Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 323: Bill & Ted / Spectrum Next

Episode Date: September 7, 2020

Jeremy Parish, Bob Mackey, Henry Gilbert, and Stuart Gipp hop in their telephone booths to discuss the classic Bill & Ted films and their not-so-classic game tie-ins. Then Jeremy chats with Henrique Olifiers about the ZX Spectrum's return via Kickstarter. Cover art by John Pading.

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network, a collective of creator-owned and fully independent podcasts, focused on pop culture and video gaming. To learn more and to catch up on all the other network shows, check out Greenlitpodcasts.com. This week in Retronauts, strange games are afoot at the Circle K. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts. I am Jeremy Parrish, as I have been, and will always continue to be through the past, the present, and the future. My name, time travels along with my body, and here with me on the circuits of time, communicating through the internet from places that are not normal. North Carolina, where I am based, we have, let's go forward in time to the United Kingdom, where it's like 6 p.m. now, as opposed to noon.

It is, yeah. It's a very lovely evening. And I was trying to think of a clever kind of intro that related to the movie, but I couldn't. My name is Stuart J. Pelley. And this is not Stewart's first ride at the rodeo, as it were. This is not a rodeo. But, yes, Stuart has been on a few episodes of Retronauts with myself and with Diamond fight and of course is a regular contributor to the retronauts blog actually the most regular contributor to the retronauts blog and social media so welcome back to the show and this is your first time steward being with the folks who are uh somewhere in the past uh and that is on the west coast of america it's very exciting because uh i listened to talking simpsons for like however many years it's been going so this is super weird oh the worlds are colliding

hey everybody it's Bob Mackey I'm a Ziggy Piggy and that's not a sex thing and although it could be I'll get back to you I'm and I'm Henry Gilbert reminding future Henry Gilbert to rewind that watch all right all right and yes this week we are talking about Bill and Ted's excellent adventure and also the less excellent franchise that kind of built up around it but I really intended to focus on just the first movie

because I thought reaching into my dusty memories like wow, that was a really influential movie and I bet we will have a lot to say about it and also there were some video games about it so this will be a rock solid, very long episode and now that I've actually gone back for the first time in 20 years and rewatch the movie

I have my doubts I'm actually filled with a little bit of trepidation going into this episode because there's less to the movie than I thought and there's definitely less to the video games than I thought but we could all collaborate together collectively surprise me,

and I hope that's going to be the case. But in any case, we will be talking about this film and the game's based on it, and maybe some of the other stuff, Ancillary on the side, all in kind of timing with the purported sequel that's supposed to be coming out in August of 2020, Bill and Ted faced the music.

I don't know what's actually going to happen because I do not have a phone booth that travels through time, and I don't know if there will actually be theatrical releases in America in August of 2020. So we'll see how it goes. But in any case, in a perfect world or a properly functioning world, we would be seeing a third Bill and Ted movie this fall. And that is why we are having a Bill and Ted Retronauts episode right now.

Yes. So, guys, I would love to hear about your personal experiences with the Bell and Ted franchises, like when did you first see the movies, how much do you love the video games, etc., etc. I'm sure we've all being of different ages, different places in the world, all kind of experienced it in different ways. So, Stuart, why don't we start with you? Because I feel like you're the

newest comer to this. Yeah, I only saw the movies, coincidentally, just last month, or whenever the teaser trailer for the new one came out, because I had my doubts that it was it's very popular. It's kind of got a cult thing going to some extent, and I was sort of doubtful that it could really be particularly good, because

it does seem quite bad from the outside. It seems quite sort of dumb and bad. But then I watched both the movies, sort of on consecutive days, and I was quite pleasantly surprised by how much they sort of had to offer. They're not amazing masterpieces, but considering what they are, I thought they were quite enjoyable, especially the second one, which I thought was kind of amazing in some ways, but we'll probably briefly touch on that later.

Yeah, these movies are dumb and bad, but they are knowingly dumb and bad. They lean into it and harness that power to be good somehow. It's very curious. Bob, Henry, how about yourselves? Oh, so when we did it Back to the Future episode, I had this theory that, like, kids that were around Henry and my age, I'm not sure how old you are, Stuart, but kids of the early 80s who were born then, we didn't like the first movie as much as the super wacky sequel. So like Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, Gremlins, this is one of those for me, where the 1991 sequel is so wacky. so out there. A lot more money, a lot more special effects. So that's the one I saw the most. And I remember renting this as a kid when it first was out on VHS and just being very bored. And thinking

about it, I have not seen it since then. I watched it right before this podcast. I was like, maybe I didn't like the movie because I didn't have the context as a seven-year-old to be like, this is Joan of Arc. This is Sigmund Freud. This is Socrates. I probably knew who Abraham Lincoln was, but none of these other people. So maybe that's why I was kind of bored. But upon this viewing, I was like, oh, I kind of don't like this movie now, but I still think I like the sequel. And I don't think it's a bad movie. It's just a super messy movie. And I did play the NES game quite a bit as a rental.

But, yeah, I'm a big Back to the Future Boy, and it's really unfair to compare the two. But they do exist in the same world. And this movie would not have been made if not for Back to the Future. Oh, well, yeah. It is like the Orion low-budget version of that movie. why I have one Marty McFly when you have two Marty McFly's

exactly they are the same person No I also had a pretty similar situation to Bob of seeing the sequel first I saw the sequel in theaters I remember my mom taking me and my brothers to a basically empty theater showing bogus journey and I'd never seen a movie about like hell

and death before I think so it really freaked me out and then I watched the uh the movie on vhs again and uh the first one and i think i had a similar boredom of like oh it's it looks cheaper there's no death in it and death is so freaking funny i didn't know who george carlin was so i couldn't be impressed at his involvement either and yeah probably a lot of the especially the freud jokes probably went right over my head as a kid uh but but yeah as i grew up. I also did enjoy the

I didn't touch the LJN video games but I had read the comics and watched the cartoons a little bit too and you know as a reappraisal of Bill and Ted was beginning as you know like five years ago as Keanu and Alex were trying to

finally make a third movie I started to rewatch the old movies and there's definitely some stuff that doesn't age too well in it but in both of them but I had a fun little time with this wacky movie it's basically a series of sketches is how i thought about it and it's not the second one i i still prefer i think yes i agree the second movie is a better smarter piece of

media uh but the first one really you know when you look at it in the context of its time for the audience that it was written for which were people who were a little older than you guys maybe more my age uh it was kind of revelatory at the time i remember when at first came out, I was in my early teens at the time. And I thought, you know, this movie looks kind of stupid, but at the same time, it seemed kind of funny. So the reviews were kind of mixed, but there was good word of mouth. And so I ended up seeing it in the theater, it's probably like at a dollar theater kind of in its second run. But I was, I thought it was really funny. And there were still some, you know, some of the sex jokes that went over my head, like the whole thing with

the corn dog and the edipus jokes and stuff. But on the whole, I was like, oh, this, This is actually kind of smart. They're making jokes about Star Wars. You never hear that in movies unless it's like deliberately, you know, a spaceballs movie that is making fun of Star Wars. There were just like lots of things that I found very relatable, even though like kind of stoned out teenagers from California who wanted to be in a band aren't necessarily characters I can personally relate to. It just felt very much like, hey, this is, you know, written for sort of late gen Xers. this is kind of your experience and here is here are some underachievers who are kind of addled by media and that's how they view the world and that's that's you latchkey kids so it hit and then you know

when when the sequel came out I definitely went to see it very early in the run and it was you know I was a few years older so I appreciated the jokes a bit more and I feel like the second movie as you guys have said is a better smarter movie it's a lot of times movie sequels fall flat. And this is one where it felt like they finally had the budget and the, you know, kind of the backing that they did not have for the first movie to really kind of explore the concepts that they wanted to. And it didn't feel like a retread.

It felt like, you know, this is a new story that happens to have these characters. But it's still very true to kind of what you saw in the first movie. So not too bad altogether. But again, going back, you know, having seen these again for the first time in nearly 20 years, definitely movies for, you know, a 13 or 14-year-old as opposed to someone in their 40s. But I can I can respect it for what it was in its context and its time. And as a result, you know, it was very influential. Whenever time stand still and trouble moves too fast.

To save the future, we must learn about the past. Whoa Excellent Bologous Did you guys watch any of the supplementary media There was a Bill and Ted cartoon that Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves voiced the main characters in There was also a live action TV series that I had totally

forgot about until I never knew about that show no Yeah, I watched the cartoon a bit. I wasn't, I don't think I was a regular watcher, but I just had a memory of because it was on Fox and I watched anything on Fox and they aired like six episodes of this Bill and Ted live action series. There is a one YouTube video that's three hours long that has all the episodes and I was skimming through it last night and I was like, these guys look eight years older than Bill and Ted. And also it looks like two people in Bill and Ted Halloween costumes in this TV show. It's very bad. How would you rate it compared to the Maniac Mansion TV series? You know what?

The Maniac Mansion TV series has grown on me because now that I accept that it is not trying to be the video game, I realize like, oh, it's a bunch of people from SCTV making a weird sitcom. So I will say Maniac Mansion is the superior series, even though it is not at all like canon or following the source material at all. All right. The opening theme to the Bill and Ted cartoon show was really good. Yeah, yeah. Most fantastic every day. I watched that when I was a child.

It was on Channel 4 in the UK, and I didn't know who Bill and Ted were, so I thought that that was the franchise, that cartoon. And all I remember is the theme song because it absolutely slaps. It's incredible. What is kind of Bill and Ted's legacy or like cultural impact over in the UK?

Because it seems very, very geared toward an American perspective, specifically an American perspective in the late 80s, which is not something that really, I assume, you can relate to that much. Not so much. No, I didn't spend any time there at all, but I did grow up consuming media almost exclusively from the US, so that kind of helped.

But for me, I always had it sort of pigeonhold, and this is vastly inaccurate, so I apologize in advance, but I always had it pigeonholed as like a lesser version of Waynesworld. Because Wayne's World was huge over here, and that's kind of what I assumed it was. It's the same kind of slackers, being slackers, go in to eat fast food, just stuff like that. And then I watched it recently.

I was like, no, this is not really at all like Wayne's World. It's so much more earnest and so much more kind of heartfelt, I find, which surprised me a lot. There's kind of a weird relationship between Bill and Ted and Wayne's World, because Wayne's World, I believe, debuted on Saturday Night Live the same week or the same month that this movie hit theater is in the U.S. but Wayne and Garth had originated as characters in like 1987. So there probably was some influence there. You know, the comedy writers from that era tended to kind of follow, you know, work in the same circles.

It was a small Hollywood. So I'm sure they were very aware of Bill and Ted when they started writing this. But kind of being a distillation of media concepts and ideas, you know, sort of a pastiche of a lot of pop culture was kind of the point. of Bill and Ted. So I don't think that it's necessarily like, oh, this is a big rip-off of Wayne and Gar. It's more like this is kind of a new take on the Stoner movie, which, you know, you can trace back to like Cheech and Chong and up in smoke. But with a very different perspective. As you say, it's very heartfelt. And I do feel that is the kind of the anchor for this. You know, it is about Bill and Ted. And they do seem very genuine, even though they're like too

stupid to live they're earnest characters and you really feel like I don't know like I was reading some oral histories of the film and both Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves basically like have said you know we just tried to make these real characters we tried to think about like what they were thinking as much as they were thinking at all and instead of mocking them to try to sort of understand what drove these two characters, which is, you know, maybe more interiority than the characters necessarily deserve, but it works because, yeah, they just feel like earnest characters. And, you know, I mentioned the Star Wars thing earlier when they start doing the fake lightsaber fighting while they're wearing suits of armor. That was actually, like, that was

improvised by Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter. They were, you know, wearing this miserable armor. It was hot and heavy. And they just started goofing around. And of course, they were making jokes about Star Wars because that's what they grew up watching. And before I read about that in the oral history, like when I was rewatching it, that part really stuck out to me because it is what kids in that era did, you know, just like, we've got a couple of sticks. So guess what? I'm Luke Skywalker and you're Darth Vader.

