Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		3.5

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman September 23, 2016

Note: This edition of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure is available as part of Bill & Ted's Most Excellent Collection.

Is it mere coincidence that both Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and Doctor Who feature phone booths that act as time travel portals? In the commentaries included on both films in the new Bill & Ted collection from Shout! Factory, screenwriters Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon actually state that they had never heard of Doctor Who before they wrote the first Bill & Ted film, and that the idea of putting the time travel device in a phone booth was "presented" to them, and that they in fact wanted the boys' van to be their "vehicle" to other eras. The hilarious thing about this is that neither of these franchises evidently was able to effectively skry the future to know that phone booths would pretty much go the way of the dinosaur by the 21st century, meaning that any time travel to the future would seem to be inherently anachronistic (at least the DeLorean had the advantage of being a car, a technology still in use, plus it looked kind of cool). Or is that one of those time travel paradoxes that science fiction writers so love to luxuriate in? On the other hand, you could almost make a case that Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure's Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon knew they were offering up something intentionally dumb seeming, since Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure luxuriates in stupidity the same way that science fiction writers do with regard to time travel paradoxes, and there's no doubt that one of the silliest running gags in the films is seeing a telephone booth plop down in everything from the Wild West to Ancient Greece. As my colleague Casey Broadwater mentioned in his Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure Blu-ray review of the old MGM release, the first film is "lovably idiotic", positing two dimwits who manage to stumble into greatness while on an ostensible “field trip” to help them ace a history exam. Shout! Factory has now assembled the original film with its 1991 sequel, Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, along with a third disc of extras.

For a recap of Bill & Ted's Most Excellent Adventure, I refer you to Casey's enjoyable Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure Blu-ray review of the MGM Blu-ray release. My only tangential aside to Casey's astute analysis would be that much of the humor here is gleaned through the ridiculously flowery language that slackers Bill and Ted utilize. This is like the opposite of "mumblecore," with less than book smart individuals coming out with all sorts of five dollar words like "heinous." It's an obvious disconnect which gives the film's verbal humor a lot of its energy. That high-falutin' verbiage tends to collide comedically with the boys' boneheaded inability to know things like how Socrates' name is pronounced.

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Shout! Factory with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1. Shout didn't tout a new scan or restoration with this release which tends to be their modus operandi when they have something "new and improved" to offer the consumer, but one way or the other, a quick comparison of screenshots between this release and the MGM release Casey covered in his Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure Blu-ray review shows that there's very little if any difference between the two in terms of palette, clarity and grain structure. (I've tried to come close to recreating several of the screenshots Casey included with his review so that those interested can do full screen compare and contrasts. I personally find this kind of comparing far more instructive than my attempts to describe things, and I encourage those considering a purchase to spend a few minutes toggling between the two releases.) As Casey noted in his review, there's a bit of variability in sharpness levels, and the film's many old style opticals offer an expected uptick in grain (there's also some fairly clunky looking nascent CGI which is almost quaint by today's standards). While (again as Casey noted) grain can be pretty chunky at times, there aren't any really problematic compression issues on display.

I did have one odd anomaly occur at circa 24:21 (at the beginning of the Billy the Kid sequence) as I watched the film where suddenly there was some kind of HDMI communication glitch where my screen went black for a few seconds and the soundtrack stuttered. Obviously concerned, I rewound (which the disc did flawlessly) and replayed that moment and the problem did not recur. I'm simply reporting it here since it happened, in case a member has a similar situation crop up.

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure includes a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track like the MGM Blu-ray release, but also gives the listener the option of a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 track while eliminating the Spanish Dolby Mono track that was on the MGM release. As Casey noted in his Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure Blu-ray review, the 5.1 track tends to be fairly front heavy quite a bit of the time, but some of the audio SFX are quite impressively immersive, especially when the boys and their "charges" are zinging through the portals of spacetime. The film is of course filled with some great era specific music, and that resides very comfortably in the surrounds and gives the sonics some fairly forceful low end at times. (One of the tunes was co-written by the Nelson twins and Dweezil Zappa.) Fidelity is excellent and dialogue is rendered cleanly with good prioritization. I personally did not notice the volume dips that Casey mentioned in his review.

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Audio Commentary with Star Alex Winter and Producer Scott Kroopf


• Audio Commentary with Writers Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon


• Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 1:57)

For additional supplements contained on the third bonus disc of this three disc set, see the Bill & Ted's Most Excellent Collection Blu-ray review.

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure simply needs to be accepted on its own boneheaded merits, but the good news is if you do accept it for what it is, chances are you'll have a rollicking good time learning history along with the two lovable numbskulls brought winningly to life by Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter. As Casey noted in his review of the MGM release, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure is a film resolutely of its time, but that time has only acquired an added luster of quaintness in the intervening years, making this film even more weirdly enjoyable. Technical merits are generally strong, and the commentaries are informative and interesting. Recommended.