Bill and Ted and the Music of Remembrance: Part I: Be Excellent to Each Other

Bill & Ted and the Way of the Fool

In the annals of human myth, wisdom has a habit of sneaking in wearing a mask.

Sometimes it’s a trickster with coyote teeth.

Sometimes it’s a clown with painted cheeks.

And in 1989… it showed up in ripped jeans, clutching air guitars, and failing history class.

Bill S. Preston, Esquire, and Ted “Theodore” Logan don’t look like philosophers in the marble sense.They don’t carry swords or scriptures.

Their sacred relic?

A phone booth.

Their scripture?

A phrase so disarmingly simple it almost slips past without resistance:

“Be excellent to each other.”

Ridiculous? Maybe.

But it lingers longer than it should.

The trilogy of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and its companions doesn’t arrive as something serious.

It lands as comedy. Noise. A little bit of chaos.

But if you sit with it—even just a little—

it starts to feel like something else.

Not quite philosophy.

Not quite parody.

Something closer to myth… wearing a joke so it doesn’t get stopped at the door.

And maybe that’s the point.

Because when something arrives labeled as “truth,” we tend to analyze it.

Argue with it.

Measure it.

But when it arrives as laughter…

we let it in.

We don’t always notice it happening.

But something absorbs.

So instead of breaking this down like a film study or cultural critique,it might be more useful to just… walk with it.

Three films. Three movements. One thread running underneath:

• A beginning that looks like failure

• A descent that refuses to take itself too seriously

• A return that doesn’t belong to just one person

If you’ve seen them recently, you’ll recognize the moments.

If you haven’t… they tend to come back quickly:

a phone booth humming with possibilityhistorical figures wandering through malls and water parksa Grim Reaper losing at board gamesa stage where the whole world starts to sound like one song

It’s absurd.

But it holds together.

And somewhere in that absurdity, a pattern starts to show:

The Fool… not as the joke, but as the doorway.

The journey… not as conquest, but as connection.

The ending… not as a victory, but as a shared rhythm.

Nothing announced.Nothing forced.

Just… there, if you tilt your head the right way.

So we’ll move through it like that.

Not as experts.Not as critics.

Just noticing what’s already been sitting in plain sight.

Because sometimes the simplest ideas don’t need to be proven.

They just need to be remembered.

And sometimes. . . what’s been sitting in plain sight looks exactly like this.