The soundtrack was filled with metal bands of the era.
Phillip Caruso Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure was heavily influenced by rock ’n’ roll. Eons before he was wasting bad guys in John Wick or The Matrix, Reeves played a high school wastoid with dreams of rock ’n’ roll stardom and uttered his first “Woah!” in the Valley. It was also a breakthrough film for Winters and especially Reeves. If anything went wrong with anything, you just put a piece of gear on an America West flight and pick it up in three hours.”īill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure was a sleeper hit, grossing more than $40 million in the U.S., spawning a sequel, a Saturday morning cartoon, comic books, video games, and even a breakfast cereal. People were flocking to Arizona to shoot movies, because it was only an hour away, too.
#BILL AND TED RUFUS MOVIE#
It looks a lot like, which helped out since a lot of the movie is set there,” she says. Phillip Caruso Connie Hoy, the film’s key production assistant and former Valley resident, says that Phoenix also had the benefit of looking like a lot of other places. (The setting led to one of the movie’s most iconic lines, delivered by Reeves: “Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.”) The Circle K in Tempe became a Circle K in Bill and Ted’s hometown of San Dimas, California, where they encounter their guide and mentor Rufus, played by the late George Carlin, and begin their excellent adventure through time. (If they didn’t, their rock band, Wyld Stallyns, wouldn’t be able to transform the earth into a future utopia, or something.) They traveled through time to kidnap icons like Abraham Lincoln, Genghis Khan, and Joan of Arc to help ace their oral history report and avoid flunking out. and Ted “Theodore” Logan, respectively played by Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves. Three decades ago, the store was prominently featured in the movie, which depicted lovable idiots and high school students Bill S.
To fans of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, however, it’s a shrine to the legendary science-fiction comedy film, which premiered on February 17, 1989. At first glance, it resembles any of the convenience chain’s hundreds of other locations of throughout the Valley. Strange things are still afoot at the Circle K at the corner of Southern Avenue and Hardy Drive in Tempe. For more details on this week's screening, click here. Editor's note: To commemorate our upcoming virtual screening of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure this Thursday, April 16, we are rerunning our cover story from February 2019 that highlighted the Valley locations where the comedy was filmed.