I'll never rule the universe with you. Like it's, yeah, they really kind of captured in some ways what it was like to really be a kid, to be a teenager in the late 80s in America. And I really think that's a big part of what sells it. Yeah, I like the time capsule aspect of this movie a lot, especially the, it was a very maybe like five or six year period when there was a lot of like Orientalism about California. Like, oh, no, Southern California, especially like, ooh, Southern California, it's full of babes and palm trees and hot pink. And this is that to a tee. It was the, uh, the surfer dude kind of bubble.

And we were all obsessed with with like things like this and Beverly Hills 90210 and L.A. law, like everything, like, oh, Southern California. Could you imagine? Yeah, if Bill and Ted didn't want to be guitar heroes, they would have been gleaming the cube for sure. It's true. And I'm shocked they don't get on skateboards in this movie. It's Genghis Khan who does, not them. That's true.

But the similarities to Wayne's World, too, I think they both just, and Beavis and Butthead after this, they all are pulling from the same heavy metal obsessed, slacker dude, you know, heshire type. Wayne's World is only different in that It's kind of this combination of like Mike Myers is coming out from the Canadian perspective of that type of hard rock fan So it's slightly different from the SoCal style But they're basically the same type of dude It's like a Midwestern flavor of this kind of stoner pair

I do think that it is It can be deceptive to think a movie about stupid characters As a stupid movie But we covered like Beavis and Butt had a few times on our What a Cartoon podcast and just thinking about like how do you write a Beavis and Butthead short how do you write two characters

who cannot figure anything out it's actually very very difficult to do I was yeah I was thinking really that Beavis and Butthead I think is a great comparison to Bill and Ted because I mean Beavis and Buthead are more horny obviously and singularly focused but they're both they're completely

true to themselves all the time they never put up any kind of front and Bill and Ted are kind of the same except they just happen to be I don't know better people. Yeah, Beavis and Butthead is a much darker look at these kind of characters in which their parents have abandoned them. Bill and Ted are living large in the suburb of L.A. They got nice houses and everything. Yeah, I think, you know, Beavis and Butthead are kind of from a slightly different rock-obsessed area than Bill and Ted. Bill and Ted, you know, it's like

the Joe Satriani, Eddie Van Halen, like sort of commercial flashy rock, whereas Beavis and Butthead are much more about heavy metal ACDC and Metallica and that sort of thing, you know, rat. So like, you know, having grown up in this era, I definitely had classmates who fell into those categories. And the Beez and Butthead kids tended to be really antisocial, tended to be the ones who sit kind of like in the back of the classroom and would use like their compass to carve the Metallica logo into their desk forever. And the kids who are more into the flashy commercial guitar hero type stuff, you know, they, they did tend to be more like Bill and Ted, not as like cynical, not as kind of like piss off everyone, we hate you all.

They did tend to kind of be like socially isolated, but not in a bad way. It was just like they were both, they were all so into what they were into. And they had these dreams of, you know, like learning to play guitar themselves and becoming rock stars, that they just sort of, I was say like almost like self-segregated just because they were really really into what they were into and i think bill and ted do capture that a lot like i definitely knew bill and ted growing up in junior high school high school like i had i had them as classmates uh i don't think anyone wore the the the crop top that that uh bill wears uh in west texas that would have been oh man your favorite but you know the rest of it you know the the vest and the t-shirt or the

the flannel shirt tied around your waist and all that sort of thing like yeah that's that was very much of the time these just is a little more California when I saw these characters again I was like these kids should be selling me Nintendo power in an ad they are so 80s out and I got to say up front this movie needs a hymbo alert there are two massive hymboes in this movie so it's true a glass of water yeah um Alex winter has said that you know he lived in Venice beach back when it was just skaters and stoners and old hippies as opposed to the commercial development that it is now and like he based the look of Bill's costume on people that he knew, like the backward baseball cap with a mop of hair kind of puffing through the

snapback opening, that was just, you know, like I saw that guy in the street and I was like, that's part of Bill's look. So, yeah, there is a lot of authenticity here. And you know, we were saying earlier about the authenticity that the actors bring to the role. That was a big part of why both of them were cast in this role because they, approached it earnestly like they weren't making fun of bill and ted they were trying to be bill and ted and i think that is really you know again what it takes to make this movie work is kind of as you said bob like it's about stupid people but it doesn't treat them stupidly it

you know everyone around them is kind of exasperated by them but doesn't hate them like the their teacher you know he's going to fail them but it's not like a gleeful thing it's not like ha ha you know, I'm going to, I'm going to stick it to you kids. It's more like, you know, I want what's best for you kids, but you are not putting in any effort. And I don't have any choice but to fail you. Yeah, I got to say. So there's, yeah, it's not like a retributory thing. It's really, it kind of assumes like the best motivations for just about everyone except maybe where Missy is involved and where Ted's father is involved. I got to say this, this history teacher at the school has too much power. Like, these kids are doing a Ph.D. like, uh, defense, uh, thesis defense in front of, like, this deft comedy jam crowd. Yeah, what the hell? And I got to say, I was like, oh, just a hard-ass teacher. He really believes in this, in these kids.

He's an, I'm sure he's an okay guy. And then the Missy stuff comes in later. That's like, Sprinkling was like, he's a kid toucher on top of all this stuff. I didn't, uh, you're right. Because Missy's like, oh, tell him I said hi. And then at the end, she's, like, sitting next to him at the end, like, during the thing. I'm like, this guy sucks. That is a level of intimacy.

I was going to say it was super nice to let Bill and Ted do their presentation together. When everybody else has to do it solo, he's already giving them an easy out. It is one of those. This is highly unorthodox, but I'll allow it. Yeah, the original climax of the movie that they filmed was just Bill and Ted, like, sitting in the classroom giving a speech to their class of like 10 people. And the directors and writers were all like, yeah, this is. is not inspiring. This feels like just a dead fish ending. So

the studio actually let them re-film it with the more epic presentation, which is ridiculous, but it does, you know, it does kind of create a you can't have these kids traveling through time and smashing up a shopping mall with Gingas Khan and then end with

like a classroom report. It's got to be suitably epic. So that is a case. Actually, most of this movie is a case of throwing out common sense in order to make the movie, be more interesting and more fun. And so in, you know, in the spirit of things, I'll allow it. Yeah, we were, uh, we mentioned the missy stuff earlier and she is the, the second wife of, uh, Bill's father. I have to say it's a little icky, but it's also very true to life and that she

is a very, uh, Southern California second wife. And, uh, Henry and I, before all this happened, took a lot of trips to, uh, to, uh, to, uh, you know, record podcasts. We would see a lot of these older guys with their Southern California second wives. And I, we went to this like place for lunch once and it was like the gathering of the second wives like it was all them hanging out what they do during the day time every 54 year old man and his like 23 year old wife was there yeah i think she's supposed to be like 20 because she i think there there's a point where they mentioned that she was like two years ahead of bill and ted they said we were freshmen and she was a senior okay so three years ahead so she's she should be like 21 22 i'm guessing yeah yep so not great

but yes, that is very it's realistic Southern California experience and they're in love the character is not treated that well she's very much like a male gaze object not very intelligent therefore sex and ogling

and some edible jokes like ha ha she can't even make grilled cheese without burning at that kind of thing so yeah she's one of the movie's problems for sure her performance I thought was funny I did like the character but that's kind of unfortunate trope going on.

Yes, the actress is quite good. She was actually like 30 when this was film. Yeah. This was kind of the tail end of Hollywood casting grown-ass adults as teenagers. You don't really get that so much anymore, but it was kind of a tradition that was fading out by the end of the 80s. So it's not, yeah, it's not to impugn Amy Stock because she did a fine job,

but she was just given kind of a bum part. Yeah, just like, I mean bum. Runchy 80s style humor that you would get in this kind of thing. They could have gone worse on her compared to other, like, like, say, ski school or your other hits competitors at the time. My favorite joke in Bogus, one of my favorite jokes in Bogus Journey is when it's revealed that she is now married Ted's dad in between movies. That's such a good joke.

Oh, that guy's a sicko. He's a real freak. Yep. That's a top. What do you expect? That's like a beautiful line because it's just, it's a very funny joke that's also exposition. They just nail it, I think. Oh, yeah, something I don't think I would have gotten as a kid is just like,

The dad of Ted, Ted's father, is like psycho cop. He's wearing the NRA jacket. Like, he's supposed to be an imposing figure. And a very 80s thing is like, you're going to military school. Oh, yeah, yeah. That was never a threat in my household, but it was like a threat in a lot of movies and TV shows, like going to hell essentially, being sent away to hell. They're going to shave your head, take away everything. And military school in Alaska, that's even better.

What a great heightening. I'm going to be able to be. All right. So getting into the production and history of Bill and Ted, there's not too much to talk about. It's not one of those torture productions that took 20 years to happen. There was a little drama, a little business happening. But on the whole, you know, considering the scale of the movie and the budget they had to work with, there wasn't a lot of room for that. So it was written by Chris Matheson, who would go on to write a goofy movie, which I'm sure you guys have talked about on What a Cartoon. Oh, big time. Yeah. We love it. Yeah, and co-written by Ed Solomon, who had written Revenge of the Nerds 3, would write the Super Mario Brothers movie and would be one of the many, mini-script doctors on Brian Singer's X-Men. Oh, boy. So that's a pretty broad spread. Yeah, I guess quite a resume. The directors on the Mario movie went rogue and basically made their own movie, so we can't blame him too much, I guess.

It's still a fascinating atrocity, that movie. Yeah, they did shop the script around for a while, and they had trouble finding studio interest, but they finally landed it, and they got a director in Stephen Herrick who had directed Critters, and then would later direct the Mighty Ducks and the live action 101 Dalmatians. So a very family-friendly, sort of like, tepid comedy kind of director. What an interesting turn, because Critters is, you know, a high concept, low-budget sci-fi horror thing. And after this, he used this as his launching pad, like, oh, kids like Bill and Ted more than we thought they would. I can be a kid's director now. And he goes to Mighty Ducks and then he's just living in the Disney factory. Yep.

And that was back when the Disney factory was not the road to being a billionaire. It was kind of the struggle days for Disney, kind of the tail end of the struggle days, I guess. So, you know, they started making the movie and then the production company, De Laurentis. went bankrupt midway through production I think the film was mostly assembled by that point That's why there's a King Kong poster in it There's a 72 King Kong poster in it

Which is a Dino De Larentice classic Wow For some reason I thought like Was this going to be like a Christmas or summer of 88 movie Because the film says 1988 And it's February of 89 is the actual release date So I feel like they wanted to do it back to the future When it's like this movie is taking place in the year you're watching it

Yeah well and it you know then you look ahead to the future and it's 2688. So exactly, what is that? 700 years later. So yes, it was clearly meant to be an 88 release. But De Laurentius went bankrupt. And so they had to shop it around and find another studio to pick up production. And all the studios were like, this is stupid.

There's no way. But it was ultimately saved when they did test screenings with teenagers. And the teenagers loved it. They were like, this is so good. This is crazy. It's hilarious. finally a studio said, okay, that's fine. And they reissued, or they picked it up, finished it up,

reshot the ending to do the big kind of on-stage presentation where Bill and Ted somehow managed to have like vera lights and like dry ice and that. I don't even know. But anyway, yeah. So that is pretty much the whole drama behind the production. And I guess the other part of the drama is that it's a 90-minute movie, which is like you never see 90-minute movies these days.

