Anyone who lived through the ’90s probably remembers the Bill & Ted movies – Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) and Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991). If, by some chance you, haven’t seen them, the movies revolved around Bill S. Preston Esq. and Ted Theodore Logan, two time-traveling slackers who first kidnap historical figures to help them with a history test, and then come back to life after being killed by their evil robotic counterparts from the future (and give The Grim Reaper a “melvin” along the way).
Needless to say, the wacky humor and surprisingly clever plots of the Bill & Ted movies have made it one of the more beloved franchises of the late 1980s/early 1990s. In fact, the films were so popular, that fans have been clamoring for a third installment for years. Fortunately for them, Bill & Ted 3 is currently in the works, and star Keanu Reeves recently revealed some of the plot details.
With the twenty-year gap between the movies, many fans are wondering how the third movie will tie in with the other two. Keanu Reeves told GQ:
“One of the plot points is that these two people have been crushed by the responsibility of having to write the greatest song ever written and to change the world. And they haven’t done it. So everybody is kind of like: ‘Where is the song?’ The guys have just drifted off into esoterica and lost their rock. And we go on this expedition, go into the future to find out if we wrote the song, and one future ‘us’ refuses to tell us, and another future ‘us’ blames us for their lives because we didn’t write the song, so they’re living this terrible life. In one version we’re in jail; in another we’re at some kind of highway motel and they hate us.”
In Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, we learned that the music of Bill and Ted’s band, The Wyld Stallyns, is responsible for creating a Utopian future where people live in harmony by adhering to commandments such as “Be excellent to each other.” As with any good time travel movie, though, things are always in flux.
From the sound of it, this new film will be exploring multiple timelines, which is always fun. After all, what would Back to the Future 2 be without the alternate reality 1985?
It’ll be interesting to see how the writers weave in the plot from the first film into this new one. Cameos by past characters – pun intended – are pretty likely, but I wonder if we’ll see the current Bill and Ted interacting with younger versions of themselves from the original footage.
Bill & Ted 3 (to be directed by Dean Parisot of Galaxy Quest fame) is expected to hit theaters in 2013.
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