Bill & Ted's Most Triumphant Trilogy - 4K Blu-ray Review

[Michael Scott]

Bill & Ted's Most Triumphant Trilogy



Movie:
4K Video:
Video:
Audio:
Extras:
Final Score:


WARNING: THE SCORES ABOVE ARE A COMBINED SCORE FROM ALL 3 FILMS, THE INDIVIDUAL SCORES ARE CONTAINED BELOW IN THE INDIVIDUAL SECTIONS OF THE REVIEW


​

Movie
As a fan, I’m actually tickled pink with most of the 4K UHD upgrades that Shout! Studies have released the last few years. Yeah, most of them aren’t any NEW titles for the most part, but they have been steadfastly upgrading most of their lineup over the last few years into UHD, and generally with stellar results. So color me EXTRA pink when I find out that it’s one of my favorite Keanu Reeves series of all times, complete with a heavy chipboard outer box, dual disc combo packs (which some of the majors have been shying away from doing anymore) AND a serious load up of extras that surpasses pretty much everything that we’ve seen to date. So yeah, I’m kinda stoked for this box set.

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure:
Dude, totally gnarly. The 1980s were coming to a close, but that doesn’t mean the sheer awesomeness of that generation was done QUITE yet. 1989 was the year that we got Seinfeld, The Simpsons and hair metal was still going strong (albeit, showing some cracks in their impenetrable armor), and we of course got Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. I have no idea how it happened, but Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure was one of THE stupidest movies to come out of the 80s, but someone made it’s way into our hearts as an absolute cult classic over the years. This was back before Keanu Reeves was really taken seriously as a power house actor (and before he made his infamous change over from the “whoa, dude” type of actor to the most grizzled and metered persona that he put on in the early 2000s after his career started to fade post Matrix era). The flick is basically a gigantic send off to the 1980s, filled with every single cliché, quote, slang, and general FEEL of that generation as they passed to the torch to the more cynical 1990s. But no matter HOW or WHY it came to be, we all have to acknowledge that it’s never too late to rock on.

Bill S. Preston Esq. (Alex Winter) and Theodore “Ted” Logan (Keanu Reeves) are two high school morons who are in serious danger of flunking out of their high brow San Dimas High school history class if they can’t get a handle on their final presentation. Which naturally would put a damper on their plans to rock out in their band “Wyld Stallions” this summer (even though they’re absolutely terrible guitarists) being that Ted’s tough as nails father has promised to send the “brilliant” youth off to military school if they can’t pass their grades this year.

However, their savior comes in the form of Rufus (George Carlin) a denizen from 700 years in the future who comes back to inform them that their music paves the way for a utopian future where poverty and violence has been completely eradicated. Thus he is forced to jump backwards in time through a magical phone booth to help out the brain dead teenagers learn the past, so that they can protect the future (oi vey). To make sure that they pass their history test, Rufus gives them the magical telephone book that has dates and locations of all of the most important events in history, allowing them to jump back in time and experience these events first hand, thus now being able to pass their history exam. But like you would expect, things don’t go exactly as planned, with Bill and Ted accidentally blurring the lines between past and future.

I’m going to borrow a bit of symbolism from another reviewer from years ago, but Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is basically Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits, just set in the 1980s with stoner slang and a Wayne’s World sort of mischief and mayhem. The script is as silly as it gets, making gags about each of the historical figures the boys run across, even going so far as to drag Napoleon from the past into 1989, introducing him to ice cream, and taking him to the “Waterloo” water park where he learns the joys of water slides. But at the end of the day, kind of like Wayne’s World, it’s all about the visual gags and the slapstick comedic timing between Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves. They’re charming together, and somehow make a stoner variant of Time Bandits actually work, even though everything about the scripts screams that it shouldn’t. So while I doubt anyone is going to claim that Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is high brow entertainment, it most certainly is a FUN movie. So, whatever age you are, just remember to party on!

Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey:
Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves) are back at it again. The lovable pair of slackers are chilling with their munchies when the future villain De Nomolos (Joss Ackland) sends back a pair of robotic clones in time to kills off the two bums (who somehow pose a threat to him in the future). The clones actually succeed in killing off the totally radical duo, but Bill and Ted aren’t done just yet. In order to get back to the land of the living, the two challenge the grim reaper (played by William Sadler) to a series of games so that he will grant them their life back again. Like usual, this means lots of stupidity, lots of “whoooooaaaaa’s” and lots of total tubular adventures for our dynamic duo.

