Five Totally Awesome Fun Facts About Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
An unabashed celebration of dumbness for dumbness sake, 1989’s charmingly goofy, time-traveling buddy comedy Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure remains a beloved cult classic — and a personal favorite of ours. It’s not groundbreaking stuff here, but it’s spirited, sweet-natured, funny as hell, and clever in its aloofness. Bill & Ted’s affably dim titular duo played by Alex Winters and Keanu Reeves would be just captivating and silly enough to make this fluffy film go down smooth, cementing its imprint onto pop culture forever and paving the way for inferior imitations, like the Ashton Kutcher and Seann William Scott vehicle Dude, Where’s My Car? or Pauly Shore’s Bio-Dome (which was rumored to have been the third Bill & Ted film).
With the release of Bill & Ted Face the Music fast approaching, we’re honoring the film that started it all with some totally awesome, most excellent fun facts!
Bill & Ted were college creations.
Screenwriters Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson first came up with the characters of Bill & Ted in 1983, when they were classmates at UCLA. The duo had formed a student improve workshop with a few other classmates. “The initial improv was them studying history, while Ted’s father kept coming up to ask them to turn their music down,” Solomon told Cinemafantastique in 1991. Their idea was built around a couple of guys who knew nothing about history or current event, talking about history and current events, and Solomon and Matheson would perform these characters (Solomon as Ted, Matheson as Bill) in a series of stand-up sketches. There was even a third character named Bob, but the comedian portraying Bob pulled out after a few sketches. This is probably for the best, since three’s a crowd and that phone booth is cramped.
Keanu Reeves and Alex Winters were too cool.
The Bill & Ted from Solomon and Matheson’s original script were much more nerdy. During the conversation with Cinefantastique, Solomon stated, “Bill and Ted were conceived in our minds as these 14-year-old skinny guys, with low-rider bellbottoms and heavy metal T-shirts.” Casting Reeves and Winters clashed with that concept; simply put, they were too cool, and they changed the way Solomon and Matheson viewed them. “We actually had a scene that was even shot, with Bill and Ted walking past a group of popular kids who hate them,” Solomon said. “But once you cast Alex and Keanu, who look like pretty cool guys, that was hard to believe.”
Identity Crisis.
It’s hard to envision another actor portraying Bill and Ted other than Winters and Reeves, but hundreds of actors auditioned for the roles — including Pauly Shore, who auditioned for Ted and would later awkwardly corner Reeves on the MTV special Bill & Ted's Bogus Premiere Party…
More peculiar than Pauly Shore playing Ted, is the idea of Winters and Reeves swapping roles, an idea that was very nearly a reality. In the early audition stages, each actor was going for the opposite role (Reeves for Bill, Winters for Ted), the roles they originally wanted. However, when Solomon and Matheson saw their audition tapes, they thought the opposite worked better and did the ‘ole switcheroo. Only, they kinda forgot to tell the actors.
When talking with Moviefone, Reeves said he didn’t even know their roles had been switched until after being cast. “I got a call saying that I got the part. So I went to the wardrobe fitting, for my wardrobe fitting, assuming I was playing Bill, and I get there and Alex Winter, who eventually played Bill, went to the wardrobe fitting thinking he was playing Ted. Then we were informed that that wasn't the case.”
According to Winters, this bummed Keanu out. “We're sitting in the office waiting to meet the producers for the first time and I’m pretty jazzed and he's miserable," Winters says. "I'm like, 'Dude, what's wrong? We finally got it after all this bullshit,' you know? And he's like, 'Yeah, but I'm Ted.' And I was like, 'Yeah, you're Ted. That's awesome.' He was like, 'I thought I was Bill.' I was like, 'What fucking difference does it make? For god's sake, they're completely interchangeable. If you want you can be Bill and I'll be Ted, I really don't care. It's not going to impact the way I play this guy one iota.’"
The movie was almost called Bill & Ted’s Time Van.
The time machine in Solomon and Matheson’s original script was a 1969 Chevy van, and it was titled Bill & Ted’s Time Van. However, this idea was later scrapped when the pair would rewrite the script for Warner Bros., who had expressed early interest in the project before Dino de Laurentiis picked it up. The concern was that the motorized time machine felt too much like a rip-off of Back to the Future’s monumentally iconic DeLorean. Director Stephen Herek suggested they swap it out for the now legendary phone booth. This wasn’t a bad idea, considering Back to the Future Part II would release later that year, nine months after Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, but there was one minor oversight. The time-traveling phone booth is strikingly similar to Doctor Who’s iconic TARDIS, which had been on the air since 1963…
How Carlin joined the band.
The role of Rufus hadn’t been cast yet when the film started shooting. According to Herek, they intended to have Eddie Van Halen play Rufus, due to the slew of Van Halen references that littered the screenplay, but due to the film’s low budget, this wasn’t possible. Winter’s said the casting of George Carlin was “a very happy accident. They were going after serious people first. Like Sean Connery.” They also pursued, Ringo Starr, Roger Daltrey, and Charlie Sheen, but they quickly recognized that no one on this list was a comedian. Producers Scott Kroopf and Bob Cort had just finished filming Outrageous Fortune, which co-starred George Carlin, and they thought he’d fill the role nicely, and the stars aligned.
Ironically, there’s a possibility Eddie Van Halen could have joined the band. In response to Bill & Ted’s claim that they need Eddie Van Halen in their band to make it better, Van Halen jokingly stated he would have joined their band if they had asked. Welp, better luck next time, dudes!
Don’t want the fun to stop?! Check out more most excellent Bill & Ted material below:
Five Totally Triumphant Fun Facts About Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey
Bill & Ted's Most Excellent Drinking Game
What do you think? We want to know. Share your thoughts and feelings in the comments section below, and as always, remember to viddy well!