Ladies and gentlemen, look what we’ve done. Bill and Ted are returning with a 3rd movie (only 25+ years after they went to hell) in a new film entitled Bill and Ted Face the Music.
In a meeting with other PopLurker writers, the Bill and Ted movie franchise sparked an interesting conversation. Everything from “I’ve never seen it” to “Beavis and Butthead were better” to “They’re okay, but it’s no Wayne’s World” was dropped in the Writers’ Room. And to an extent, that’s a fair assessment. In a universe filled with two-morons being dumb together, where do Bill and Ted fit in?
And no, we’re not forgetting that save for Cheech and Chong, these guys came first.
It’s important to think back to an important time in our modern pop culture, so let’s take it back to 2014 for just a minute when we were stupid enough to get excited for Dumb and Dumber To. The movie was not only exciting because of how few sequels Jim Carrey does, but because we (the audience) would have the opportunity to see just how Dumb these two top-shelf idiots had become. And whereas Harry and Lloyd were unsettling back in 1994, they were just plain terrifying come 2014. They’d somehow morphed from the guys who said inappropriate things and talked to your tits instead of your face to the old men who might spontaneously grab your pussy at any time.
I walked out of that theater (yes, I saw it in the theater) with the words “I hate nostalgia” on my lips. I’ve since recovered because I love the Retro-Life and it loves me too, but for a moment it was hard.
Bill and Ted were not as extreme as Beavis and Butthead. They were not innovators like Wayne and Garth. They were not creeps like Harry and Lloyd. They just talked like cartoon surfers and commented on everything around them. They also got a strange Saturday Morning cartoon and got to hang out with MST3K’s Brain Guy before MST3K had a Brain Guy in their “didn’t hold up to the original a’la Ghostbusters 2” sequel.
Are you excited for the third installment of Bill and Ted? Do you think we have a story here? Or are we just slaves to the vile throes of money pits and nostalgia?
I guess we’ll just have to get excellent on opening night and find out.
Author: Loryn Stone