Friday, March 21, 2014

Celebrity Toons: Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventures (1990)

The success of the feature film, "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure", led not only to the sequel, "Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey", but an animated series that aired in between films.

Orion Pictures contracted Hanna-Barbera to produce the first season of episodes, which aired on CBS, with stars Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, Bernie Casey, & George Carlin reprising their roles from the movie. However, after "Bogus Journey", the series changed animation houses (to DIC) & networks (Fox, which was developing a live-action version of the series). Winter & Reeves were gone, replaced by Christopher Kennedy & Evan Richards, who would star in the live-action version, which would air on Sundays on Fox. Neither of these lasted very long, about 2 months apiece, and then, poof, gone-zo.

Winter went on to develop another short-lived series, The Idiot Box, for MTV, and has seemingly left show biz altogether. Reeves was last seen in the movie, "47 Ronin", a box office dud.

There is no rating for the show, since I never saw it. Here is a sample intro/outro:

2 comments:

magicdog said...

I remember this show and it was essentially a continuation of the film - using the same logic! There was really no place to go based on the first film (and I wasn't a fan of the sequel, "Boogus Journey", which as far as I'm concerned, doesn't exist).

At least bringing Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter and George Carlin made it tolerable. Once they were gone, there wasn't much point anymore.

The live action syndicated series was virtually identical in set up and storyline resolution, but at least the actors were really good in their roles.

hobbyfan said...

I didn't bother either way, as I noted. I just didn't get the whole idea behind these valley dudes traveling through time. Like H-B had already done that with Fonzie a decade prior. Meh.