This week has brought the bodacious news that a third installment of the Bill and Ted movies—which began with 1989’s Excellent Adventure and continued with 1991’s Bogus Journey—may very well get made, with Dean Parisot (whose resumé includes cult favorite Galaxy Quest) attached to direct, and both stars (Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves) happy to reincarnate their eponymous hair-brained metalheads, Bill S. Preston, Esquire, and Ted “Theodore” Logan.
Now, courtesy of Keanu, we have a rough idea of the plot, which sounds perfect:
One of the plot points is that these two people have been crushed by the responsibility of having to write the greatest song ever written and to change the world. And they haven’t done it. So everybody is kind of like: “Where is the song?” The guys have just drifted off into esoterica and lost their rock. And we go on this expedition, go into the future to find out if we wrote the song, and one future “us” refuses to tell us, and another future “us” blames us for their lives because we didn’t write the song, so they’re living this terrible life. In one version we’re in jail; in another we’re at some kind of highway motel and they hate us.
“Drifted off into esoterica and lost their rock”? Sounds like a certain musical genre lately mourned in Slate. What’s more, the questions such a storyline involves seem appropriately existential for characters who, given the age of Winter and Reeves (both are 47), could be approaching their mid-life crises—not to mention mourning the passing of Rufus, who will be missed. Despite his absence, I’m looking forward to this one. I won’t forget to wind my watch.