It's so beautifully trim. It's just like it's on point and there's nothing wasted. It was originally a two and a half hour movie with like musical numbers and stuff. And they filmed all this and God, I just can't imagine how terrible that would have been. It would be that today, I think, or at least two hours. Yeah, I love like sitting down and turning out. It's like, oh, it's a 90 minutes with credits. Signed me up.

No bathroom break in this movie. Nope. It's, yeah, it was like half an Avengers end game and thank God bless it. So it was just enough to make the jokes, show the funny stuff, have the ball rampage, give everyone the happy ending, and let George Carlin say peace out. And honestly, it feels like it feels like they could trim fat from what is there anyway, too. Yeah. A little bit, but yeah, I think it's good as it is. I wouldn't want it any longer, though.

Was there like 20 more minutes of Napoleon, like, in our world goofing around? Probably. That's my favorite. I would like it if the whole movie had been that. I was delighted when that happened. Oh, yeah, the water slides. The scene in the water park where the movie just stops completely. So you get five-minute montage of him going on water slides.

Oh, man, that made me want to go on a water slide so bad. And I was telling Henry when I got here to record, like, this is two movies. This is like the time traveling adventure and the what-if ex-person was in modern times movie. Like, both are interesting, but it is like a whiplash when it's like, Bill and Ted are doing this, but now Napoleon is eating ice cream. the original script treatment that was not Napoleon that was Hitler

and at some point they realized you know actually maybe let's not do that and I think Napoleon is actually funnier than most people would be honestly but definitely funnier than Hitler yeah I think that's so like one of my issues with this movie is the time travel

logic and like Riff is like just go off on your own I won't supervise you even though you almost get killed it's like well unlike back to the future it's not like don't interact with anything don't interact with yourself just be you know leave uh take only pictures leave only footprints that's the future travel law in this one it's just like no just steal whoever you want they should land this telephone booth on hitler and then get the hell out right yeah which is also outside of scope they're they're just writing a book report they're not killing you know saving history but think

of all these germs they're giving exposing to these historical figures that aren't aren't ready for them they're all going to die as soon as they get back to their original timelines Abe Lincoln after being super spreaders Yeah Or how could Beethoven Go back to writing any symphonies After what he's seen

I mean Beethoven was deaf So how could he even hear Like an electronic drum machine There's no like Percussive force to it Yeah This is not a movie

You're supposed to think about too hard Stuff happens And it's just for comedic effect And just to make you laugh The time travel Is what is described As wibbly wobbly Like there is this

absolute San Demas time clock that ticks down throughout the story and Bill and Ted must complete their book report according to the absolute rule of San Demas time, except they go to San Demas outside of that absolute time to meet themselves like they're the selves that were about to embark on the journey into the past. So clearly they can travel to San Demas outside of the absolute time that Rufus dictates. And, you know, a lot of time travel is the kind of the involiddle rule is don't meet yourself because it'll cause the end of the universe. And they just throw that right out the window here.

Causality is just like nonsense here because basically this entire movie is motivated by the utopian society that Bill and Ted create being concerned that Bill and Ted aren't going to pass their history exam in order to create the utopian society. but it doesn't look like there was anything that caused them not to pass the history test. They were just not going to pass it. So logically, there's no reason that Bill and Ted should have created a perfect society. So it's a causality loop that creates itself just out of nothing. So, yeah, if you actually stop and think about how time travel works and the rules of time and so forth,

it's a giant mess and makes no sense. But you're really not supposed to think about that. You're supposed to approach time travel with the same mindset as Bill and Ted, which is kind of like wide-eyed wonder and be like, whoa, that's cool. And that's about as much as you're really supposed to think about it. It's Futurama. It's paradox three time travel. Don't worry about it.

Bogus journey at least gets it right of like, you know, you mean an evil time traveler to go back in time to disrupt the timeline. And that's why you need to fix it for Bill and Ted. Instead, for no explained reason, Bill, George Cameron, one's like, oh, they are about to fail history, so I have to go back in time and help them. And also that the Bill and Ted's life, they seem to treat it as only one timeline. They don't change their past.

They're always interacting with their future selves and change things. But then other times, they do create alternate timelines. Yeah, honestly, we talked about how they should use this thing to assassinate Hitler. Part of their mission should be to pick up Eddie Vedder and drop them off in the Stone Age because grunge is going to destroy their hair metal future. They don't see grunge coming. These two movies don't understand grunge is on the way. It's crazy.

The next year after Bogus Journey, it's just over. Like, hair metal, heavy metal, done. Yeah, but dinosaurs didn't know about the meteor either. So, of course, dinosaurs didn't have the three most important people from the future sending George Carlin back to tell them about the future. But, you know, again, I don't think you're supposed to think too hard about any of this. The real utopian future is SoundCloud rapper. I mean, yeah, I mean, the level this movie works on best is like an S&L sketch, basically. You know, I think it's actually a very impressive movie considering the budget it was written on.

It's always kind of weird to think back about how cheaply movies used to be made. This had a budget of somewhere between 6 and 10 million, which I cannot imagine a movie being like a, you know, a studio. production for theatrical release that isn't like an art film being produced for you know even adjusted for inflation like 15 to 20 million dollars that's just uh you just don't see movies created that cheaply and part of it is that the cast didn't take home a huge amount of money from it uh i know alex winter has talked in some of the oral histories about how weird it was to go to the grocery store and see bill and ted breakfast cereal and be like oh that's me but he's just like living in a crappy apartment in Venice Beach because, you know, he got his paycheck for

the movie and it wasn't a huge amount. And then he went on to voice in the cartoon and that sort of thing. So it's definitely a product of its time in a lot of ways. And there are some bad ways in which it's a product of its time. We talked about Missy, but women in general are just kind of eye candy here, like the medieval babes that Bill and Ted end up mirroring, just kind of are there to be rescued from marriage so that then Bill and can marry them, which they're like the prizes that they get at the end. Oh, you did your book report. Here's some wives. Do they speak at all in the movie? They do speak, yes. Okay. Very little at the end. Yeah, they are like, they're trading one forced marriage for another

forced marriage. But yeah, like going into this, knowing the budget, it's used very effectively, but you can definitely tell, like, they don't actually do a lot of time travel on this movie. Most of the movie is in Southern California in 1988. And also when they do time travel, it's always like on location or outside. And there's not a lot of extras. So you can definitely tell. There's a lot of stock footage when they go to Austria. And you see Napoleon's war happening. And it's clearly from some movie filmed in the 60s.

Oh, yeah. Definitely. Yeah. I didn't know that. And I was amazed. I was like, how have they done this? This is incredible. Yeah.

It's beautiful, sumptuous battle footage. And then it's like, oh, of course. Yeah, it's in the credits. They think Paramount Pictures for the use of the film, War and Peace. Okay. There you go. You can tell, like, the film stock is different when they're showing that stuff. I'm like, what's going on here?

It really shows up in HD for sure. But, you know, even when they filmed Napoleon at Waterloo, they couldn't shut down the water park to film there because they didn't have the budget for it. So, like, all the people close up that you see Napoleon interacting with, those are extras. But then everyone in the background is just someone who was there to swim at the water park that day. So they got to be movie stars in the background just because of where they, you know, when they decided to take their water park vacation. So I was talking about the treatment of women. I will say that I like Joan of Arc in this. Joan of Arc is played by Jane Weidland of the Go-Go's.

So kind of keeping that musical motif, but I really, I really feel like they'd kind of treat her as the medieval warrior equivalent of Bill and Ted. Like she is this kind of wayfish young woman in chain mail. She's not treated, you know, sex to or anything like that, unlike most of the other women in the movie, she's, she's clearly a warrior. But she's also sort of wide-eyed and filled with wonder and then decides that aerobics can be used for violence. So that's a, I don't know, like I wish she had a bigger part in more dialogue. She's kind of cool. Yeah, you know, she doesn't seem like the stodgy, hyper-Catholic girl that history would tell you. Though they didn't get any comedy out of any of these characters finding out what their ends are,

like Joan of Arc finding out she's going to be burned alive or a shot in the head in Abraham Lincoln's case. Try to look surprised. Yeah, you think maybe Lincoln would be like, well, I guess that's the last time I go to the theater. yeah again there's not a lot of thought given into this and you know even even socrates like they don't really know what he's saying they're kind of guessing he's just like gesturing and they're like okay so this is what the philosopher dude is telling us but I do I really like the bromance between Billy the Kid and Socrates it's so unlikely and just so

random but they're like the best buddies in here besides Bill and Ted it's really I like I would I would watch a movie about Bill the Kid and And Socrates. Yeah, I was thinking they cut back to the future three off at the past by making their old West thing first. That's the first place they go to. And this movie came up before two and three. So it filled the gap right before those movies. I think the relationship between the sort of historical figures is kind of emblematic of the whole film because they basically just kind of go, okay, sure.

And they get in the time machine. Like, if you think about the time travel logic, it's like, no, don't worry about it. Just get in the time machine. It's fine. Just don't sweat it. My favorite gag is in the background where Socrates is just throwing a foos ball back and forth with Billy the kid as the characters are just talking about the babes they're seeing. Oh, you know, Stuart, speaking of the time machine, I think that's one of the better gags in here. Originally, they wanted the time machine to be a van.

They were going to drive around their time traveling van. But at some point, someone realized, like, whoa, that's way too back to the future. Yeah. So instead they went with a Dr. Hu riff. but it's such an American version of Doctor Who. It's like instead of being this iconic, historic police box that is like kind of mysterious and ethereal and out of time and it's bigger on the inside, it's just a phone booth. It's just like this cheap, crappy bell telephone booth. And they actually just punch in phone numbers in order to travel to different coordinates in time.

And everyone barely fits in it by the end. Everyone's all crammed in and going off the rails. It's like such a budget crappy rendition of like the Doctor Who concept. It's so American. What shame is I sat through both movies and that never once occurred to me. And I love Doctor Who. I didn't even think about it. It's a very striking image of them on the,

I can see the movie poster in my head. It's like a really cool enigmatic image. But I was also thinking like why a phone booth? It does not explain in the movie. There's no like phone booth that saves them. I mean, with Doc Brown, he's a weird kook and the Doloreans are presumably like on the cheap or whatever at a point in history so that's why he has one but like

the phone booth thing never really made sense outside of it being a cool idea well this is the complete opposite of Back to the Future in that regard because when we did the Back to the Future podcast we noted every time we're like oh they actually did explain that at least like a one off line and character says oh why did I do that because of this because of this

like in this movie no explanation like it they just barrel through and that's part of the joke yep and yeah so the joke is just you know it's another media reference basically like this whole movie they're dropping references to not only Star Wars

but to all kinds of musicians like Bill and Ted want to form a band but they realize they're terrible musicians with no talent so they're like how do we get Eddie Van Halen into our group and the the three most important people in history in San Demas 2688 were originally actually supposed to be ZeeZ Top

I think it's better the way it ended up being they couldn't afford Zizi Top so instead you get like actual representation and diversity within the important people instead of like three white guys with beards. Zizi Top had been acquired by the Back to the Future movies. Yeah, yeah. They're a big part of part three.

They had a non-compete clause. You got to explain their presence in part three to kids. No one's going to get the spinning guitars in that movie. I think Clarence Clemens is the only black person who has a other, him and the teacher, the only black people who have lines in the movie. That is Clarence Clemens. Yes. Yeah, there's not a lot of diversity in this.

And, you know, that's in addition to the, the issues with representation of women. There's also punch lines, homophobic slurs, not great. It is very accurate

to the way teenagers like that talked in 1989, but that doesn't mean it's something that you necessarily want to see in 2020. I'd rather,

for all the times that we edit movies and make them worse, I think editing that out would make it better. But I also think that it's more acceptable than it could be

because it is a joke on the characters. In the next movie, they call another character the F-sler. Granted, he is the devil. I understand that, but you don't need to go that low. But in this movie, it's just like, it's a joke about two men who are not comfortable with their masculinity to express, like, emotion or grief about each other.