Bogus Journey is a story that will ring true to anyone who has noticed how Hollywood handles sequels. Back in the day writers Matteson and Solomon were forced into writing the script for the sequel right after the unexpected success of Excellent Adventure. The studios had juggled Excellent Adventure around for years, putting it through production hell, and even changing licensing hands several times, but when it hit box office gold, the powers that be wanted to strike while the iron was hot. So they gave Mattheson and Solomon an even bigger budget, but only a few weeks to write and finalize the script. As a result the process was a bit murky, and the end result is a sequel that is simply over stuffed with too much goodies.

The commentaries on this disc are pure gold, as the two writers go into great detail talking about the foibles and pitfalls of making the film, and you can see where they WANTED to go with the script, and where they ended up as a result. The first film was just a laid back “party on!” movie, with no central villain (well, besides Ted’s nagging father), but this one is stuffed with a few. We’ve got death, De Nomolos (who seems to want to stop the Utopian future that Bill and Ted usher in with their winning of the battle of the bands), and even a few minor ones like the robots as well. This creates a sensation of film bloat, as the movie skips from one situation to the other, never really focusing on one villain completely, and this is really one of the biggest downfalls of the movie.

Bogus Journey tries to be a bigger film in scope and deed, and in many ways it succeeds. The dynamic duo of Winters and Reeves are still the hilarious slackers that we’ve come to know and love, but this adventure is much different than what happened in Excellent Adventure. The hijinks are bigger, and so are the stakes. The humor is a bit more hit or miss, but there are still plenty of laughs to be had, and I still love watching the two films together as a double feature. Reeves was hilarious back before he became the silent story Neo, or the ice cold John Wick, and his “far out man!” camaraderie with Alex Winters is about as iconic as Mike Meyers and Dana Carvey in the Wayne’s World franchise.

Bill & Ted Face the Music:
Party on dudes!

How many of you were actually calling out for another sequel to Bill & Ted? Show of hands? Anyone? Yeah, that’s what I thought. I’m not sure that anyone was actually calling out for another Bill & Ted movie, but 29 years after Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey that’s exactly what we got. I’m going to say it up front though, I really, REALLY didn’t expect this movie to amount to a hill of beans. Most movie sequels that take years and years to come to fruition aren’t worth the paper that they were written on, and a movie like this that is 31 years after the original and 29 years after the last sequel just doesn’t have that much going for it. About the ONLY good thing that was going for the film was that Alex Winters and Keanu Reeves were both coming back together to reprise their original roles. Color me surprised when Bill & Ted Face the Music actually turned out to be a fun time. Sure, it’s not a great movie, OR a great sequel, but the fact that it’s actually fun and a DECENT sequel is a bit of a miracle in and of itself.

It’s been 25 years since Bill S. Preston Esquire (Alex Winters) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves) saved the world with the gift of Wyld Stallions, married two princesses from the 1400s, and basically were just plain excellent to each other. The thing is, that massive concert back in 1991 WASN’T the song that would unite humanity together as Rufus (good old George Carlin) said, and both Bill and Ted have fallen on hard times. Wyld Stallion had garnered some fame back in the 90s, but 25 years later the duo are still trying to find the magic formula for creating that perfect song, and have basically turned themselves into has beens. Their marriages to the princesses are falling apart, but luckily for them, their daughters Thea (Samara Weaving) and Billie (Brigitte Lundy-Paine) have followed in their father’s musical footsteps and been jamming together for years.

HOWEVER, Bill and Ted are at the end of their proverbial rope as the future gurus have called them back through time to make due on their promise of creating the song that unites humanity. You see, the world is starting to unravel at the seams and the ONLY thing that can save all of time and space is for Bill and Ted to get cracking. Confused and bemused as ever, the doltish duo decide to hijack Rufus’s old magical telephone booth and travel through the future to get the song from future thems, run back in time and save the world. While they’re going through times desperate to plagiarize their own music, Billie and Thea also start time jumping to organize a band comprised of the past’s greatest musicians in hopes of helping their fathers accomplish their goals. Only thing is, both sets of duos run into problems, leading them back to hell and death himself (with William Sadler reprising his role), and with time running out, have to figure a way out of hell and back into rocking the world once more.

