Top 10 Fun Facts About ‘Bill And Ted’s Bogus Journey’ (1991)

Hitting the theatre on July 19,1991, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey follows two robots, Evil Bill (Alex Winter) and Evil Ted (Keanu Reeves), who are sent by evil tyrant Chuck De Nomolos (Joss Ackland: Caligula 1979 – read our retro review here) back to the 20th century where they try to stop the original Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves) from winning a band competition and changing the world. To celebrate Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey’s 30th birthday, we’ve compiled a list of our top ten favorite fun facts from the film!

Top 10 Facts about Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey

1)  The evil character from the future is called De Nomolos, which is writer and producer Ed Solomon’s name spelled backwards.

2) During filming, Keanu Reeves collapsed in his trailer and was hospitalized with an arm infection.

3) Orion Pictures, the film’s distributor, was on the verge of bankruptcy months before the release of Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey and was in the process of selling off the rights to several films in an attempt to remain stable. Columbia Pictures looked into acquiring the film, but after careful consideration, Orion kept the film due to the faith they had in it.

4) The mall with the Building Emporium was the same one Doc Brown shows Marty how to time travel in Back to the Future (1985).

5) 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.

6) When Bill and Ted are addressing God, the two statues at the base of the staircase are of Michael Powell and David Niven, an homage to Stairway to Heaven (1946). The stairway was also used in that film.

7) The original title of the film was Bill & Ted Go To Hell but was changed because of American objections to the use of the word “hell.”

8) The Evil Robot Usses were supposed to kill Bill and Ted at the Battle of the Bands, whereupon the boys would invoke their wins against Death to get resurrected. This part does appear in the comic book adaptation of the movie, which was based on an earlier draft of the script.

9) The mountain, to which Bill and Ted are brought to be killed by the evil robots, is the same mountain Captain Kirk climbs in Star Trek: The Original Series: Arena (1967), which the boys watched in their apartment.

10) According to the fourth draft of the script, one of the guys from the future was going to be played by Tom Petty, to whom Rufus refers to as Sir Thomas Petty.

That’s it for our top ten fun facts about Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey! Did we miss anything? Tell us in the comments!

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