“Strange Things Are Afoot at the Circle K”: Introducing a Teen to the Teen Canon of the 1980s

“What happened to the other guy?” Grace wanted to know.

“What other guy?”

“The one who didn’t become Neo.”

“Oh. You were probably too traumatized to notice this but he had a small part in The Lost Boys.”

“Ew.”

“I think he directs now? Anyway what’s your takeaway?” We’d been struggling, a bit, to get through Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, but we’d made it without her actually walking away.

“It was popular, right? At the time?”

“Yeah, they managed to get two sequels out of it, I think.” (Further research determined there was only one sequel.) “I didn’t see them that I remember.” Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure had indeed found both commercial success (it grossed four times its 10M budget) and cult-classic status, which has ensured that however dopey and dated it might be it has never totally left the pop culture lexicon. A “sci-fi comedy” that was very light on the “sci” side, the film featured two Angeleno garage band doofuses (doofi?) who travel through time with help from an unusually well-appointed phone booth and Rufus (George Carlin), a dude from the future with a strange vested interest in Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves) not flunking out of history. Along the way they discover that it’s worth learning how to actually play your own guitar, along with many other valuable life lessons. When it came out in 1989 I’d found it … well, the kind of movie you 90% laughed at and maybe 10% with.

As it turns out, that hasn’t changed.

“There is one reason why you watch this,” Grace said. “So you and your friends have a few random buzzwords.”

“Like?”