That slur is so jarring. I found it so jarring because the whole of the rest of the movie is just wholesome. I agree with you that is more that the joke is more on them. And then the strangest thing is, as you say, in bogus journey, they use it several more times. Yeah, and much worse, I don't know. Yeah. Oh, it's used more than, I couldn't remember. It's like, oh, that's just the thing Bill and Ted say.

The evil shot it over the cliff when they throw Bill and Ted off the cliff. Sorry for the spoilers, everyone. Oh, man. I guess they are evil, right? Yeah, they are evil. Yeah, I had actually forgotten about that slur. And I was really, really enjoying the staircase gag, like where Ted falls down the stairs in a suit of armor, and then the suit of armor gets stabbed as he's laying there at the foot of the stairs.

But, you know, he didn't actually get stabbed because he fell out of the suit of armor as it with tumbling down the stairs. It's so dumb. Totally impossible. It's like, you're half an hour in the movie and you're like, oh, my God, they killed one of the main characters. Is Bill going to travel back in time to save Ted? No, Ted just fell out of the armor.

It's just stupid. It's unbelievably stupid and it has me laughing. And then it ends like the final punchline is that slur. And I'm like, ah, you spoiled it. Come on. The joke would work the same if they even just said, oh, you're so gay. Like, even that will work. They don't have to say.

straight up a slur to each other but you just did a kind of gay panic reaction without the word honestly that would be i mean i say better with you know inverted commas fellas is it gay to have a lightsaber fight in suits of armor in the middle ages oh very yes that's a kink now you go to clubs and you pay to do that it also just feels weird to see keanu reeves do that because he is such like he's still so wholesome to me. He's almost every person at his level of fame from my childhood has diminished in my eyes. Like they've all done things. I'm like, ew, why'd you do that?

Mostly men, but Keanu has stayed good and pure and I hope he, I hope it always stays that way. I did kind of, like every time you see photos of him with his arms around fans, it's always the hoverhand. Hoverhands. You're a dude. You're a good guy. Yeah, I mean, I did roll my eyes a bit at the, you are, Amazing, you are beautiful, a cyberpunk thing at E3, but I will say at least he didn't just show up and shoot gum on stage like Paul McCartney. Yes.

That still bothers me. He sort of came close when he started Knock Knock, but I forgive him for that, ultimately. Eh, you know. Another great prop culture reference is the casting of George Carlin, moving back to positive things as opposed to negative things. They kind of kicked around ideas for the narrator, the role of Rufus for quite a while. They thought about Sean Connery, but then they were like, oh, that would have been too much. what was it? Which movie was he in? The time travel movie that Sean Conner

Is that Highlander? Well, he's not exactly Time Traveler in that, but I mean he's in a mortal, yeah. No, it was, it has the word time in it. It's like Time Bandits, Time After Time. Oh, he's in Time Bandits, but he's Okay, he's one of the guys the kid visits. He's like Agamemnon, I think.

Yeah, they said that would have been too on the nose. And I think also they couldn't afford it. So at the very last minute, they ended up casting George Carlin. And everyone has really great things to say about him. too apparently he was just like a really nice professional guy even though his kind of stage persona was a little bit of cervic and condescending like in person he was very professional uh whenever he improvised he always like cleared it with the director like is this okay as opposed to just stepping on other people's lines and and spoiling the script uh everyone just said good things about him and his dead pan delivery is really good he's got this kind of um good humor about him he's he presents this role very straight And you can tell he thinks the whole thing is kind of ridiculous. Like, I'm going to save the universe by helping these kids who can't even pass their school classes and have no idea how to play guitar.

But, you know, I'm here to help them. I'm their bro. It's all good. I'm a little bit surprised by how kind of reserved he is because it was kind of flied up to me his performance before I watched the movie. Oh, yeah, he's in it. He's great. His Rufus. It wouldn't be the same without Rufus.

And he just kind of seemed to sort of deliver exposition. I mean, he delivered it very well. but I was expecting like some schick and some jokes from him In my memory I thought I thought he was in more of the movie Me too Yeah I in my memory I was like yeah

And they hang out with Rufus the whole time And he shows him instead he's like I gotta go I can only be in like four scenes of this movie Sorry guys I wonder how weird it was for our parents For us to be introduced to George Carlin Through these family friendly things

Like I saw him in these two movies And when I was homesick I would see him on a shining time station as Mr. Conductor introing Thomas to tank engine stop motion things or not really stop motion but whatever and then like on the

the George Carlin sitcom that was very short lived and then like when I was a teenager I got into his stand-up well he had his big comeback like 80s 80s Carlin is kind of lame

compared to 70s and 90s Carlin but yeah we didn't have Ringo Star we had George Carlin instead for those Thomas scenes yeah but I think his his role here. I think he

does a good job of it because his, you know, he has, he had a reputation beyond this movie. So he was you know, kind of a known character. His persona was to be like kind of the wise guy a little smarter than everyone else. That was a stage act. And

you know, he comes in and he just lends the whole thing a little credibility. Like, oh, well, if George Carlin is behind these idiots, there must be something to them. Yeah, he's the first. I think, I think it works. And like I said, there is this kind of element of good humor to him. He's clearly like the smartest man in the room.

You know, when he does his guitar solo at the end, you know, he doesn't show off. But then when they ask him to, he's like, oh, well, yeah, look, I can, I can shred like the best of them. Yeah, so as long as you don't see his face in the same shots. Yeah, I mean, he is, he is the first person we see in the movie after that extensive ring pop docking scene in the beginning. But he is like, he is the guy that, like, kind of introduces you to the movie and talks to the camera and stuff like that.

So, yeah. If they cast somebody with that with no comedy background, it wouldn't lend his intelligence to it. If you saw Sean Connery, it intros the film differently. To have a smart comedian introduce your comedy movie, it does feel different.

Yeah, it lends it some valuable credibility. You mentioned the ring pop docking sequence at the beginning. And I feel like the whole San Dimas 2866 is very much another case of the sort of media-inspired pastiche nature of this film. Like the whole,

whole future scene concept really feels like the planet Krypton scenes and the Superman movies. I don't know if that's deliberate, but it feels like it is. It feels like as with so many things, they look back to Star Wars and Doctor Who and, you know,

Van Halen videos and that sort of thing. And they also were like, well, what's futuristic? Oh, yeah, it's Marlon Brando wearing black in a cave of crystals talking to his son. So yeah, it's just another case of like there's some real media savvy about this

and it's very rarely super overt I mean some of it is but not all of it it just feels like you know this film was made by people who were media junkies and just kind of processed and repurposed everything they saw and it just feels really really well suited

to who Bill and Ted are also I could not imagine this film with anybody but Keanu Reeves in it like it's it doesn't work like I see in the notes it says Pauli Shore almost had the role and like that film is 800 times worse

I don't think they almost gave the role to Polyshore they were like looking at possible candidates but from all accounts as soon as they auditioned Keanu they were like this guy this is it this is this is Ted this is Ted Theodore Logan right here and then it was just a matter

of finding someone that he had good chemistry with to cast his bill and they went through a bunch of auditions and narrowed it down to like 24 people and Keanu the actor actually got on really well with Alex Winter the actor like they both showed up to the auditions on motorcycles and we're talking about how much they love playing bass guitar and stuff and just kind of hit it off and you know the studio was like all right these guys like each other they're friends let's go for it I did enjoy watching their stoner surfer dude mannerisms because I don't see them anymore in media but like

they do a unique thing that's also on the poster like they put their hand over their heart and like extend a hand like almost like a proclamatory manner like what is that like was that something that was happening i i just don't know what that manner is even like me like i'm speaking from my heart or whatever but just like whoever did that and how did they figure out that schick was that in the script i think that was something they made up like that's not something that you really saw people do i don't know i didn't live in sand demis in 1988 so i couldn't really say but yeah i think that was something they invented like they kind of have created this floral

approach to stoner language you especially see it in the medieval era where they are you know kind of trying to be what they think medieval is and you know of course it has nothing to do with actual language that was spoken in England in the 16th century

or whatever but 15th century but yeah like it's just you know one of the the affectations that the characters have that makes them so endearing. That just big open mouth smile that Keanu has. You're just like, what a nice guy. You just want to hug him. And he's, I feel bad that we spent the 90s just making fun of his woe persona the entire time when it's like that's likable. Maybe a little

miscast in Dracula, but still that's a fun movie. Sure. Sure. This movie really, really haunted Keanu for a long time, I think, because his natural diction and just the way he talks has this kind of breathiness to it. And you just can't hear that without thinking of Ted Theodore Logan. And he just, you know, was like the goofier version of himself for this movie. But there was enough of him in it that it just kind of trailed behind him. And yeah, it's hard to swallow him as Jonathan Harker. But, you know, he tried to be in other dramas. And it's, it is really hard to separate him from Ted Theodore Logan, at least until he gets, you know, he got older. And I think the Matrix was a big help for him to kind of break away from that.

Hugely, yeah. He didn't have that like, I know Kung Fu kind of like goofiness, but he also tries to be dramatic action hero and the film takes him seriously. And I think that that really counts for a lot. Well, you know, the production of Bogus Journey was actually delayed because he was making my own private Idaho, which was his Oscar attempt and him being in a Gus fans gay cowboy movie, well, gay homeless kid movie, was a big change for him. I actually did not know that.

Oh, yeah. It's a great movie. It's because it was made in the early 90s, they don't even, they say like, I'm not even gay. I don't like labels, man, but it's him. And also, I mean, River Phoenix, like it's, there's a region everybody thought, we're so sad that his career ended so early because he's so good in that movie. and this is a movie where they dub in a lot of fart sounds

Oh man Cartooning noises Like watching this again I realized You know the sound editors And the foldy guy Did not trust the audience To get the jokes

Yeah like when they go to the old west The first thing you see is a man in an outhouse Like an above shot of him Just like shitting furiously And I was like This man is sick I've never heard these noises Coming out of a human before

Yeah like In nerds are down there in the hole Also a major plot whole I find with this movie is that I have to think Napoleon spoke English. I think he knew how to speak English and he's, but he just speaks French and five words

of French the entire film really just repeated over and over again. Maybe he's just really indignant and refuses to like humor them. A rude Frenchman? I would never hear of such a thing. Although also I in my high school,

we didn't really learn European history at all. Same year. Yeah, so my history teacher would never even ask me about Napoleon or Freud or Socrates. Like, I actually, in sociology class, like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, that stuff did all come up. But like, why one teacher I had was super into Henry the 8th in that era, but that was the only, I think she took it upon herself to teach us that. I think we pretty much barely touched on non-American history. in my classes anyway. I'm quite ashamed of this,

but watching the movie, when Joan of Arc turns up, there's only a very brief sort of montage shot when they kind of recruit her. And the only reason I knew who it was is because of clone high. I was just hearing the voices. Like, you know,

God's power is in the mix. It's just clone high. It's her. All right. So we probably ought to wrap up the discussion of the film so we can talk about the games. Oh, but just kind of,

yeah, sorry, unfortunately, we got to go there. to kind of bring this to a close, is there one element of the movie that you love above all others? Like, is there one thing that you think is just great? Yeah, I will say that I want to jump in here first because I have one thing I really like about this movie, and I wish they would have played more with it, is the time travel rules. We only see it in the beginning when they meet themselves and at the end where it's just like, it's basically like a screenwriting game genie where it's just like, oh, there's conflict.

