Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Bill & Ted Marathon: Conclusion

Well, we've come to the end... for now. There's really not a whole lot else to say.

About the only other Bill & Ted item I haven't touched on is "Bill & Ted's Excellent Halloween Adventure" which has been happening at Universal Studios in Orlando and Hollywood since 1992 as part of their Halloween Horror Nights. The description from Wikipedia says: "The main plot involves Bill and Ted being threatened by an evil villain from a popular film of that year, with appearances by a host of villains, heroes, and celebrities. The show usually includes elaborate dance numbers, stunts, and multiple double-entendres." I've never seen the show first hand so I can't really comment on it, but I'm sure you can find videos of differing quality from past years on Youtube.

There were also apparently action figures and trading cards made for the first movie that keep staring at me on ebay and begging me to buy them.

Why are you staring at me like that?

You want me to talk about Bill & Ted 3, don't you? OK.

Shortly after I started this marathon, the internet exploded with MTV's story of Keanu Reeves talking about Bill & Ted 3. Then they contacted Alex Winter and he "confirmed" it. The thing is if you understand anything about how movies are made, someone telling you they have a story idea doesn't mean anything. The possibility of an Indiana Jones 4 was rumored not long after Last Crusade came out and you see how many years that took to actually be finalized and become a reality. Indy has the advantage of having George Lucas and Steven Spielberg behind him, who have enough money and power between them to make any movie they want. Bill & Ted has an actor who's been behind the scenes on smaller budget works for decades now, another who is mostly known recently for having his sad looking picture be part of a meme, and two writers whose other works include Super Mario Bros and A Goofy Movie. One would hope that the fan base is large enough for any studio to want to give it a chance, but you can't count on anything.

As far as what the movie could be about, I'm happy with Alex's comments regarding not recasting Rufus and not setting up the franchise for new sequels with younger players. They could have easily done this with Little Bill & Little Ted, so it's nice to know they won't. I can't remember where anymore, but some site seemed to take the position that the movie would have to involve Bill & Ted looking back on their lives and thinking about "what went wrong" and why they weren't the greats they were meant to be. I don't understand why they came to this conclusion. It seems to be based on the idea that Bill & Ted's future = OUR future. If that was the case, where's my phone booth time machine and why didn't I see their Battle of the Bands broadcast the night it aired? It was only on every television station in the world.

It would be exceedingly easy to keep it so that they did in fact achieve the success that was shown during the credits of Bogus Journey. There are plenty of movie plots that start off with the people on top of the world and in danger of losing their success. Honestly, if the movie doesn't start off that way, I'm going to be disappointed. I'm pretty confident regardless that the guys can do a good job with whatever they come up with. You can tell they've stayed in touch and are still friends after all these years and I think they'll be able to slip back into these roles fairly easily. On the other hand, Wikipedia claims that their original plans for this sequel turned into Biodome. That fact scares me so much I want to believe it's one of those things that Wikipedia has gotten wrong.

I don't really have any particular ideas of what they could do because I thought Bogus Journey did a really good job of wrapping the whole thing up. Do you have any ideas for their next adventure/journey/expedition?

3 comments:

  1. Randomly came across this looking for a panorama from #1 rhcp/fishbone party for my fb timeline thingy. Good read. Haven't read these since I got them but I remember being similarly intrigued despite the erratic flow and ambiguous plot.

    I still haven't come across #11 in person, either. I usually remember to look for it, too. Might look into these again now that B&T3 is an actually seriously really for reals this time thing now. But yeah, thanks.

    btw, Listening to one of your podcasts out of curiosity... what made Edward Norton such a surprising and realistic twist to me is how legitimately charismatic he can-be/apparently-is. The way they overshadow this by constantly keeping your head in his POV (endlessly idolizing brad) really is a powerful visual in the way it gives a dude an insightful "drop your standards and you can actually be what you want" reminder. Maybe I'm thinking to hard about a movie about scrappy drunkards and anarchists.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks very much for the comment!

    In my personal opinion, there's no such thing as thinking too hard about Fight Club. But maybe I love that movie just a little too much... :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. i just played using help from the internet the atari lynx bill ant ted game. the story and graphics and puzzles were cool, the only problem I had with it was on two of the levels, there were disappearing floor tiles that you only had half a second to walk at a precise rhythm across, and if you touched the floor you'd die and go back to the beginning of a section. Those tiles ruined the game for me,because I had to skip major portions of the game because I couldn't get across the sections. otherwise I'd be thinking about the kinds of music they were learning about while retrieving different musical instruments from different time periods. oh well. I liked bogus journey as well as the first movie, but the good robots made me want to make a robot again, since having made a non functioning one in grade school out of a coffee can and a milk jug. I also liked the opening songs of the tv show and animated show. and do you think the action figure for death looks like Geoff petersen from the late late show on cbs, or the other way around? I might want a station action figure to be made of rubber or something with hair on it. also I like the clothes people will wear at bill and ted university, hope to hear from you angie, chris , madd13dogg@aim.com

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.

Related Posts with Thumbnails