Orion Pictures
Yesterday was Keanu Reeves’ birthday, and to honor the actor — now 54 years young — Bill and Ted screenwriter Ed Solomon tweeted out some legitimately rare trivia. Did you know Excellent Adventure, the duo’s first outing, was supposed to include Hitler? That…would have been a heavier movie.
The story, caught by Mashable, first started when “Keanu Reeves TheClub [sic],” one of Twitter’s countless fan accounts, tried to blow everyone’s minds with kid photos of Reeves and his costar Alex Winter. This inspired Solomon, who co-wrote the two Bill and Ted movies with Chris Matheson and later penned Men in Black (and Super Mario Bros.), to chime in, offering something more fascinating: His and Matheson’s hand-written, scribbled notes when they were first hashing Excellent Adventure out.
Among the revelations? For one thing, it was originally called Bill and Ted’s Time Van. Yes, the two San Dimas blockheads and air guitar enthusiasts originally cruised around in a van à la Back to the Future’s DeLorean. Rufus, the futuristic time travel guide eventually played by George Carlin, was also a talking dog, name of “Dogrufus.” Hiring Carlin presumably was cheaper, and so we were spared a talking dog brought to us via horrid late-’80s f/x.
Solomon and Matheson’s initial conception of Excellent Adventure sounds more ambitious than the relatively low-budget affair that turned into a surprise hit in 1989. Ted “Theodore” Logan and Bill S. Preston Esq. were supposed to nip down to Ancient Rome and accidentally cause Caesar’s death; instead they kidnapped Socrates and hit him with some Bread lyrics. They were also supposed to kidnap some jocks and drop them in Ancient Egypt, but nothing like that ever materialized.
Then there’s the idea of going all the way back to the Stone Age, befriending a caveman and using fire to light a joint. Were Bill and Ted supposed to be stoners? Whatever the case, they wound up merely stupid, for this turned into a PG-rated film aimed at kids as well as dumb teens (and dumb-teens-at-heart).
Still, there’s a lot in Solomon and Matheson’s notes that did make the cut, including the basic foundational idea of two guys with a big history project due who go back in time and bring historical figures back to the future. (Actually, a van is a far more practical way to collect people than a phone booth, isn’t it?) Even the idea of including Hitler was generally followed-through; they simply found-and-replaced his name with “Napoleon,” whose presence made for a far less heavy comedy.
Maybe some of these ideas can be repurposed for the threatened Bill and Ted reunion film.
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