Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey

Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey
Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey
Directed by	Peter Hewitt
Written by	Chris Matheson; Ed Solomon
Produced by	Scott Kroopf
Starring	Keanu Reeves; Alex Winter; William Sadler; Joss Ackland; George Carlin
Music by	David Newman
Distributed by	Orion Pictures
Release dates	July 19, 1991
Running time	93 min.
Language	English
Budget	$20,000,000

Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey is a 1991 American comedy science fiction film, the sequel to Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. Like the first film, it stars Keanu Reeves as Ted and Alex Winter as Bill. The film's original working title was Bill & Ted Go To Hell.

Plot

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Three years after acing their history report, Bill and Ted are still struggling with their band, Wyld Stallyns despite help from their fiancées Elizabeth and Joanna (whom they met in the first film and brought back from medieval England. Meanwhile, in the future, the villainous Chuck De Nomolos (Joss Ackland) schemes to prevent Bill and Ted from performing at the Fourth Annual San Dimas Battle of the Bands, thereby preventing them from influencing history with their hated rock music. De Nomolos forcibly takes possession of a time machine (once again, in the guise of a phone booth), sending two evil robot look-alikes ("total metalheads") of Bill and Ted back in time to kill them. Bill and Ted are quickly abducted and driven to the desert, where their android doppelgangers throw them off a cliff.

Death, a.k.a. the Grim Reaper (William Sadler) comes to collect Bill and Ted. telling them that if they best him in a contest, he will give them their lives back. Assessing their chances of winning, they resort to giving Death a melvin and escape. Bill and Ted possess two police officers (including Ted's dad) in an unsuccessful attempt to protect their fiancées, and also infiltrate a séance led by Bill's former step-mother, now Ted's current step-mother, Missy, now a New-Ager. The two are mistaken for evil spirits and are cast down to Hell.

After encountering Satan, Bill and Ted are doomed to their own personal versions of Hell. First they are menaced by the fanatic Colonel Oats (Ted barely escaped enrollment in Oats' Alaskan Military Academy in the first film). Bill and Ted split up and are subjected to some of their worst childhood memories. Bill recalls being forced to give a kiss to his vile, aged grandmother, while Ted is chastised by the Easter Bunny for stealing his brother's Easter candy. Reuniting in the tunnels of Hell, Bill and Ted figure that there is only one way out: to play the Reaper, and win.

Bill and Ted challenge Death to games of Battleship, Clue, electric football, and Twister. Although Death proves a poor loser, he is at their command and, with his help, the three travel to Heaven to seek advice from God. After mugging three innocent souls, the trio gain entrance to Heaven by appropriating the chorus from "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" by Poison as their answer to St. Peter's question, "What is the meaning of life?". Using a map they receive from God, they find the smartest scientist in the afterlife, an alien named Station who has the ability to split his body into two smaller versions of himself.

Bill, Ted, Station and a reluctant Death return to Earth. Station builds crude "good robot" versions of Bill and Ted as they drive to the Battle of the Bands. The good robots easily defeat the "evil usses", and De Nomolos arrives in the time machine booth and directly challenges Bill and Ted. The film's conclusion relies on a series of events that at first appear to be contradictory grandfather paradoxes but are resolved as overlapping predestination paradoxes.

After De Nomolos has been defeated, Bill and Ted disappear in the time machine with their fiancées to improve their musical skills. Reappearing only moments after leaving, they have both grown long beards and have fathered children with their wives. They then go on to play the Kiss rendition of "God Gave Rock and Roll to You", and the credits show various newspaper clippings suggesting they go on to shape the future in much the same way as described in the first movie.

Cast

Keanu Reeves as Ted Logan/Evil Robot Ted
Alex Winter as Bill S. Preston, Esq./Granny Preston/Evil Robot Bill
Pam Grier as Ms. Wardroe
Joss Ackland as Chuck De Nomolos
George Carlin as Rufus
Amy Stock-Poynton as Missy Logan
Jim Martin as Sir James Martin
William Sadler as Grim Reaper/English Family Member

Soundtrack

"Shout it Out" - Slaughter – 4:19
"Battle Stations" - Winger – 4:00
"God Gave Rock 'n Roll To You" - Argent – 5:22
"Drinking Again" - Neverland – 4:54
"Dream of a New Day" - Richie Kotzen – 3:17
"The Reaper" - Steve Vai – 3:18
"The Perfect Crime" - Faith No More – 4:23
"Go to Hell" - Megadeth – 4:35
"Tommy the Cat" - Primus – 4:14
"Junior's Gone Wild" - King's X – 3:08
"Showdown" - Love on Ice – 6:18
"The Reaper Rap" - Steve Vai – 4:27

KISS did do a cover for "God Gave Rock 'n Roll To You", which ended up in the movie.