What if they solve the conflict when the movie was over? Yeah. And it just is all solved for them immediately. So I did like stuff like that, even though it was a big cheat, and I wish they would have done more like time travel logic jokes. But one thing I also wanted to add is that like Bill and Ted, despite the franchise kind of ending in 1991, it lived on for about 25 more years at Universal Studios with the Bill and Ted Halloween Horror Nights. Yeah. They had a live show every year. Please check out the podcast, The Ride podcast about it.

So this show was eventually shut down for homophobic and racist jokes. but it was a very bawdy live show in which Bill and Ted would play out these stories in which they would also steal other characters from other franchise they didn't know and so like one year would be like Bill and Ted team up with Shrek to fight Mr. Burns and Dr. Evil and it would get way crazier than that

so Bill and Ted... And this was at an official Universal Studios thing this wasn't like somebody's side project or whatever. Exactly. So like despite the movies ending in 1991 for like 25 years more after that There were these yearly Halloween live shows at this theme park where the characters remained who they were. And, yeah, I'll back up, Bob, on the time travel comedy is my favorite stuff in it. And I wish it wasn't mainly in the last 20 minutes of them just going, like, well, we have the keys because we told ourselves to put the keys there.

And that's where they are. So great. But I also did really, I really like the joke where, Missy gives them lunch in Alex's bedroom, and then she makes eyes with Alex's dad, and Alex's dad kicks him out of his own bedroom to have sex with Missy on his son's bed. Like, that's just so screwed up. He's a real sicko, this guy. It's such a messed up joke that I had to laugh at it.

I love the follow up, and they're walking down the stairs, and it's just yelling, shut up, Ted. It's so, it's so great. Yeah, I think to the, every joke with Sigmund Freud holding a phallic objects made me laugh too. I had a good, the corn dog. The corn dog, that was the best. Sucking on the vacuum cleaner? Oh, yeah. I didn't even notice that.

I noticed it for the first time watching it the other day. I was like, whoa, that's, that's kind of raunchy. How about that? What about you, Stu? I just love the whole subplot with Napoleon because in a movie that's this short, this, this kind of tight. It's perfect. It's so funny. Him at the bowling alley here at the ice cream store or the ice cream parlor or whatever you want to call it. And even just best of all, I've already mentioned it, but the water

park scene, because they really do just put the movie on pause so you can frolic with Napoleon just enthusiastically going down water slides. And I find that so gloriously confident in their own silly movie. I think it's quite charming. Not just, not just frolicing, but frolicing in his 18th century underwear. Yeah. And, you know, like, lecturing children in French. It's just, it's just so goofy, and it's just marvelous.

I love it. I like that they used up their PG ratings entire allocation of the word shit, just on that one bowling joke. Like, and it's not even, he's not even saying it. It's the subtitles as he's shouting, Mert, Mert, Mert, Mert, because he messed up the bowling. And they just, like, they use up all, all the S-words they can get out of a PG rating. They got 12.

Yep. Another really great visual gag, I only noticed this time that made me laugh so much, was when they confront Ted's younger brother about where, how you lost Napoleon, they are talking to him through a chain link fence. Then when the camera pulls out to a wider shot, you see that there's open space right next to the chain link fence. There is no reason for them to talk through the chain link fence for it and they make sure you know that, but they're like, no, you need to see that these. stupid idiots it's almost like a police squad level joke yeah so in thinking about it there's no one part of this movie that i think necessarily stands out above any other there's there's lots of great moments but i think what what i enjoy most about it is its legacy and just kind of what it represented for satire and pop culture referentialism in movies because before this i don't

really think you had pop culture references and jokes the way you see here Here, you had, you know, like Mel Brooks movies where he basically set out to say, in this movie, I'm making fun of Hammer Films. In this movie, I'm making fun of Star Wars. And, you know, I'm making fun of the Western. And that is what it was. Whereas here it was, it was just like you grew up absorbing a media diet of all these things and we're referencing them sort of easily and candidly and sometimes in a very funny way. And that is, that's media now. Like, that is like every Seth McFarlane show, every Marvel movie, except I think it's more earnest and natural here and doesn't feel so much like a, you know, we've got to go through the checklist of references or in the case of, you know, Seth McFarland, just like, well, I don't have any jokes. So here's the Kool-Aid man.

I feel like it works really well here and was very influential in that regard. And going back, I can definitely, you know, you know, kind of put this in the context of its time and say, I get why this had such a big impact because even though it was kind of building on the stoner movie legacy of the 70s and 80s and doing, you know, like the time travel shenanigans that you saw a lot of in the 80s with, you know, Back to the Future and Time Bandits and so on and so forth, it still, it was just different and it felt fresh and unique. And, you know, it treated these really dumb characters with respect. Maybe more respect than they really deserved, but it just felt like it didn't talk down to its audience, aside from the fully.

Well, and the ending is really Back to the Future Times 4 because at the end of Back to the Future, it's like, oh, I got my cool truck. Awesome. Cool truck. At the end of this, it's the George Carlin not only hands them wives, but also awesome guitars. He's like, you know what, here, four gifts. Here you go. Yep. So, anyway, that's Bill and Ted's excellent adventure. Now I guess we need to talk about the not-so-excellent video games. Although, first we have to talk about the NES game, which I saw the logo LJN on these games, and

LJN is actually a message from myself in the future to my younger self. It means little Jeremy, no. That's good. So I avoided these. But Bob, it sounds like you played a lot of the NES game which was by Rock Science games

who I'd never heard of otherwise. Yeah, Rocket Science Games made this, and it does feel like it was supposed to be, or they were thinking of designing more of a PC game of the time, because I will say for this game, it's better than the others in that it has a really interesting concept and it's almost like an open world NES game

but it is too ambitious for the platform and it is very confusing if you are an eight-year-old trying to play it but I will give it credit for being ambitious and not being like what if Donkey Kong was bad the Game Boy game so it has that going for it I was watching a let's play of it I was like this game is huge it has like dialogue there's an inventory there's all this stuff going on

but I think again it is too much for that platform and for that controller to be like an intelligible game so I will give them credit they were a good developer who made interesting things but it was a little too much for the time and all these games are adventure games but they came out for bogus journey

which is also strange at least taking such a wide swing with an LJN title is admirable because LJN doesn't expect much they didn't expect much of anything other than a shipable game on a date yeah like back to the future That's a thousand times, like, let's say a million times worse than this, that NES game.

Yeah, the Bill and Ted NES game, to me it feels like it is a descendant of the, like, the British microcomputer isometric platformers, games like night lore and that sort of thing, where it's not so much focused around the platforming elements, but just kind of like the exploration, navigating spaces, trying to collect items. I mean, basically, from what I can tell what you're doing in this game is traveling around, talking to people, trying to find specific items that you take to the historic figures that you go to visit in the time machine. And then once you give them that thing, then they're like, okay, cool, I'll join your band. Let's party and they get in the time machine with you. I don't know. Stuart, being from the UK, do you think this is fair, or am I painting too broad much? I've not spent too much time with it, but it does kind of come off as a kind of a microcomputer game to me.

Yeah. Though for some reason I had it in mind that it was a point in click adventure, but that turned out to be Wayne's World. That is a Wayne's World game. But no, I've not spent a lot of time with it, but yeah, it's the, there's the isometric view and the way, the kind of awkward movement and the fact that everyone's just kind of milling around all these maps that are just way too big for what you need to do. It's, it seems ambitious, but like, that's not always necessarily good. Actually, I have a tiny anecdote about this game, and I just remembered it when I was doing research. This happened in my life, and it gave my mom a signal to the kind of person I would become. When I readed this game, and I was like, oh, man, this game is so.

big and complicated and I was just like trying to figure it out playing it all day and like a friend came over to play and I was basically to my mom like sent him away and I was lightly scolded for wanting to play a Nintendo game over hanging out with a friend but that never happened after that I think my mom realized like no this is what he wants just just let him play the damn game it'll be his it'll be his job someday exactly that anti-social future that I'm making hot money off of right now the hottest money I think most Most people know Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure for NES through Angry Video Game Nerd, which, you know, is probably a funny but not exactly fair take on the game. I do feel like it is the kind of game that if I had played back in 1991, I would have been like, oh, this is interesting.

I'm going to beat this. I'm going to figure it out. But definitely one that's hard to go back to. Though I like the visual style, like the combination of kind of detailed sprites and flat, like big spaces of flat colors. It's really weird that you can't move at non-diagnals, though. You can only, it's isometric. You can only move at diagonals. You can't move in the cardinal directions,

which would make this game, I think, a lot more playable. If you could actually, like, walk diagonal to the actual orientation of the back. That's very Z-X spectrum. To me, I would just be like, okay, you can't go up or down. Okay, let's do this. Let's go. I don't want to be too cruel to your country's games, Stuart. No, no, no, by all means, they're awful, please.

But I would guess AVGN said about it, like, excellent adventure. I had more excellent adventures having to. I read out of my ass and my grandma's birthday. What the fuck is it? That's a direct quote. It's on the box. And like AVGN, they also went back to the past, but to do different stuff. All right, so that is the NES game.

On the other hand, you have the Game Boy game, which prior to researching for this episode, I assumed was basically just like a bad either conversion of the NES game, or a really bad like scrolling action game kind of in the lines of the back to the future games but that's not what it is at all it totally caught me off guard and Stuart you're a big fan of this game I am a big fan of this game

I have brain problems about it It doesn't look bad though Like you know from what I played of it It's it's kind of good It's weird to my personal tastes I really like this And it's exactly what I want from a Game Boy game which is a super simple game

which is still kind of compelling and tricky. And what this basically is, Bob compared it to Donkey Kong. And I can see that comparison, but to me, it's very much like manic minor. It's the same exact game almost, which is an old classic spectrum game, where you jump around, collect items on single screen levels, and then a door appears and you leave. It's basically the same exact game. The difference is, unlike the spectrum game, this is actually controllable.

when you jump you can move in midair that sort of thing it's very smooth it plays very well I mean it is literally Manic Minor even has the same exact style of fall away platforms and I don't know how this happened if it's a coincidence it's a really surprising one I just find it hard to believe someone at LGM was like or Beam software whoever made this was just like hey this 1984 spectrum game seems pretty good let's let's copy that exactly yeah basically you get your singles I think they're all single screens I'm not sure if they get more complex later but I can't remember if I scrubbed through a let's play like a complete long play of the game

and it never gets more comp well it never scrolls the levels get very complex there's a lot of like really complex stuff happening what is what it is really is you've got your single screen with multiple platforms or whatever and you've got a number of items that are basically just I think they're I'm not sure if they change or if they're always these sort of just glowing dots but basically what you're going to do is get all the items and then the exit appears you go to the exit and that is literally it

but it has these minimal little graphics like sort of Super Mario Land or the Batman game, the Sunsoft Batman game on the Game Boy, which they just don't blur, so the game is incredibly playable and it plays really smoothly and it probably is the best LGN game which

I know isn't saying much. For me, I would honestly put it as top 10. I think it's a really, really fun handheld game, but LGM did publish Jaws on Friday the 13th, so they occasionally got it right. I do like that George game. I think that is a lot of fun

but now that this one I think is a pretty great little handheld title. It's difficult to explain why but for me it just works. It has that kind of pick up and play I think it has passwords as well so you don't have to start from scratch every time. It has a very tortured title though. The official title of the game

is Bill and Ted's excellent Game Boy Adventure Colin a bogus journey. Wow. So getting both movies in there. Yeah, torture. Yeah. All of these movies have elements of bogus journey in them, some more than others, but they all are called excellent adventure to some degree. So it's very confusing, but they mostly came out in 91. So they would have been tie-ins to Bogus Journey. No, I would assume that the, you know, the filmmakers in 88, they weren't

having the meetings with LJN or any other toy company to make any games for anything. Only by the time Bogus Journey came out. They're like, oh, we could sell these to kids. Like, this is something for children. So that's when the wheel started turning. on actual video games. Yeah, so the Game Boy game is not very much an adaptation of the movies in the sense of like there's no real tie to the movies besides the fact that you have like Bill and Ted Sprites and the Sprites you have to avoid, the bad guys,

are like multiple Abraham Lincoln's and multiple Helen of Troyes. And, you know, eventually you go into the prehistory and you are evading pterodactals and then you end up in haunted houses in hell and then heaven. So, yeah, it kind of plays it fast and loose. You have to avoid angels and stuff. I guess the angels are bad angels, like Metatron or something. It's one of those classic tie-ins that doesn't really bear any relation to the license,

except in the most, like, desperate kind of ways. And in a way that kind of helps it, I think, not having to queue closely to the movie. Yeah, the Game Boy version is much, much better than the Link's game, which is completely different. It was developed apparently internally at Atari. There's not a lot of information on a lot of links games out there. And I would describe this game as aggressively mediocre. It's an adventure game, kind of like the NES game,

but instead of being that isometric view, it's top-down only. And the graphical style, I have to describe as naive art because it's like really kind of primitive and it does a lot of things in terms of like how it handles sprites that you just don't see. Like, you know, it's top down. So when your characters are facing down,

they're kind of just like drawn there as, you know, standing there facing the camera. Like, you know, the legend of Zelda, where Link is, you know, you see like a full body shot of him as he's standing facing the camera. And if you point up, you turn up, then you see the characters back. But when you turn them sideways to walk left or right, instead of seeing a side profile of them, it's their face on sprite from when they're standing, facing down, turned 90 degrees on its side. And it's really weird.