As I said in the opening paragraph, I really didn’t see this as going anywhere. The idea of a sequel 29 years later is already a tough sell, and with the inclusion of Bill and Ted’s daughters I was FULLY expecting this to be a movie about them, with Bill and Ted playing cameo in their own franchise. Luckily I was wrong about that aspect, as this is a movie all about Bill and Ted, just with their daughter’s help included. It’s simple, about the music, and pure silly fun. My only complaint about the film (or at least my most MAJOR complaint) is the ending. With all of the hype and mystique about the song that unites humanity, it playing out the way it did just felt a bit silly and trite. In my opinion it was much better to leave it to the imagination as the imagination has a way of making it grander than it is.

Basically, silly movie, silly concept, but it works due to Keanu and Alex’s chemistry together. They both feel like they’re right back in groove ala 1989 and 1991, just with age marks. That being said, Billie and Thea almost match them blow for blow, with Brigitte’s Billie REALLY selling it. Samara Weaving does a great job, but Brigitte is fully rocking the doltish surfer vibe of her dad down to a T. Both my wife and I thought she was spot on perfect, and had Samara not let the surfer vibe slip a little now and again, they would have been the perfect duo.




Rating:

Rated PG by the MPAA (1 and 2) / Rated PG-13 for some language (3)




4K Video: Video:

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure:
It looks like Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is basically a clone of the 2022 4K UHD release that they put out a while back, except this time it’s a combo pack vs. the single disc that was released previously. The first Bill & Ted film has always looked HEAVILY grainy, with some soft detail levels, and the 4K UHD seems to resolve them quite nicely. The film is still extremely grainy, but detail levels appear a bit crisper and more solid. The grain is a bit on the heavy side though, and it tends to make things look a bit grungy at times. Colors are dulled and flat, and fine details (such as the fur on Genghis Khan’s outfit) look really nice, and the film overall is a solid upgrade over the MGM Blu-ray from old. One thing I must make note of, I was a bit weirded out by the Dolby Vision grading. I’m used to DV and HDR applications dimming the brightness level a bit, but here it seems like the whites are a tad blown out, and colors a bit flat (as I mentioned above). It’s a bit odd, and makes me take a ½ star off my original 4/5 rating I wanted to give to the film, but overall a decent looking image.

Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey:
Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey was using a near 10 year old master for it’s 2018 release (at this time, not at the time of the 2018 disc) and Shout! Has done the same thing as the other films and released this with a new 4K master struck from the original camera negative. End result? Head and shoulder over the aging Steelbook release that I reviewed back in 2018 (even the Blu-ray included here shows those improvements) with substantial improvements all around. Black levels are deep and inky as they explore the underworld (and Death’s deep dark robes), and fine details are very solid. Locations are full of 3 dimensionality, and the smeared softness that I saw in the previous release is all gone. Dolby Vision adds some very nice cool blue and orange punchiness as the due traverses the worlds, and grain levels are tastefully done without the heaviness that we saw before. It’s not going to look AMAZING considering that the film source is comprised of a heavily stylized bit of film stock that was notoriously grainy, but this is a VERY nice upgrade over the old disc, and the new Blu-ray alike.

Bill & Ted Face the Music:
Being that Face the Music was given a native 4K master back when Warner Brothers released the Blu-ray in late 2020, I was SUPER disappointed that they didn’t put it out in 4K. I mean, Warner has done great jobs with their 4K releases and it made absolutely zero sense for them put out a 1080p variant only, even though Covid was underway and all it would take was a simple re-encode and pressing. But alas, that wasn’t in the cards. Luckily Shout! Studios boxset rectifies that mistake and proves that yes, this film is most definitely worth the upgrade to 2160p.

Shout! Studios 4K UHD release looks stellar in 4K, and states “new 4K remaster of the of the digital intermediate” in the press release (meaning that Shout pulled their own master instead of using the Warner one most likely) and it generally looks like a solid improvement over the excellent BD (the BD in this set and the Warner one look almost indistinguishable) with colors showing more depth and punch, and fine details looking a bit better. The afterlife and the orange fires of hell really show off the new Dolby Vision enhancements, and the cool blue arena of the future is resplendent with fine details. Blacks are deep and inky, and except for a smudge of crush, are head and shoulders better than the Blu-ray.








Audio:

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure:
Being that this is a clone of the 2022 UHD disc, no surprise that we get the same 5.l DTS-HD MA track on board this set. Basically it’s the same (or so similar you can’t tell the difference ) track from the MGM release, just with an extra option of a 2.0 dowmix in DTS-HD MA and the exclusion of the Spanish Dolby Digital Mono track. This is a fairly front heavy mix, with strong vocals and good presence in the mains during the limited “action”. However, some of the special effects (such as the flying phone booth) add some depth and expansiveness to the mix, engaging the surrounds and bass when needed. LFE is tight and clean, but fairly laid back and tends to only crop up on occasion. Fidelity is all around solid, and is overall a solid sounding mix.

Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey:
Like the video, the 5.1. DTS-HD MA and 2.0 DTS-HD MA tracks are the same as the Shout Studios Blu-ray release from years ago, giving us a little bit of a punchier mix than Excellent Adventure was afforded. The front sound stage is excellent, with crisp dialog and well balanced effects, but I noticed that the film was more generous with affording low end to some of the hijinks as well as surround sound activity. It’s not nearly so front heavy as Excellent Adventure and the bigger budget the film was afforded shows. The end battle of the bands concert is amazing, with clear music and a wide open sound stage to enjoy. It’s only fault is that it’s STILL a bit more front heavy than other films, but a good track that does everything asked of it quite nicely.

Bill & Ted Face the Music:
As this is simply a port of what seems to be the exact same track as Warner's Blu-ray, my analysis of the track will clone that of my Blu-ray review from nearly 4 years ago. Again, like the video, I would have loved a next gen audio mix (Atmos or DTS:X) as the musical nature of the film really would have benefited from it, but the 5.1 DTS-HD MA mix is no slouch. It’s a rocking track from beginning to end with a nice spacious feel to it. The music flows seamlessly throughout the 6 channels, and the bass can be absolutely crushing at times, especially when the phone booth makes a landing. Voices are crisp and clean up in the front of the room, making it a VERY impressive mix.









Extras:

Disc One (Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure UHD)
• Audio Commentaries
• “Time Flies When You Are Having Fun”
• Theatrical Trailers

Disc Two (Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey UHD)
• Audio Commentaries
• “Bill & Ted Go To Hell”
• Theatrical Trailers

Disc Three (Bill & Ted Face the Music UHD)
• The Official Bill & Ted Face The Music Panel At Comic-Con@Home
• Be Excellent To Each Other” – Behind The Scenes With Cast And Crew
• "A Most Triumphant Duo”
• “Social Piece (Excellence)”
• “Death’s Crib”
• Theatrical Trailers

Disc Four (Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure BD)
• Audio Commentaries
• “Time Flies When You Are Having Fun”
• "The Original Bill & Ted" - In Conversation With Chris & Ed
• "The Hysterical Personages Of Bill & Ted"
• Theatrical Trailer

Disc Five (Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey BD)
• Audio Commentaries
• “Bill & Ted Go To Hell”
• “The Most Triumphant Making Of”
• “Score!” – An Interview With Guitarist Steve Vai
• Air Guitar Tutorial With Bjorn Turoque & The Rockness Monster
• Vintage EPK
• The Linguistic Stylings Of Bill & Ted
• Theatrical Trailers

Disc Six (Bill & Ted Face The Music BD)
• The Official Bill & Ted Face The Music Panel At Comic-Con@Home
• “Be Excellent To Each Other” – Behind The Scenes With Cast And Crew
• “A Most Triumphant Duo”
• “Social Piece (Excellence)”
• “Death’s Crib”
• Theatrical Trailers

Final Score: ​

While not every film in the box set is gold, Bill & Ted is very much a beloved classic series (and modern as well) that is loved by comedy fans the world over. The first is a stone cold stoner classic, the 2nd and the 3rd fall behind, but make worthy successors for fans of the series. But the real winner here is Shout! Studios attention to details and lovingly remastering the set and just packing it to the GILLS with special features. I’m also in love with the fact that they didn’t try to save a buck and put everything in a 6 disc case, but use those old fashioned heavy chipboard outer cases that are fantastic at protecting larger sets. Definitely recommended for those who still wish to party on.


Technical Specifications:

Starring: Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, Samara Weaving, Brigitte Lundy-Paine, Kristen Schaal, William Sadler, Erinn Hayes, Jayma May, George Carlin
Directed by: Various
Written by: Various
Aspect Ratio: 2.39:1 HEVC, 1.85:1 HEVC, 2.39:1 HEVC
Audio: English: DTS-HD MA 5.1, English DTS-HD MA 2.0
Subtitles: English SDH
Studio: Shout! Studios
Rated: PG/PG-13
Runtime: 276 Minutes
Blu-ray Release Date: August, 6th, 2024

Recommendation: Good Set

​