Male duos throughout history who are genuinely great are few and far between. Lewis and Clark. Barnum and Bailey. Ben and Jerry. Bill and Ted. It was 20 years ago that audiences were introduced to this pair of aimless adolescents and taken on an adventure best described as “excellent.” Even though Ted never was never sent off to military school in Alaska, it’s about time we saluted him and Bill for their service to cinema.

Never have so many slacker shenanigans taken place in a shopping center until “Mallrats” came along (it could be argued that the Jay character from Kevin Smith’s movies is a dumbed-down, R-rated composite of Bill and Ted). For those who tend to write off the first Bill and Ted flick as nothing more than a mindless comedy, we submit it was an educational film, brimming with knowledge and bodaciousness (bodacity?).

If you havent seen it, its Keanu to you.

First, a bit about its stars. For a man portraying an airhead who was clueless about history, Keanu went on to know many things: kung-fu (did his knowledge of said martial art somehow cause David Carradine’s death? I’m sure it’s one of the many scenarios being investigated), how to make a bus maintain a constant rate of acceleration, how to send letters through time, how to win court cases with a little help from the devil, how to quarterback a pro football team, how to lose a guy in 10 days (wait, that was Kate Hudson, the female equivalent of Keanu, in that she has above-average looks but a ficus can out-act her).

Which brings us to Alex Winters. Those who say “Who?” are fair to ask that question. Those who keep saying “Who?” repeatedly and are sizing up a field mouse, are probably owls, and as such, aren’t fit for this discussion. After the sequel and the Corey-heavy vampire movie “Lost Boys,” he went on to be a lost boy, hardly appearing in anything again. Every season without him is truly the winter of our discontent.

The movie affected a comedy legend as well as a hack. What other flick could get consummate curmudgeon George Carlin to offer the affable advice, “Be excellent to each other”? If it wasn’t for Bill and Ted, what would the unoriginal, non-mass murderer Mike Myers have ripped off to create the clearly cut from the same cloth (that cloth being flannel) characters, Wayne and Garth? ‘Twas a crime our heroes would surely dub “ most heinous,” and one that the American public stubbornly overlooked, the modern-day equivalent of Bill and Ted being waterboarded (Nancy Pelosi claims she was never briefed that Bill and Ted was a film).

Bill and Ted changed technology. Is it a coincidence that telephone booths like the one that allowed Bill and Ted to travel through time are impossible to find anywhere in the country now? Ma Bell is afraid we’ll harness the ability to roam through centuries and use it do to more than ace our oral exams. Have more faith in us, phone companies. Our main goal would be to make-out with famous women. First up: Helen Keller. We’ve never bagged a babe who could read braille before.

Bill and Ted made history come alive for us in a way community college never could. The movie taught us you can’t tame a tandem of “Wyld Stallyns,” that Napoleon, like the rest of us, finds water parks irresistible, that hot stepmoms/seance participants do exist, that fictitious football programs rule, that you can add the title “esquire” to your name without having to suffer through three years of law school, and that if you hang out in the Circle-K parking lot long enough life-changing events that don’t include getting arrested for loitering will happen.

Thank you, Bill and Ted, for the “Adventure” of a lifetime.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 at 7:04 pm and is filed under headlines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.