When I first got the idea to do this marathon, I thought it would be a lot of fun to talk about and go over the various B&T appearances. I enjoyed the movies as much as I always have, and I'm excited about going over the comics as I imagine that's an area that most people definitely don't remember or have never seen. What I didn't bargain on is that there's also a bad side to this as well.
Between seasons 1 and 2 of the animated series, Fox purchased the rights to make a live action Bill & Ted TV series. The deal apparently also included the rights to the animated show. They used their versions of Bill & Ted to do the voices and created 8 episodes.
Apparently, traveling throughout all of history and even possibly into the future was just not enough of a storytelling engine for them. They felt the need to change it up a bit. In the second episode Rufus shows up to give them the new phone directory which allows them to travel into movies, books, video games, and etc. Literally, ETC. is a separate category. It apparently includes the ability to shrink down to mini size to enter a guy's body. Here's the show's new intro which shows this new change, along with the new voices for the characters, new theme song, and the slightly different animation style.
I can't decide which song is more annoying.
The problem with this is that they mainly choose to enter TV shows, and without the rights to them, we get parodies like "Leave it to Badger" and "Mr. Radish's Condominium" the latter of which is a stand in for Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. They really should have gone with more books, seeing as how many of the classics are old enough to be public domain. I guess they thought kids don't read enough to get it.
You would think with only 8 episodes, it would have been easy for me to make it through this. The fact is I just couldn't, and generally halfway through an episode, I had really had enough. I'm starting to wonder how many other cartoon shows I watched as a kid that were this awful and I just didn't have the maturity yet to realize it.
The voices don't sound anything like the original movie cast. I don't care for the art style changes, which add colored collars to both their outfits for no reason and overall just look a little more cutesy. The situations they get into are very similar to the ones from the first season, and they still included a lot of their trademark speech and even some quotes straight from the movie. But without using Alex, Keanu and Carlin, it loses its charm rather quickly. Add to it that each episode is trying to instill some kind of lesson and it gets really old really quickly. There's also no continuity here from the previous season, as the former "don't interfere in your own lives" rule is completely ignored as they go and babysit themselves one episode.
I really can't recommend this to anyone unless you just have a strong curiosity for how bad it could be. This is definitely one of those shows that deserved its very short run.
Next up: The NES game. It was made by LJN. If that doesn't mean anything to you yet, you'll see.
I concur, I liked the first season's intro much better as well as everything else about the first season
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