And I get it. Like, Link's claim to fame was that sprite rotation was an easy thing. So they probably saved themselves a lot of trouble by not drawing side-facing sprites. They were just, oh, we can just flip this on the side. But it's really awkward and strange and just makes for one of the most subtly unpleasant game experiences I've had in a while. It looks like he's limboing whenever he walks left or right. Right, these characters, like, oh, he just decided to limbo for this part. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, so this is a game where you travel to different eras. In a lot of these games, you use the phone, telephone interface to dial to different eras. You're collecting stuff. Mainly you're trying to collect musical instruments and musical notes. There's like 144 musical notes you have to collect. You have to travel through all these eras and collect them. There's a lot of platforming and, like, jumping over, disappearing blocks and things like that. There's no combat.

you have to avoid everything from like bats to lions in the Roman Coliseum where you park the phone booth to haunted furniture to you know Abraham Lincoln or whatever but it's just I don't know it feels like this was a random game that they came up with and we're going to publish and at some point someone came in and said guys we have the Bill and Ted license do we have something we can put on the Bill and Ted license like can we just slap us on something and they said, well, here's this kind of weird limbo action video game, and that's what they went with. It feels to me like just a real hodgepodge of different genres,

and it doesn't hold together at all. It's like the collecting of music notes almost reminds me of just like horrible Pac-Man, where you're super zoomed in, and the enemies just come at you from anywhere on the screen at any time and move basically randomly. But then you've got these kind of computer game-esque use item-in-place puzzles as well that are really arbitrary. And you've got these weird frogger bits

where you walk across lava while disappearing and reappearing platforms sort of more thin and out of existence. And it's horrible. And the worst part is, it's one of the best Atari Links games I've ever played in my entire life. I don't know if I'd go that far.

There's some decent stuff on Links. I hate to read that the Grim Reaper was the villain in the game. He abducted the medieval babes. He's such a good guy. I love that Grimper. Even though they melvined him. He's still a nice guy.

So the portable games definitely feel like someone took a game concept and slapped some Bill and Head Sprites in there. But the computer versions from the early 90s, C-64, Amiga, PC, DOS, I think, they're very definitely based on Bill and Ted the movies. They're kind of cinemaware style graphical adventure games. They have some alternate modes that are terrible. That's perfect, yeah. Yeah, but basically you're traveling through time to collect items then you use in different places, give to different

historic characters, but not in the same sense as in the NES game. It does have more of that adventure game style like, you know, almost like a scum engine interface when moving around. Bill and Ted always move in unison. They're a pair. They're like buddies that are always linked. They're the ice climbers,

it sounds like. Yeah, it's like they're in a three-legged race. Yeah, I'm watching. I was just going through a long play right now. And then like this person's long play. It's 15 minutes long. It's like 17 minutes. And that's because this person was stuck on this like,

again, a Donkey Kong style segment with like girders and ladders and falling barrels for about five of that 17 minutes. Yep. three minutes at least are the book report ending which is not playable you just watch it so yeah but you know i will say this this long play is like a very efficient play through there's no sense of discovery to it it's someone who knows the way through the game because what we have to do is travel around through different eras you have to like go to austria to see to napoleon's tent to get a shovel and you have to go someplace like the prehistoric era i think to get um a firefighter extinguisher for no particular reason and then you use that to put out the fire where Joan of Arc is being burned at the stake and of course there's a butane lighter sitting next to where she's being burned because of course that is how the French used to burn people at the stake by lighting straw with a lighter so you need that to do something else etc etc so yeah if you actually are playing this and trying to figure it out then it's more challenging you have to figure out where everything is you'll probably fail your first few times there is a strict countdown the absolute time of the movie movie that San Demas time is constantly running at the top of the screen. So you have to complete the game before that runs out. And yes, I'm sure most people's time was spent in the utterly terrible Donkey Kong

platformer sequence. I was not actually able to play this because it's an Amiga game. But just watching the let's play, the long play, oh my God. There's just stuff falling from off screen that you can't see. And it hits you, knocks you down a level. you have to keep climbing up. God, just the worst. It's so emblematic of microcomputer games to be like that.

They're so short that they have to be aggressively unfairly difficult so that you get any kind of longevity out of them. Yeah. It really reminded me of the Flintstones game that did actually get some console ports where every level is a different mini game and they're all horrible. Yeah, like whenever I watch those like those microcomputer games,

it's like the only strategy is getting good RNG. Like maybe things won't hit me. this time. Yeah, pretty much. It's just relentlessly unfair. But, you know, back in the day, I would just sort of go, yeah, sure, why not? Shrugged shoulders. It's not like I've got anything better. Let's play. Yeah, I'm, you know, 50 bucks into this, so I might as well. When you're taught to blame yourself at that age, you're like, no, I must be bad at this game. This is just a really hard game. We're all being gaslit by licensing games. It's true. When you've got to wait for 15 minutes for your game to load, you're going to play that game. You're going to learn that game. I mean,

when you've paid like one pound 99 for your game you're going to play that game you know and that's it for the video game legacy of bill and ted uh as far as i know i was not i'm not able to find any indication that there were other games if there are i probably don't want to know about them but i i do wonder if someone's going to create a game based on uh bill and ted face the music it's not really a thing that people do it's probably going to be a terrible license game but if i had my druthers someone who really loves classic games would make a very convincing Chrono Trigger clone based around Bill and Ted and make it fun and good. And that would make me happy.

But it's not going to happen because we live in Hellworld. I was thinking, Jeremy, movie licenses now are just like content for Fortnite and other games like that. So maybe there'll be like a Bill and Ted skin in something. Yeah, or a mobile re-skinneding of some game. Like, it used to be like a runner game. But now I don't know what they're going to be candy crush. Now you can unlock Bill and Ted in like Speedos.

Bill and Tech can be the Wifu game The Hymbo Wifu game And you can unlock JPEGs of them In various states of undress Well, with the time I could actually imagine a wild Stallions concert in Fortnite

They're giant Bill and Ted with long beards Playing thrash metal And everyone's like still running around Shooting each other and building structures You know, and the gotcha wifu concept though With all the time travel And alternate versions of Bill and Ted you can have It really opens up a lot of

Husbando options there I see that. Well, it sounds like video games based on movies are still terrible no matter what. So in that sense, I guess Bill and Ted was predicting the future. What can you do? Anyway, thanks, guys. We actually managed to put together a full-length proper episode based on this movie, which I guess I never should have doubted you and myself.

I've got to believe in the spirit within. Well, actually, that's a different episode altogether. But yes, so to wrap here, let's do our usual rounds. and Stuart, why don't we start with you? Why don't you pitch what you're doing? Promote yourself. Tell us about your podcasts that are not retronauts. Okay, I will do that.

You can find on Twitter as at Stupacabber, which you'll agree is an excellent username, and I'm very pleased with it. I do a podcast, I think I can say the name of it. I do a podcast called Arshaulvania, which is about coming up with the worst possible take on a video game of the moment and then tweeting it and just seeing what happens,

what we're doing is we're making the world slightly worse and I do feel quite bad about that but essentially you'll get an hour or so of talk about whatever games say Last of Us 2 or we just did Resident Evil 4 and then we'll come up with the tweet the perfect tweet that will upset the most people possible we'll send it out into the world

and we'll watch the fireworks and the last one we did was like I said Rezi 4 and we got we got some actually multilingual abuse and I was quite proud of that you know But then they'll lay awake at night and I think about how I'm making the discourse less good. It's really just a drop in the bucket. People are doing so much worse in so much worse faith. But besides that, you can read my stuff on Retronauts.com where every two or three times a week,

I will write some silly nonsense about a video game. All right. And speaking of Retronauts, Retronauts is the show you're listening to that is supported on Patreon at patreon.com slash Retronauts. We publish episodes that go to the live public feed every week, every Monday. But every other week, we publish episodes that go only to patrons on Patreon. And if you support us at the $5 level a month or higher, you will get access to those and all previous patron exclusive episodes, plus weekly columns by Diamond Fight. The most recent one was on a film that actually intersects with this episode,

the 2000 X-Men movie, which was a huge impactful kind of thing that happened 20 years ago this week. So check us out, patreon.com slash retronauts. And, of course, you can hear all the free episodes at retronauts.com and on the public feeds that you find on Apple podcasts and the Zoom store. I don't know. So please, check us out, support us, keep us going. And I'll hand over the microphone to Bob and Henry now. Oh, sure. Hey, everybody.

It's Bob Mackie. You can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. And Henry and I do a bunch of other podcasts outside of Retronauts. One of them is Talking Simpsons, where it's a chronological exploration of the Simpsons. another one is what a cartoon and we'd go over a different episode of a different cartoon every week and you can find those wherever you find podcasts or go to patreon.com slash talking simpsons and sign up there and get all kinds of bonus stuff that we've been working on for the past three plus years including all of our limited miniseries our most recent one was talking mission hill there's over a hundred

bonus podcasts on there if you're a patron you get them all early just like with retronauts i don't know that i forget anything henry uh no i mean oh also in our what a cartoon movie for the extra premium patrons and yeah we've done a lot of great ones that you can even hear jeremy on we on the what a cartoon one so uh check all those out and please follow me on twitter at h e n e r e y g yeah i haven't done a what a cartoon in quite a while i'm probably overdue for one of those we should do uh something sometime soon you do bill and ted who oh good i was thinking maybe something like uh from japan because i just like a lot of japan stuff this japan make cartoon I don't know.

They did. Very good ones. Sounds crazy to me. Anyway, myself, Jeremy Parish, you can find me on Twitter as GameSpite. You can find me doing a lot of things in a lot of other places in addition to retronauts because I have a lot of stuff I want to do. And we are in a race against the collapse of America and the extinction of humanity. And there's only so much time of the day. So I am just producing as much content as possible while we're all still alive.

