Bill and Ted’s Excellent Midlife Crisis
If you hopped inside a telephone booth and traveled back through the space-time continuum to your first encounter with Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, you might be surprised to discover that its early scenes were, to paraphrase our heroes, totally bogus. In Bill & Ted vernacular, bogus doesn’t mean “counterfeit,” it means “bummer, dude,” and in the original 1989 film, their excellent adventure is set in motion by some seriously dark domestic stuff. Those bits go by fast, though, and they might not have seemed so dark at the time—assuming your first viewing of the smash-hit time-travel comedy (budget: $10 million, box office: $40 million) was closer to the late 1980s than to 2020. It was a different era. Phone booths were everywhere.
Ted’s father is a cop, an angry, belittling police captain, disgusted with his floppy-puppy son and ready to ship him off to military school, where they’ll make a real man out of him, or at least get him away from his nitwit friend Bill. Keanu Reeves was cast as Ted when he was 22 years old, and his tense scenes with Ted’s dad are unsettling to watch now. He doesn’t roll his eyes or fight back—he flinches. Ted’s scared of his father. “When I first played the role,” Reeves told me last week, “I was thinking about this kind of character and personality”—sweet, guileless, harmless—“that’s born out of pain.”
[Read: Millennials just ‘get’ Keanu Reeves]
Bill’s dad, meanwhile, is a creep. He’s a stubby professor who,” Bill seethes, humiliated.
