Trivia / Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure

• Ability over Appearance: In a 1991 interview, Ed Solomon said that Bill and Ted were originally envisaged as "fourteen-year-old skinny guys, with low-rider bell-bottoms, and heavy metal t-shirts" who were despised by the popular kids at school. Casting Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter changed the filmmakers' images of the characters because "once you cast Alex and Keanu, who look like pretty cool guys, that was hard to believe."
• California Doubling: The first movie is set in Southern California, but was filmed primarily in Phoenix, Arizona.
• Celebrity Voice Actor: The Japanese dub features comedians Kazuo Fujii and Daisuke Koshikawa as the respective voices of Bill and Ted.
• Creator Backlash: A minor case, as Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter remain very proud of the film, but they admit to some frustration at Bill and Ted being written as The Dividual with absolutely nothing to make them distinct characters. Face the Music even mocks it with them being completely incapable of talking about themselves as individuals.
• Dawson Casting:
  • Playing seniors in high school, Alex Winter was 21, and Keanu Reeves was 22. Diane Franklin and Kimberly LaBelle, both age 25, played the possibly-middle-teenaged princesses.
  • Missy, Ted's stepmother, is said to be a high school senior when Ted was a freshman, putting her age at around 20. Her actress, Amy Stock-Poynton, was 28 at the time.
  • During filming, Dan Shor was 31, and Jane Wiedlin was 29. In real life, Billy the Kid was killed at 21, and Joan of Arc was executed at 19.
• Deleted Role: An early script had a random medieval guy tag along with all the historical characters. The end credits still mention James Bowbitch as "John The Serf".
• Deleted Scene: Detailed here.
• Fake American: Ted Logan is played by the Lebanese-born Canadian Keanu Reeves.
• Fake Brit: Diane Franklin (Joanna) and Kimberley LaBelle (Elizabeth) are Americans.
• Fake Nationality:
  • Terry Camilleri, who played Napoléon Bonaparte, is Maltese-Australian.
  • Toledo, Ohio-born Clifford David as the German-born Austrian Ludwig van Beethoven.
  • Chinese-American Al Leong plays the Mongolian Genghis Khan.
  • Rod Loomis, a native of St. Albans, Vermont, plays the Austrian Sigmund Freud.
  • Wisconsin native Jane Wiedlin as the French Joan of Arc.
  • English actor Tony Steedman plays the Greek Socrates.
• Orphaned Reference:
  • Bill and Ted asking the princesses to go to the prom with them is possibly a leftover from the original planned ending, where after getting sent to the present, the princesses accompany the titular duo to their prom.
  • There was originally going to have a random medieval guy called John The Serf played by James Bowbitch tag along with the historical characters. He was cut from the movie but was still listed in the credits.
• Playing Against Type: Profane, animated, and misanthropic comedian George Carlin as the calm, peaceful and optimistic Rufus.
• The Shelf of Movie Languishment: The film took two years to be released. It was filmed throughout spring 1987 for De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, but then the company went bankrupt, and the film would be shelved until a year later when Nelson Entertainment and Orion Pictures picked it up. They also had to re-dub everything that was originally scripted as "1987" as "1988".
• Studio Hop: The film struggled to find a distributor. Originally, Warner Bros. tried to produce it with a budget of $10 million, but were unable to acquire funding. De Laurentiis Entertainment Group picked it up for a potential 1987 release, but they suffered financial issues and the film was in a state of limbo for a while. Ultimately, Orion Pictures and Nelson Entertainment picked the movie up (many of DEG's executives had gone to Nelson, helping the film along). These days, the film belongs to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which bought Orion in 1997 and obtained most rights to the Nelson library the year after, as part of their purchase of the Epic Productions catalog.
• What Could Have Been:
  • River Phoenix and Sean Penn auditioned for Bill before Alex Winter was cast.
  • Pauly Shore screen-tested for the role of Ted before the casting of Keanu Reeves.
  • Ringo Starr, Sean Connery, Roger Daltrey and Charlie Sheen were considered for the part of Rufus before George Carlin was cast.
  • Eddie Van Halen said that he would have been glad to appear in the movie, but nobody asked him.
  • The Three Most Important People in the utopian society were envisioned to be portrayed by ZZ Top. However, Solomon had connections to the E Street Band, The Tubes, and The Motels, and were able to get Clarence Clemons, Fee Waybill, and Martha Davis, respectively, for the Most Important People.
  • At one point, the plot was to have Bill and Ted visit, and therefore accidentally cause, all of history's greatest tragedies (the American Civil War, the sinking of the Titanic, the crash of the Hindenburg, the Black Plague...).
  • The time machine was originally a pickup truck, then a van. It was changed into a phone booth because the car might have made the movie seem too close to a Back to the Future ripoff. Now it's just unintentionally close to the TARDIS in Doctor Who.^note At the time, the series had only a cult following in the United States, and wouldn't become mainstream there until its Revival in The New '10s.
  • The original concept for the film was following Bill and Ted through an unrelated series of sketches, with the time travel story just one of several skits. Writer Chris Matheson's father, Richard Matheson, wisely suggested that the film focus entirely on the time travel idea.
  • In the original outline for the movie, Rufus was a 28-year-old high school sophomore who befriended Bill and Ted. There was also a character named John the Serf, whom Bill and Ted picked up in medieval England.
  • The film was originally called Bill and Ted's Time Van, and ideas for time periods covered included everything from ancient Egypt to the Presidency of Richard Nixon. The idea seemingly involved more characters than just Bill and Ted going back in time, since in an Entertainment Weekly interview, Solomon said that at one point in the script one of the popular kids would have befriended Adolf Hitler (which Matheson says is more reflective of their attitude towards "the popular kids" than anything else).
  • The presentation at the end of the movie would have just involved the historical figures lecturing the history class while Bill and Ted watched, and then they went to their prom and the movie ended. Alex Winter remarked that even while filming this ending, they were underwhelmed by it, so the whole thing was rewritten into the auditorium spectacle seen in the final film.
• Working Title: Bill and Ted's Time Van.

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