So I’m home for the holidays and my brother says to me, I think unsolicited: “You know, in retrospect, I think ‘Bill & Ted’s Excellent adventure’ is vastly superior to ‘Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey’.” This was not a surprising statement, topically. In an unrelated conversation we were actually brought to a standstill until someone could tell us the formula for calculating the volume of a cone, so there’s no telling what inane things we might find ourselves discussing when left to our own devices long enough. What was surprising about that statement, however, was how vehemently I disagreed with it. Usually when someone says something sufficiently strange you either don’t comprehend it or at the very least have no opinion about it, but when you find yourself immediately prepared to contradict it you find that you are on the opposing end of the same otherworldly plane of weirdness. I not only understood what he was saying and why he was saying it, I took it a step further by passionately disagreeing.

My rebuttal, here presented as a written statement, was neither uninterrupted nor definitive, but as it came to me I found it was in its entirety so much stranger and more inane that it’s worth committing to paper. And the weirdest thing of all is that it consists of nothing more than a description of the movie, without embellishment or exaggeration. Some movies, I believe, are so brilliantly conceived and exquisitely stupid that they are their own kind of art form. Modern-day tall tales, if you will. This, in essence, makes them a form of literature. While some movies, like “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure”, are stupid to the point of being enjoyable, others are so utterly nonsensical that they jump the shark to a whole new level. I believe that “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey” is one of those movies.

“Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey” follows the events of “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure”, in which a time traveler from the future helps the hapless Bill & Ted with a critical history report by allowing them use of his time machine, all because – as they come to discover – their band’s music will someday trigger a worldwide utopia. Tough act to follow, sequel-wise, because any time travel story would just be a retread of the original. So instead they just pulled out all the stops, coming up with an all-new story that went something like this:

Open with the Future – a crazy fascist dictator, fed up with the moronic paradise Bill & Ted’s music has inspired, decides to change history by sending android duplicates back in time to kill them and take their place. Traveling to the present, the evil robots quickly dispose of Bill & Ted by throwing them off the same cliff where Captain Kirk fought the Gorn in “Star Trek”. They then proceed to assume their place and put the moves on our heroes’ girlfriends, medieval princesses they saved from the past in the first film.

Awakening in the gray-filtered afterlife, Bill & Ted quickly assess that they are dead, and have to find some way of returning to the world of the living to stop the evil robots from destroying the future. At this point, they are approached by the Grim Reaper, who tells them they have to defeat him in a contest in order to come back from the dead. Time being a factor, they decide to wedgie him instead (they call it a Melvin) and make their escape on foot. Returning to town as ghosts, they try to get the police to stop their robot counterparts by possessing the bodies of two policemen and explaining the whole sordid business to the rest. When they fail to convince the police, they take ghostly form again and crash a séance held by Ted’s stepmother. They only succeed in scaring her, though, and she uses the power of the occult to banish them both to Hell.

In Hell, Bill & Ted make their case to Satan, who decides to damn them to their own fluffy-bunny, dirty-granny personal Hells. They decide the only way out is to challenge Death to a duel, at which point he intervenes on their behalf. After they beat him at Battleship, Twister, Clue and table football he finally agrees to lend them his complete assistance in their quest to rescue their medieval princesses from their evil robot twins. So he takes them to Heaven, and the three of them mug three good souls and steal their clothes to sneak in, proving their wisdom by quoting “Poison” lyrics at the gate. Once inside they proceed to seek the counsel of God, explaining that they need the help of a scientist capable of building good robots strong enough to defeat the evil robots who killed them. God directs them to a Charades game in which Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin are competing against a couple of midgets in monkey suits whom Bill & Ted instantly infer to be Martians.

Recovering quickly from the shock of discovering that the greatest scientist in the universe is actually a duo of midgets in monkey suits, Bill & Ted enlist them to the cause and the quintet descends to the land of the living, with a quick stopover at Home Depot for robot-building supplies. Although the supplies seem to consist mainly of PVC pipe and a dustbuster, the midget monkeys from outer space morph into one giant 8-foot space monkey who looks roughly like Chewbacca would if he were a thumb puppet, and he suddenly is possessed of the know-how to transform a handi-vac and plumbing supplies into Lego-looking replicas of Bill & Ted on the van ride to the concert where the evil Bill & Ted robots plan to kill the medieval princesses at the end of their show. Still with me? Hold on just a little longer.

Bill & Ted arrive just in time to stop evil Bill & Ted from going on, smashing them to bits with their remote-controlled PVC-pipe Lego-bots. And just when it looks like everything is going to be fine, they are confronted on stage by the evil Denomolos (which is actually an anagram reversing the name of screenwriter Ed Solomon), who hijacks the world’s communication satellites to send the live television feed of the concert to every television in the world. As the world watches, Bill & Ted outwit (yeah, I said it) Denomolos with a little time travel trickery and the timely intervention of their friend from the future, Rufus.

Releasing the medieval princesses, Bill & Ted pack them into Denomolos’ time machine and zap away to a point in time where they can train to become the world’s greatest band. This accomplished, they return to the exact point in time they left, both with beards and babies, and proceed to wow the world and create a utopia overnight by playing the Kiss classic “God gave Rock ‘n’ Roll to you”.

I just want you to know, that summary isn’t an embellishment, it actually leaves stuff out for the sake of brevity. Now you tell me, is there anything as brilliantly stupid as that? And this time I’m serious, developing such a highly imaginative farce is no small feat. Anything is a little stupid, often unintentionally, but to be that stupid for that long on that level is a true talent to be admired. I think “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey” is actually a modern-day “Candide”. And maybe even more than that. Ever read “The Odyssey”? It’s considered the first novel, but some pretty wack-a-doo stuff happens in that book. Every good adventure story borders on the ridiculous, but the great ones are those that dare to cross that border into the realm of the truly bizarre.

I will accept your lack of rebuttal to mean you all agree...

i didnt quite finish the first paragraph, but i got the gist of this idiocy. you are a fucktard. bill and teds excellent adventure is so much better. i dont even care about your debate points. you make me sick, peanut butter boy.

jesus. i gotta get outta this fuckin place.



love, wilson

I can always count on you for the perfect rebuttal, wilson. It's everything I like in an argument: unnecessarily hurtful with no supporting information. When I become president, I'm making you the Secretary of Defense.

NO REBUTTAL POINTS?!? i said you make me sick.

touche'