Cody's Top 30 Favorite Movies of All-Time: #11 - Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure

I love stuff from the 1980s, that goes without saying. Quite frankly, you can't get any more 1980s than Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. In fact, a two part retrospect on Bill & Ted movies is how this blog first started.

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure follows two high school surfer stoners, Bill S. Preston Esq. (Alex Winter) and Ted "Theodore" Logan (Keanu Reeves). These two dimwit hopeful musicians are in danger of failing history class by their teacher Mr. Ryan, who tells them "If you don't get an A on your final history report, I'm flunking the both of you". Worse news is that if Ted flunks, his father is sending him to Oats Military Academy, thus destroying Bill and Ted's future as a powerhouse of metal. What Bill and Ted don't know is just how influential their music will become, when a good samaritan named Rufus (George Carlin) travels back in time from 2688 AD to give Bill and Ted a time-traveling phone booth to help them complete their history report, else the entirety of the future will crumble when Bill and Ted don't form their band and change the course of time. As Rufus puts it, Bill and Ted's future music "will align the planets and bring forth universal harmony, allowing meaningful communication with all forms of life."

What follows is watching Bill and Ted travel to the Old West, Ancient Greece, Medieval England, Austria, Germany, and even 1863 USA. Rather than study the past, Bill and Ted take it upon themselves to capture or "borrow" rather historical figures from their time periods and bring them to present-day 1988 San Dimas, California. They capture everyone! Billy the Kid, Napoleon Bonaparte, Socrates, Joan of Arc, Genghis Khan, Beethoven, Sigmund Freud and Abraham Lincoln. At the end of the day, the bring these historical figures to their school and each one gives a speech relating their time period's to San Dimas's. The whole movie even climaxes with Abraham Lincoln telling people in the audience to "Be Excellent to Each Other and PARTY ON, DUDES!" in perhaps one of the greatest speeches Abraham Lincoln ever gave in the entirety of his political career.

Another point of pride in the movie is the soundtrack. It went full-on 80s hair metal with a few pop hits thrown in there and each song in the movie is poignant, notable and welcome. From Big Pig's "I Can't Break Away", Vital Signs' cover of "The Boys and the Girls Are Doing It", and Shark Island's "Father Time" to Robbi Robb's "In Time" and Power Tool's "Two Heads are Better Than One", the soundtrack is absolutely beautiful (wipes away heavy metal tear). Please do yourself a favor and give Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure a watch. You don't have to watch Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, but if you want to, that one's fun too. Just in a different way.