Alternate endings and missing scenes

There are several alternate endings to the movie, which don't appear on any of the video releases, but are the same in both the novelization and the graphic novel.

In both media, De Nomolos ends up being killed by the exploding heads of the Evil Bill and Ted. He ends up in hell, where he spends all eternity with the Evil Bill and Ted.

There's also at least one scene which appears in the promo trailer for the movie, as well as the novel and graphic novel. When Bill and Ted end up in Hell after their exorcism at the hands of Missy, they initially arrive in Hell and start having to break rocks (this part also is in the "Reaper" song at the end of the movie/soundtrack). In it, a Demon pulls a rat out of its mouth, at which point Ted exclaims that he knew a guy who "got one of those in a bucket of chicken once."

In Vai's "Reaper" this is the part where the following lines happen:

"Dude, I totally broke a rock!"

"Excellent!"

"Y'know, I kinda like this!"

An alternate scene where evil Bill and Ted reveal to Joanna and Elizabeth their secret by unzipping their faces and torso and introduce that one is the evil version of the other.

Another such scene has the Evil Bill and Ted using a set of canisters from their chests to produce real-world versions of the monsters from Bill and Ted's personal Hells (the Easter Rabbit, Granny S. Preston Esq. and Colonel Oats) and prevent them from getting to the concert. These three chase Bill, Ted, the Reaper and Station down just after they collect the parts for the Good Robot Usses, and Bill and Ted realize that they have to face their fears to defeat them. In the comic book version, Bill finally kisses his grandmother, Ted phones his little brother and confesses to stealing the candy, and the pair manage to bring out Oats' sensitive side, causing each of them to vanish. In the filmed version, the pair simply refuse to show their fear, which causes the monsters to shrink into nothingness. Although this scene never takes place in the finished film, it is foreshadowed by the evil robots (they say "Good luck getting to the concert" even though they make no effort to stop them).

Finally, in the original version of the climax, Evil Bill and Ted repeatedly kill Bill and Ted after the Good Robot Usses run off. Bill and Ted force the Reaper to bring them back each time, citing the number of games they beat him at while in Hell. Part of this scene (Bill and Ted being flung across the stage) made it into the theatrical trailer.

One scene did manage to be restored for the 1996 TBS television broadcast. This was a light hearted moment that occurs as soon as Station starts to work on "the good robot Bill and Ted" while they were on their way to the Battle of The Bands. Death switches seats with Ted and confronts Bill with the belief that he is unappreciated. Bill tries to pep talk Death by telling him it's not true, but Death is not buying it. So Bill makes it up to him by giving him a stick of gum. Death puts the gum in his mouth, wrapper and all, and immediately spits it out, replying "I don't like gum". As of this writing, this is the only deleted scene to be shown in full.

Marvel Comics adaptation

To coincide with the release of the movie, Marvel Comics released a one-shot comic book adaptation of the movie, hiring Evan Dorkin to adapt the screenplay and pencil the art (Fabian Nicieza admired Dorkin's work on Pirate Corp$!) with Stephen DeStafano, Marie Severin and Ron Boyd as inkers. Like Archie Goodwin's adaptation of A New Hope, Dorkin worked from the original script, which included many of the deleted scenes, and portrayed Death as the archetypal skeletal figure. Due to the popularity of the comic, Marvel commissioned a spin-off series, Bill and Ted's Excellent Comic Book, which kept the talents of Dorkin, Destafano and Severin. The series ran for 12 issues.

Trivia

One of the bands they competed against in the Battle of the Bands was real-life California band Primus, led by Les Claypool. The song Wyld Stallyns performs at the competition was "God Gave Rock 'n Roll To You", which in real life was originally performed by Argent, and later covered by KISS. It was the KISS version of the song that was used in the actual movie, albeit with a more elaborate intro. The introduction to this song is played in the film by Steve Vai.

External links