18 Fun Facts about BILL & TED'S BOGUS JOURNEY
With Bill and Ted Face The Music currently in development, I thought it would be fun to do a Fun Facts list on Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey. I already did one for Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. I just think it's awesome that after all these years we are finally going to get a third chapter in the franchise!
There may be a few things listed here that you don't know about and movie trivia is always fun! I also included a behind the scenes video and deleted scenes.
- The evil character from the future is called "De Nomolos", which is Writer and Producer Ed Solomon's name spelled backwards.
- In an early draft of the script, Rufus was the villain.
- There was an alternate ending of the film involving a car chase scene between Bill and Ted and their biggest fears. It was obviously cut. It also involved Bill and Ted bringing themselves back from the future every minute for 10 years to make full armies of themselves. Preview audiences didn't like it, though.
- At first, the studio executives adamantly said "No Way!" to the idea of Bill and Ted dying, but the creators and actors were firm, realizing that it was too good an idea not to do.
- The studio wanted the Bill and Ted to enter famous works of literature to pass an English test in the film. The idea was "Bill and Ted go into historical settings and meet famous characters, except now the characters are fictional." The actors preferred that the characters go to Hell.
- The band that plays before the Wyld Stallyns at the Battle of the Bands is Primus from El Sobrante, California. They play "Tommy the Cat".
- When Bill and Ted go to Missy's séance, you can see Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon, the creators and writers of Bill and Ted. They're the only men that are attending the séance. (Chris is the guy with the white shirt, and Ed is the guy with the glasses.) They also say "Ed and Chris rule the world" backwards
- The original title was "Bill and Ted go to Hell" but was changed because of American objections to the use of the word "hell". They couldn't even advertise the film on TV until after 9 o'clock because of the word Hell.
- Bill and Ted playing a game with Death to win back their lives is a reference to the classic Ingmar Bergman film, The Seventh Seal (1957), in which a knight plays chess with Death for his life.
- In the scene where Bill and Ted are addressing God, there are two statues at the base of the staircase. One is of Michael Powell, and the other is of David Niven, an homage to Powell and Emeric Pressburger's afterlife classic A Matter of Life and Death (1946). The stairway itself is the same as the one in that film, which has the U.S. title "Stairway to Heaven".
- The "Riddance of Evil" book that Missy uses to send Bill and Ted to Hell, is actually a re-dressed copy of the Stephen King short-story collection "Four Past Midnight." She opens it to a page in the story "Secret Window, Secret Garden," which can be read clearly in a few frames of the film.
- During filming, Keanu Reeves collapsed in his trailer, and was hospitalized with an arm infection.
- Stephen Herek declined to return as director because he thought it was "almost a parody of a movie that was already a parody".
- The Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in Van Nuys, California, is used to represent Bill & Ted University in 2691. It would later be used to represent another future university, namely Starfleet Academy, in Star Trek: The Next Generation: The First Duty (1992) and Star Trek: Voyager: In the Flesh (1998).
- The scene at The Circle K wasn't actually filmed at a Circle K. It was filmed at a 7/11 in Canyon Country. The Circle K logo and sky behind it were all computer generated.
- The Ria Paschelle character was partially modeled after The Borg from Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987).
- In the kid Bill hell scene, Granny S Preston Esquire is played by non other than Alex Winter himself.
- Chuck De Nomolos was originally going to die at the end, and go to Hell with the Evil Duo, where they annoyed him for all eternity.