So that includes doing all kinds of stuff for limited run games. That's my day job. the video works series that you can find on YouTube just look for my name that's chronological histories of NES games game boy games by the time

this episode goes up I'll have thrown in a few side episodes on links in game gear games oh and there's a music podcast progressive rock podcast called Alexander's Regtime Band that I'm hosting it's also on the Greenlit podcast network here

so yeah that's about the extent of it so please check those out and of course check out Retronauts consider supporting us on Patreon, and we'll be back again in one week with another episode. Until then, remember, all we are is Dust in the Wind, Dude. Dust, Wind, Dude. Retrograde amnesia is a comprehensive podcast where we relive a classic Japanese RPG. Season one covers the cult classic Xenogers.

In season two, we're covering Chrono Cross. Each episode, we take a section of the game and unpack the story, mechanics, music, and themes. And we have an AI companion, the fake net. It'll make sense later. Find retrograde amnesia wherever podcasts are found. How does Bloodborn stack up against, say, Oregon Trail? And is Bomberman just loadrunner from a different point of view? Find out on Hardcore Gaming 101's Top Games,

where we objectively, definitively, and scientifically rank the games you nominate for our ever-growing list. HG 101's Top Games, twice a week, every week, right here on Greenlit. Running Diagnostics in three, two. Men like that is a podcast. Good so far? That really sucks. Oh, no. Shut her down.

Shut her down. They thought they could make something funny. They can't do anything. They can't. Listen, I meant like that. There are a lot of podcasts with comic book reviews and interviews with some of the greatest creators in the industry. But only one will tell you scientifically what the worst comic book of all time is. And the best.

We've been ranking comic book stories for six years. We have a list with over a thousand comics on it and we're adding more every month. More Rocket Ajax on the Greenlit Podcast Network. All right. And so for this segment of the show, we're doing something a little different than usual. And normally we record, you know, like several months out and have fairly timeless topics. topics, toppings. But this week, I actually am talking about something timely and hopefully we'll get it up while it's still relevant. The Spectrum Next Season 2 Kickstarter, which is currently running. And I have someone here who is closely involved with that project. Please introduce

yourself and tell us a little bit about the Spectrum Next. Hi, I am Enriquelli Fears and one of the many people behind the ZX Spectrum Next project. And I am a game. developer and have been a bedroom colder back in the 80s, who was the first games were on a Spectrum machine. And this is where the love for the platform comes from. So, yeah, to talk a little bit about the Spectrum, we've touched on it from time to time on Retronauts, but as I was telling, Enrique before the show began, as an America-based, a U.S.-based podcast hosted by Americans, we can't really speak to the spectrum with the

a lot of expertise or personal experience because it was it was not something that had any real traction in the US, kind of like the MSX platform, which we talked about as well, and which I actually got mixed up when we were sorting out the details for this podcast. But, you know, it was a tremendous success in the UK especially, but it did have a lot of, you know, a lot of fans in Europe and even in South America. So it just kind of passed by. the American market, but it's a hugely influential platform, computing platform in the early 80s into the late 80s, as a matter of fact. Yeah, that's true. I don't know exactly the history of why the spectrum didn't make it big in the U.S. I guess because they were already

in train-shed platforms back then. Commodore, for instance, was an American company. He had a much stronger presence in America than he had elsewhere. But also, I guess, the TRS platform was also very strong. So those two probably left little space for the spectrum to break into the country, right? Yeah, you know, the home computing market really kind of got its start in the U.S. and other countries quickly said, oh, yes, let's create our own in addition to importing systems. But America just had so many competing systems from, you know, from the mid-70s. You had not only Tandy and TRS, but also Apple II. was enormous over here. Exactly. You had Commodore, you had Atari's 8-bit computers. Of course.

Yeah, you had several others as well. And yeah, there just wasn't a lot of breathing room, I think, either for Spectrum or for MSX. And I was reading through some old gaming magazines recently from kind of the mid-80s. And they were talking about how the MSX platform was shown off at trade shows, but they weren't really sure if they were going to launch it in the U.S. because the market had, you know, dropped out in 1983, 84, and they just weren't sure that there was a market for it. And you saw so many companies dropping out. So I think, you know, it was just a matter of timing and competition in the U.S. So it kind of locked it out. But that wasn't the case for many other territories. And the spectrum, you know, it was a very appealing system

because of its combination of accessibility and affordability, I would say. Yeah, exactly. This was reflected in the US, I guess, by the Timex Sinclair, 2048, which was a spectrum, right? But it didn't gain any traction there, as you say, because the competition was very fierce and by very competent machines. But if you look at the success of both the spectrum and the MSX, it happened because it was not one manufacturer. The MSX was a standard that got manufactured by several different companies originally in Japan and then migrated to several countries in Europe like Spain and Holland. And he went into Brazil of all places as well through two manufacturers locally.

The spectrum, though, was different because it was meant to be only a Sinclair machine, but it got ripped off and cloned in Eastern Europe and in Brazil. So the spectrum existed in these countries, but not officially. In fact, Sinclair tried to clamp down on the local manufacturers making these machines, but they copyright back then, intellectual property was very, very different. And some of these countries even allow this legally to happen, like it was the case in Brazil. So the spectrum in Brazil was called the TK90X and then subsequently the TK95. And in Russia, for instance, there were like literally dozens of different machines.

based on the ZDX spectrum. The most famous of all in Russia was the Pentagon. And then, of course, the MSX was very popular, not in Russia, but in Brazil. It was super popular. And there is this strange connection between the two platforms, because

most of the games on the spectrum were actually port of sorry, most of the games on the MSX were actually port of spectrum games. The MSX had an edge in terms of sprites and so on. And he lived much longer because it had new versions of it, like MSX2 and MX TurboR, where the spectrum never

went beyond its 128 cousin, right, which is essentially the same harder with more memory. Yeah, the standards approach that they took with MSX was interesting because, as you mentioned, it did kind of give the platform, the opportunity to grow and to adapt to different people's needs. And I actually have two different MSXs. I have one by Panasonic, which is pretty bare bones. you know, just the cartridge ports. And then I have one by Sony, a hit bit, which is, you know, the deluxe version that has a disc drive and the turbo mode and everything. So you could kind of,

you know, find a system that fit your budget, fit your needs. And I feel like Spectrum wasn't quite that flexible. It was more like, you know, it was basically just an affordable system. And it was built around, you know, the Z80 processor standard, which is, you know, kind of kind of what made it so accessible and affordable is that it was this processor that was very easy to source and produce, which also made it easy to clone. So I guess it's, you know, the design of the machine was kind of a blessing and a curse in some ways. But the result is that there is just a huge amount of love and affection for the spectrum because of just what an impact it had on so many people's lives because it was so widely available. it's true but also one of the things that you had going for it was its simplicity as well right it was this neat package just one solid beautiful block of design which was cheaply made as you

said the components were very easy to source with the exception of some specific chips like the uLA that had to be retro reverse engineered but otherwise the the parts were very market standard than available, and then the keyboard was cheaply to make as well because it was rubber keyboard and so on. But the fact that all that you needed was that single machine, which is a beautiful design, by the way, the regional one specifically, and a cassette tape, that was all that you needed. And that made it very appealing, particularly for these restricted markets, right? And I remember back in the day when I first owned a spectrum, the concept of owning a disk drive

was beyond unreasonable. It was too expensive, let alone buying media in those countries was very difficult and very expensive, like five inch or three and a half inch discs. So the simplicity of the spectrum was its biggest strength. And it was a time where there was no documentation. There was no internet. BBSs were not a thing yet. So people swapped information on playgrounds and on schoolyards.

And if you could get hold of a book that kind of describe it, the hardware and a little bit of detail, so you could make inferences and make the leap from basic into machine code, into assembly, to actually unlock the power of the machine. So they had this kind of underground feeling to it, which was reflected into the kind of content that was created. A lot of the tropes that we have today in video games and things that we take for granted that games stand for were born. out of the ingenuity of the British developers and how they grappled and took the harder beyond what it was technically officially capable of. And in doing so, they created a lot of the lingua that we use today in game development

and game design in general. There is a lot beating in games to this day that came from the spectrum mature on the likes of the Amiga and then it is now common language of design, if you wish. Mm-hmm. So with that in mind, can you tell us a little bit about the spectrum next? And what is the kind of portion of the legacy of the spectrum that you really want to enshrine with this. All right.

So the Spectrum X is what we thought that the successor to the original spectrum should be like. Imagine that Sinclair created a machine that could rival the likes of the Amiga 500 or the Atari ST. So we created this machine which is fully compatible with the original, right? The hardware implementation is such that you can play the original games and original applications just as if you were working on original spectrum. But of course, with all the commodities that you would expect from an advanced machine, like

HDMI or a faster processor, larger memory, storage from an SD card, it has more audio chips. It has like new graphics modes and sprites and tile maps, et cetera, everything to make it sure that you can have a modern experience with a machine that at its heart, 8-bit machine. There's not many 8-bit machines that can connect to the internet with a Wi-Fi module, but the next is that. And it is officially licensed. We went over to the brand holders and licensed the Sinclair and the X-X spectrum brands to make sure that it was an officially licensed machine. And we recruited the original designers of the Z-X spectrum to work on the next. So the whole design of the next was made by Rick Dickinson and Phil Candy.

Rick Dixon was the original Sinclair industrial designer who made many of the machines that Sinclair got known for. So at its heart, it is a Z-Expectrum that allows you to play the original games in much more comfortably and much more quickly. But it expands it way beyond that. You can play the original games with faster processor, which is great for 3D games,

like especially the freescape games some of the very first first person games that emerge on an 8-beat you can play them with a proper frame rate but also there are already like three dozens of new games made exclusively for the next by original developers from back in the day so some of them they took original games

and revived them with new graphics modes new sound and new music etc and some of them are brand new games that ever saw the light of their hand on the platform, which is the exciting bit, is to see the whole community of developers and players who are grouping around the next and pushing new content into the pipeline, which is unbelievable. I never expected that I would play a new version of Lords of Midnight, which was a classic

spectrum game with new graphics and new gameplay, et cetera. But here we are. We see people like Mike Dali, who was this big developer in the Spectrum days and went on to work for Rockstar making GTA. he's now doing tools for the next, making games for the next. This kind of love and seeing this translated into games that we can also touch and play is something that goes way beyond the hardware that we made, right? So let me ask what the technology is that's powering the next.

I mean, the form factor is basically, you know, an homage to the original spectrum, which is a all-in-one keyboard black with the sort of small square keys and the rainbow in the corner. But in terms of what's powering it inside, or is it, you know, is it an actual like 8-bit chip like you mentioned, or is it an FPGA? Or is it a modern processor that's emulating it in software? Like, what's the solution that you're using to make the system work? So the whole implementation is on FPGA. And for people who are not very familiar with FPGA, I can give a quick example of how it works.

Yeah, please. Every chip design from old Z80 to a modern I7 or I9 is essentially a collection of transistors laid out in a specific way. So I make a sequence of transistors in a special, in a given layout, and it perform a function. That's all there is to a processor. When you do emulation, what you're doing is, that you are making, implementing transistors in software, okay? And when you do that,

those transistors are now competing for resources with other stuff, with operational systems or things are running, et cetera. And it's always kind of an attempt to make it feel like the original hard. FPGA is exactly like the original hardware. Think about it as a checker board, a board of chess, right, which each one of those squares is a transistor, so to speak, And then you can turn them on and off as you wish. And when you do so, you implement the original chip, transistor by transistor, into this FPGA dye, right? Today, every chip that there is has once been an FPGA.

And the only reason why they don't continue being an FPGA is because FPGA is more expensive than the fixed layout, if you wish. So if you are a harder designer, you think of a chip layout, you design that chip in FPGA, you validate it, it works, and then you copy that FPGA layout into a fixed design chip. But functionality-wise, they have absolutely no difference. So FPGA is no emulation. FPGA is the real chips just implemented in FPGA rather than fix a die.

