Bill and Ted: a bluffer's guide as we prepare to Face the Music

Get your best air guitar ready, because Bill & Ted Face the Music is scheduled to hit Cineworld this August.

After a gap of more than 20 years, the titular slackers return to the big screen. And if you can tell your Bills from your Teds, we're here to help. Scroll down to find out more.

1. Who plays Bill?

That would be Alex Winter as the eponymous Bill S. Preston Esq. Winter is best known for his Bill & Ted roles, but he also appeared in cult 1987 vampire horror-comedy The Lost Boys, playing Marko.

2. Who plays Ted?

Ted Theodore Logan is played by the mighty Keanu Reeves, who enjoyed one hell of a career in the wake of the initial Bill & Ted movies. Reeves is by this stage best known as an action hero, largely off the back of Speed, The Matrix and John Wick. (The last two franchises cited are getting fourth instalments in 2022.)

3. What are the previous two Bill & Ted movies?

So, you know who the main actors are. But you be wondering: who are Bill and Ted as characters, and what adventures have they enjoyed so far?

Put simply, they're a pair of slacker/doofus/rockers who've experienced two prior journeys through time. In their debut movie, 1988's Excellent Adventure, they're forced to scamble the time-space continuum to arrange a series of famous historical figures for their high-school presentation. The luminaries include Socrates, Napoleon Bonaparte and Abraham Lincoln.

In 1991's sequel Bogus Journey, Bill and Ted are replaced with robotic avatars. The reason? Well, it turns out that the music of their band, the Wyld Stallyns, has led to the creation of a utopian future society. This compels a 27th-century terrorist to send replicas back in time to destroy Bill and Ted's musical legacy. Having been killed, the loveable goofs must journey through the afterlife to find their way back home, in the process playing chess with Death (William Sadler) in a famous spoof of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal.

4. What are some signature Bill & Ted quotes?

"All we are is dust in the wind, dude" – Ted to Socrates

"Party on, dudes!" – Bill and Ted when they get excited

"The truth is, Wyld Stallyns will never be a super band until we have Eddie Van Halen on guitar." – Bill

"Every rose has its thorn. Just like every night has its dawn." – Ted to St. Peter when trying to get into Heaven

"Mars, Jupiter, Uranus." – Bill and Ted when complimenting God on the creation of the planets

"The best time to be is now. And all's we can say is... let’s rock!" – Bill and Ted's philosophy after travelling through time

"Be excellent to each other." – From the Book of Bill and Ted

5. What are some classic Bill & Ted scenes?

There are too many to mention, but we think the aforementioned Socrates and Death scenes sum up the charm of Bill & Ted in a nutshell.

6. What do we need to know about Bill & Ted Face the Music?

We pick up with the Wyld Stallyns members – older, but decidedly none the wiser. However, both Bill and Ted now have daughters, played by Brigette Lundy-Paine (TV's Atypical) and Samara Weaving (star of 2019's hit horror-comedy Ready or Not). Both guys are plunged into a battle to save the universe, and the only way they can do it is to come up with the ultimate song in just 78 minutes. That means they have to call in some favours from the likes of William Sadler's Death and others.

The film is directed by Galaxy's Quest's Dean Parisot and scripted by the duo of Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon, who wrote the original movies. Excellent! Less excellent is the vast amount of time it's taken for the Bill & Ted threequel to reach the big screen. However, back in 2018, Solomon said the following: "We have a script that we really are proud of, that we worked very hard on, that we've done many iterations of—and we did it on spec, meaning we spent years working on it because we wanted to get it right, creatively."

He adds: "This is not, 'Hey let's all cash-in on the Bill & Ted thing for money'—this is the opposite. This is, 'We love these characters, they've been with us for our whole lives'—Chris and me, and Alex and Keanu—and we wanted to visit them again as middle-aged men. We thought it would be really fun, and funny, and sweet.."