I think that it was sometime last summer during my stint in the Tetons that it hit me, Bill & Ted are, or would be in theory, responsible for what can best be described as “Biological Genocide”. How would it be possible to have a present let alone a future when they would have eradicated every civilization they encountered during their “Excellent Adventure”? Pack a bowl and let me explain the logic, don’t worry, I’ll keep it short and simple.
First of all….
They say that blankets killed far more of the people of the First Nations than bullets and there’s a whole lot of truth to this. They simply didn’t have a way to fight off the pathogens that the Europeans had spent centuries developing an immunity to. Now think about what the hell would happen if you put two stoner teenagers from SoCal ( San Dimas Highschool football rules!!!) and placed them, unwashed at various points throughout history?
It gets worse.
It’s bad enough that they visited. Just by being there, someone was going to pick up something and it’s going to spread like wildfire throughout the region. While we take for granted things like being able to wash our hands and buy Nyquil, most civilisations didn’t have this until rather recently (sadly, a whole lot still don’t). Their presence alone would have been catastrophic but they also interacted and then kidnapped some pretty big names in order to ace their history report.
Think about it, we’re talking Abe Lincoln, Genghis Khan, Joan of Arc just to name a few. These people weren’t just pesents, they were big shit leaders in direct contact with other VIP’s of the erra. Even if they kept their mouths shut about what they saw they still would have coughed.
It gets even worse.
Not only do Bill and Ted interact, they pull them to modern day (1989) SoCal and take them to places like the Mall and Jail, neither of which are known for being sanitary. The only thing more unrealistic than the plot is that several of the characters didn’t start puking before the end of the report. Then, Bill and Ted, being the most excellent dudes they are, take each of them back to their respective time and place in history.
This is when the bomb goes off.
We’re talking several major world leaders here who have now been incubated in modern western pathogens for several hours. Think about it for a second, you have to get shots to travel to a whole lot of forgien nations and even then people still get sick all the time because our bodies simply don’t have a way to fight off the bugs that the locals are immune to.
Culture as we know it would cease to exist. These two good hearted idiots would be revered as Gods of wrath. Their appearance, told of in the history of people all over the world, would signal imminent death and the fall of a civilization. How else would you view it if one of your leaders or figureheads was kidnapped then reappeared screaming of things that could only be described as madness and magic before dying, followed by the majority of the local popluation?
This was the beauty of the ’80s, we didn’t care about plot holes, we just wanted to go into an overpriced movie theater in the mall with our friends and escape for a few hours. We didn’t over-analyze every little detail, we just wanted to have fun while Hollywood writers continued to prove how potent cocaine really was. These movies were never meant to be taken seriously and right now we need that, desperately. We need a distraction and a laugh and Friday night, I plan on smoking a phatty, turning off my phone and curling up with my girl on the couch while we enjoy the latest chapter of their adventures.