And the next is that. It is a Z80N at its core that runs at the 3.5 megahertz, like the original spec. did, but also have other three modes, a 7 megahertz, a 14 megahertz, and a 28 megahertz. And he also has 80 new instructions that the developers of the community ask for, which allows the next to create much more easier content than you had back in the 80s on the traditional Z80. But for all intents of purposes, what we're talking about here is real hardware implemented in FPGA. And this is why he runs the original games and applications with complete fidelity, right?

Right. Yeah, I think our listeners are pretty familiar in the abstract with FPGAs because of things like Mr. and analogs consoles, but it is interesting to see it kind of applied in this way to a vintage computer with the involvement of people who worked on that computer and trying to basically expand the functionality and the power of that standard while, you know, being very faithful to the original format. You know, the additional instruction commands, you know, like sets that have been added are an interesting touch. But, you know, just the ability to basically run the system five times as fast as you originally could while still maintaining the original, you know, instruction sets and hardware design is, I don't know, it seems pretty unique to me. I'm sure there

have been some attempts to do things like that. I think maybe there was an MSX project kind of open source a long time ago, but those were sort of early days of a commercial FPGA production. So I'm sure people have learned a lot about the pitfalls and what to do, what not to do. And, you know, available FPGAs have grown in power considerably since then to allow for a lot more opportunities. But in addition to the like the central processor, how else is the, is the spectrum? of Next Designed. I mean, I'm assuming it doesn't use a tape cassette drive because you can't really easily buy tape cassettes these days. And I'm sure the production, like manufacturing a drive would be really expensive because they're so rarely produced these days. So I'm assuming it's

moved on to things like USB or, you know, flash-based storage. Yes, exactly. Although you can, you can use it to load from tape. If you have a cassette tape and you work in a tape deck and you want to do that, it absolutely supports it. But the primary storage for it is a SD car that ships with the Next already full with demos, its own OS and Next OS by Gary Lancaster, full of utilities and tools and games embedded in it as well. But the next is just a lot more than just the Z80 update, right? And it has nine audio channels with three audio chips plus PCM output. It has co-processors that we added to handle sprites and tile maps, et cetera.

So all these extra hardware is pretty much invisible for the original spectrum, but once you want to unlock all of those possibilities, they are completely open to the Z80, and the Z80 can coordinate all this, including it also has one of the models have an accelerator board, which is essentially a Raspberry Pi-0 inside the next. and it is completely at the mercy of the Z80. So the Z80 can command that ARM CPU to do something transcendental

like play a wave file of an original spectrum tape and feed that into my audio in. So I can get the experience of loading a cassette tape, even though I'm loading from the SD card. So there's some very clever things you can do when you have a machine of that power with a one gigahertz CPU and half a gig, of them doing your bidding, right?

It's much better than running an emulator on it, et cetera. So it's there sitting, waiting for the Z-A-80 to tell it what to do. And because of all these possibilities, we have this neat package that can literally do everything. The philosophy of the next was, what is the best expansions that exist for the spectrum? Oh, there is this kind of SD card reader over here. there is that other video mode over there that you can do, or this, this and that, a mouse support, et cetera, and we bring it everything together into that neat package,

so you don't have to fiddle around with more expansions, et cetera. Although if you have a fancy expansion for the original spectrum, the next also supports them. You can plug them in. It has an expansion port that is fully compatible with the original. So even to that level of detail, we went to, which is to create all in order to create this, this neat package that does everything on its own right,

but is there anything any specific thing that you want to do with an original expansion, you can just add it to the mix. So what is the video output available for this? I mean, you mentioned HDMI, but is there any kind of analog video out? Because I feel like, you know, when you look at Spectrum graphics, you know, just on a digital screen, they seem pretty stark. And I really feel like a lot of the, you know, a lot of the visual design of Spectrum was built around the sort of built in, you know, the basic natural blending. effects and kind of the ambiguity of analog screens and CRT monitors.

You're right. And I particularly use my next on a CRT monitor. I think that that is an unbeatable experience. And the next supports RGB monitors, traditional CRTs. It supports VGA monitors as well. So if you have a VGA monitor with a four by three aspect ratio, it can be used. And, of course, the HDIMI as well, both in 50 Hertz, like it was meant to be in the UK or 60 Hertz, as it was in Russia and Brazil, et cetera.

So we made it so that you can attach pretty much anything to it. And if you are lucky enough to have a CRT, a good quality CRT, you can have the original experience right there and then. And we drive some new resolution modes for it, right? It has the original video modes, of course, 256 by 192. But we also have 256 modes with 256 colors and then 512 colors. And we have a high resolution mode, which is 640 by 256. So the next drive these new formats if you want to use them.

And for things like file operations when you're listing a directory or when you're using a text-based adventure, et cetera, these high-resolution modes are surprisingly handy. You can pack a lot more information on the screen. But we didn't want to go beyond those video modes because then they become unusable on CRTs, right? You start to introduce Flickr and so on, and nobody likes that. Okay. So you really did think a lot about kind of the original experience and trying to recreate that in addition to the sort of modern approach that most people will probably want to take. Yeah, exactly.

So it is one size fits all, literally. There are people who are super happy to have their next running on a large HDMI TV, 60, 70 inches, or people who want the whole 13-inch CRT experience that I personally prefer. But it's all there. We don't want to pigeonhole it in one particular mode, right? And there's something to be said as well, because FPGAs in general, the original designer of the hardware, Victor Trucco, he makes a lot of, FPJ-based boards for arcade machines, for other systems, et cetera.

But it's always a board that requires some fiddling and require you to go online and find the right core or the right beat stream or whatever. And then you have to find extras and there are so many expansions that you have to attach until you get the good experience, even like a keyboard or a mouse, et cetera. And this is what we wanted to stray away from with the next. Is that sense that you get a beautifully designed box. And when you open it, the machine is there ready to be used with a bulky printed manual that you can go over and learn everything that there is to be learned around it, which is that experience that we had back in the 80s, right? Minos the polyesterine, but it is, it is what, it is that we wanted to capture, this box of magic, this box of dreams that you open, it's all in the air for you to discover and start playing around with, right?

whatever the setting that you want to play around with. So you mentioned that the system has optional high color modes. Is that something that programmers have to specifically target? Or is it possible to play an original classic game in a high color mode and get rid of things like the color attribute clash and just kind of have a better experience? Or is that a little beyond the scope of this? No, that is beyond the scope,

Because technically, if you get read of the color clash that the spectrum is famous for, you will have problems with the game not being able to run, right? Because that was very specific to it. But you can make games that look like the regional spectrum, but without the color clash. And you can make games that take advantage of the full 512 colors palette, which we are making. Right now, ships with the next, a new version of Lords of Mid. night. So you can go in and start playing this classic game, reimagined for the next hardware.

But there are ways for you to play original games with more colors and so on. There is new graphics modes that allow you to do that. For me, the best use of the next capabilities for original games is when you play 3D games with a higher clock. Right. Every game, pretty much every game plays better at 7 megahertz, even if it's not a 3D game. Things like Chase HQ, which is a big game, it runs so smoothly at 7 megahertz. But when you go into games from FreeScape, like Driller or Darkside and so on, those games run perfectly at 28 megahertz, almost at full frame rate.

And that feels like that's how they were meant to be played, even though that was not possible to do back in the day. And this is something that is magical because I have fun memories of those games, like stunt car racer and so on. And when I go back and play them on the original hardware, they are nearly unplayable because they're so used now to high frame rates, et cetera. But when you put it on the next, all of a sudden the experience is renewed and you can fall in love with them again. So that's the silver lining for me. So this is, the current Kickstarter is called Issue 2, is that correct? That's correct, yes, because it's the second Kickstarter we have made for the platform.

Yeah, so just to wrap up, can you tell us a little bit about the history of the Spectrum Next project overall, like what was Issue 1? And, you know, what does issue 2 bring to the project? And where can people find it, obviously, on Kickstarter? But what else can you tell them about the current campaign? So the current campaign was an incredible, so. The first one was successful. We funded in 36 hours. But there was a lot of reticence on and fear from people because we are a new team coming along. And there have been Kickstarter campaigns that didn't pan out. Right. So there was a lot of people who refrained from backing. Yeah. I backed a I backed a spectrum project back in like 2013 and never actually got my system. They just stopped answering my emails. So yeah, I can understand people's reluctance to get. you know, to support something. Exactly.

It's a minefield and it's justifiable that people will be concerned, right? But so they saw us delivering, although it took us a long while longer than it should have been taken, but we are first time manufacturers, so we delay the project a lot. But eventually we delivered, and we delivered the far bigger machine in terms of scope that people backed originally. They backed a 52012 kilobytes RAM. They backed only 3.5 and 7 megahertz, and they didn't expect a call or manual. Sorry, they didn't expect a printed manual.

And all of a sudden, they got much more than they bargained for. We took our sweet time to make the machine, but we made it right. And we made it with a lot more that they expected. But ever since we shipped the machine, a lot of new ideas came to the table, right? And people wanted us to move the Wi-Fi module for a different place, so the signal is stronger. there are some monitors and TVs that feed power back through the HDIMI port. So there are some issue one machines that even if you turn them off, they still have power coming through the HDI, and then you have to disconnect the HDMI.

So there are the tweaks that we are making to make the issue to more rounded than the regional next. And we carry on expanding it with the flexibility the FPGA allows us. So we can add more functionalities, more hardware, et cetera, to it. And always keeping it backward compatible with the regional one. We don't want to break compatibility, right? But there is a lot that we can add to the second one. So it's mainly targeted to the people who hesitated on the first

and they couldn't get their hands on the next. Now they can. And this is why it was furthering less than five minutes as opposed to the original 36 hours. We literally raised a quarter of a million pounds in under five minutes. And it's now at one point, almost 1.3 million pounds, right? Which is a testimony to the quality of the product where we shipped originally and the confidence that people have that we are going to fulfill the pledges. Yeah, so how much longer does the Kickstarter run?

When is the close date on it? So there is 17 more days to go, which will put us around the 10th of September when he wraps up. And right now, there are 3,600 backers to the campaign, and it's growing by the minute. Okay. So this episode will come out just a little bit before that campaign closes, which means there would still be time for people to check out the Kickstarter. It's called Spectrum Next issue two. And I'm sure you can find that pretty easily on Kickstarter. So, yeah, and what's the kind of base spy-in for a system? It's what we call the Spectrum Plus, right?

This was the mid-tier on the regional campaign, and we dropped the base tier for the Spectrum 2. So they will get the next. They will get the printed manual power supply, the SD card with a lot of stuff inside the box, and it is a one-megabyte machine that actually stretch go, double that. We already at 2 megabytes,

Wi-Fi and real-time clock, et cetera. We only have two S-Qs. We have this, what we call the plus, and we have the accelerator, which is exactly the same machine with a Raspberry Pi 0 as the accelerator board. But if you buy the plus, you can add the RPI yourself.

You can just solder a connector and put it in. So it's a very expandable machine and very easy to expand. All right. Well, I think that's probably everything. So thanks very much for your time. I am looking forward to this project. I've already backed it.

And I can see where, yeah, absolutely. You know, Spectrum has always been kind of a big gap in my personal knowledge. And like I said, I tried to, I tried to get, you know, on board with an earlier, a previous Kickstarter like six or seven years ago. And that didn't, they didn't ship me mine. So still a gap there. But this sounds perfect. Like it's, it sounds very flexible. It'll work with my analog capture setup, but also works with HDMI TVs and has, you know, compatibility and access to just an enormous amount of software. So, uh, should be great. And, yeah, I encourage everyone to check out the, uh, Spectrum Next.

Kickstarter, Season 2, still a few days left as at the time of this episode's release to back that and get on board. So check it out. Thank you very much, Jeremy. It was a pleasure speaking to you. Yeah. Thank you for your time. I appreciate it. Thank you.