Best Keanu: “Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.”

A couple of years ago the Salvation Army Thrift store down the street from me closed. I miss it dearly. It was my go-to place for anything previously loved, including a large supply of t-shirts and odds and ends. But the Salvation Army’s goodwill wasn’t enough to delay or prevent the sale and demolition of the building, which was recently replaced by high-priced condos and some commercial units.

One of those commercial units is occupied by a Circle K, which I have yet to enter.

In Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, the Circle K has no known history; its parking lot is simply the setting for Bill & Ted to meet Bill & Ted who have come back to remind Bill & Ted that Ted must wind his watch, and oh yes — say hi to the princesses!

There’s a lot to still love about Bill & Ted some *cough* 34 years later. Mostly it’s Bill and Ted, or more precisely, Alex and Keanu, who are so believable as best, or at least close, friends that it couldn’t all be acting — and by all accounts it wasn’t, with Alex and Keanu meeting while auditioning for this movie and finding they had a shared loved of cinema and motorcycles.

The first Bill & Ted movie I watched was the third installment, Face the Music, which I saw last year and loved. I knew enough about the characters for the movie to make sense, and for it to be the joyous, self-aware, and touching silly film that it is. I watched the first two installments soon afterwards and found I had a slight preference for Bogus Journey over the first film, not the least because of the hilarity of Bill & Ted choosing Battleship as their epic game to fight death.

But Excellent Adventure is the original, and it’s silly, pleasantly dated, and goofy. It’s funny. And, oddly enough, watching the movie again tonight, I found one aspect of it empowering: Missy.

My story about finding Missy empowering in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure says a lot about changing, and re-changing, of sensibilities. It probably also says something about me personally.

In 1989 I was 14 turning 15. The media portrayed girls like Missy as outcasts, because it wasn’t right of course for women to be really into sex as Missy apparently is. The “s” word was bandied about, and when you’re young and impressionable and not sure who or what you’re supposed to be, that kind of messaging gets inside your head.

Missy, let’s recall, was a senior when Bill and Ted were freshmen. Ted once asked her to prom. Now, Missy is married to Bill’s dad, meaning he has to call her Mom. There’s a scene where Ted catches Bill looking at Missy’s revealing top and Ted scolds his friend, “Dude, that’s your Mom.”

Which, even as I write this, makes me laugh out loud. When it really shouldn’t.

The Bill & Ted movies keep up the Missy joke with each installment. From what I recall, in Bogus Journey Missy’s married Ted’s dad. Face the Music opens with a wedding between Missy and Ted’s younger brother. It’s too silly to be offensive, and the joke stays the same: Missy likes sex.

Near the end of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Missy sits next to the history teacher, and coyly asks him how he’s been. I laughed. I thought it was hilarious. So, in 2023, I am glad to find myself thinking: Go Missy! She is, after all, an adult, and can do whatever the hell she wants with other adults.

I’m not one for 80s nostalgia — I hated the 80s. Please see my post on The Night Before — and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure certainly didn’t invoke any warm and fuzzy feelings for me. (In the scene where Bill and Ted “accidentally” hug, then reflexively jump back and say to each other in unison, “fag!” I thought, “wow, remember that? When that was a thing?” Remember when “dyke” was an insult instead of a word of empowerment?)

The movie did, however, at one point, make me feel really old. Near the end, Ted references Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet.

To which I responded tonight, in my head: wait, Slippery When Wet is older than this movie? I must have missed that sobering little tidbit the first time I watched this.

The years do go by (case in point — I have been working on this site where I write about every single Keanu Reeves movie for about a year and a half now. I still love Keanu.).

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is yet another one of those films on the Keanu list where you wonder, “how did they get that person to be in this little independent film?” George Carlin is the obvious person to add to the list here. But there are also at least two others: Clarence Clemons, legendary saxophone player in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, is one of the important folks in the future.

And playing Joan of Arc is Jane Wiedlin, legendary musician in her own right. If you didn’t look closely or read the credits you might mistake her for Winona Ryder, but no, in that scene where the phone booth lands in France, that’s the bassist of Dogstar extending his hand to the bassist of the Go-Go’s.

And on that note, be excellent to each other, party on, and let’s go on vacation.

July 2023