Bill & Ted Face the Music Nearly Featured Flashback to Our Teen-Aged Heroes

In Bill and Ted Face the Music, the titular duo have to write the greatest song ever written, or reality itself could fold in on them and the universe could end. With only hours to do it and no inspiration coming, Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves) travel forward in time, hoping to find a future version of themselves who have written the song, so they can take it back to 2020 and save the timeline. And, apparently, there was a never-filmed scene in the script in which they also traveled BACK in time, and encountered their pre-teen and then teenage selves.

Co-writer Ed Solomon shared some script pages on social media over the weekend, which included a scene that took place in 1980 and potential traumatized young Bill and Ted, followed by a scene that would have taken place at the Circle K seen in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

You can see Solomon’s tweets, along with photos of the script pages, below.

If you notice, the script also has another minor change from its final form: here, Ted’s brother Deacon (Beck Bennett) would have been vaporized and sent to Hell along with their father. Instead, in the final film, Deacon and Missy (now his wife, played by Amy Stoch) were stuck in traffic when the SWAT van carrying Bill, Ted, Ted’s dad, their daughters, Death, and Dennis the killer robot, returned from Hell and slammed down onto the road. Without any real explanation for why this change was made, it’s likely that the writers or director decided late in the game that they wanted Missy involved in the big, final scene when Bill and Ted bring their song to the universe. With Deacon and Chief Logan dead, it would have been more random to bring Missy in, whereas with Chief Logan dead and Deacon unaware of it, they were driving to the airport to leave for their honeymoon.

Following the surprise blockbuster that was 1989’s Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Winter and Reeves returned to their title roles for 1991’s Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey. Since then, the pair — as well as writers Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson — have consistently had to field questions about the possibility of a third movie featuring the characters, a pair of slackers who discover that in the future, world peace is achieved as a result of the music of Wyld Stallyns, a rock band they founded in their garage.

In the first film, a time-traveler named Rufus (George Carlin) allowed the pair to use a time machine that gave them a leg up on passing an important high school history presentation. The second film saw them killed and sent to Hell, where they had to defeat the Grim Reaper in order to be revived.

In the third film, Bill & Ted Face the Music, the now-middle-aged Bill and Ted have not yet written the song that kickstarts their world-altering careers, and the future is getting anxious. As reality starts to unravel, there is a literal ticking clock on Bill and Ted to fulfill their destiny. The pair elect to time-travel to the future — or more accurately various alternate futures — to steal the song from their future selves and set the timestream on the right path. Hal Landon, Jr. returns as Ted’s father, Amy Stoch as his stepmother (who was Bill’s stepmother in the first film), and The Flash veteran William Sadler reprises his role as Death, the Grim Reaper who is really bad at basically every game he tries to play — but pretty killer on bass.

Bill and Ted Face the Music is available now in on DVD and Blu-ray, on-demand, and on digital platforms.