37 Years Ago Today, This Great Sci-Fi Movie Started 1 of the Best Time Travel Franchises Ever

Time travel is one of the most popular subgenres of sci-fi, with some of the biggest franchises of all time featuring the concept. Back to the Future, The Terminator, X-Men, the MCU, and more have heavily utilized time travel, showing its possibilities and repercussions. However, one of the best time travel franchises doesn’t get its due, and it was released 37 years ago today.

Time travel is a pretty weighty concept, meaning that it is often treated with a lot of seriousness. Many time-travel movies spend a lot of time explaining the concept’s rules and dangers, and paying meticulous attention to continuity. However, it is sometimes fun not to think too hard about it, and this franchise is the best example of a series that does that.

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure Hit Theaters On February 17, 1989

The bodacious film Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure just turned 37, as it was released on February 17, 1989. Directed by Stephen Herek, the film stars Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter as the two air-guitar prodigies who are about to fail their history class. Luckily, they have the future on their side. They discover that their band is foundational to the perfect society that is to come, so they must use a futuristic time machine disguised as a phone booth to go into the past and meet some of history’s most important figures.

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure doesn’t care all that much about the rules of time travel. Instead, the time travel is a fun gimmick utilized in the service of putting Bill and Ted in funny situations with characters like Napoleon, Genghis Khan, and Sigmund Freud. The movie is so disconcerned with time travel, in fact, that it is basically unimportant to the sequel.

The 1989 film was followed by a 1991 sequel, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey. After the duo is killed by a pair of robots from the future, they must face the Grim Reaper and challenge him in a series of games in order to escape the afterlife. The franchise got another sequel in 2020, Bill & Ted Face the Music, in which Bill and Ted decide to write the ultimate song by going forward in time and stealing it from their future selves.

Despite it being a dumb comedy, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is surprisingly educational. The costumes and historical figures are pretty accurate, although the movie is mostly used to explore how they intersect with modern culture, like metal music and corn dogs. The film is also a perfect time capsule of the 1980s, meaning that the viewing experience is almost a time machine for modern audiences.

Obviously, some parts of Bill & Ted haven’t aged well. However, there is still a ton to enjoy in the film and its sequels, meaning that now is the perfect time to watch Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

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