The 80s and 90s were a golden age for Time-travel movies. I’ve already covered the basics, now it’s time to spread our reach a little. Two movies profoundly less stupid than their protagonists, William S. Preston (esq.) and Ted “Theodore” Logan. These two outstanding gentleman (a little period consistent homophobia aside) had an adventure in time and a journey through the afterlife and both movies involved Popcorn Paradoxes.
That’s right dudes.
We’re going to look at Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey in one truly bodacious post. To quote Rufus, “Don’t worry it will all make sense, I’m a professional.”
If you haven’t seen the movies they are teen comedies based on a couple of ‘slacker’ rock fans (with oddly loquacious speech patterns and a strong desire to improve themselves, unlike most slackers) from San Dimas (a suburb of LA) California 1988. Bill & Ted are the Great Ones of a future society based on their music. A future society with access to time travel that they put in the hands of the Great Ones to help them pass high school history.
The Totally Bodacious Writers
The first thing that I should point out is that the writing team that came up with Bill & Ted consists of Ed Solomon, a solid joke writer on a number of shows (and went on to write screenplays like the original Men In Black movie) and Chris Matheson, who is the son of Sci-fi luminaire Richard Matheson (who wrote the screenplay for Somewhere In Time based on his own novel). Richard apparently was the one that suggested the time-travel plot was good enough to support a movie on its own, rather than just being a sketch, and guided them away from having the boys be behind all the worst events in history, for something a little more light hearted.
So between them we’d expect a solid amount of good gags and good grasp of the fundamentals of time-travel. Others may argue with me, but personally I think they nailed it, and I’m looking forward to Bill & Ted 3 should it ever get made.
The Time Booth and Circuits of History
The Time Booth, when it first appears in the movie it is an eight-foot tall copper coloured crystal. Then it is altered to look like a telephone booth (with a red umbrella skeleton antenna). Why does it look this way?
Well, it could be because it was originally a van, but it was decided that was too similar to “Back To The Future”. It could be an homage to another police telephone box time machine, but everyone involved claims ignorance of what was at the time an obscure British show, and that they just liked the idea of phone booth cramming famous historical figures.
In universe, it might be an attempt at disguising the booth (although only in San Dimas 1988 itself), but I suspect that the booth was given this design so that Bill & Ted could grasp the technology (and let’s face it they needed all the help they could get).
The Booth travels through the “Circuits of History” (as Rufus calls them) to go forwards and backwards in time. It seems to slide along inside the Circuits in a way very analogous to a water-slide (which is undoubtedly why Napoleon is nervous to go into the “Waterloo” slide at first).
The booth uses a directory of numbers called the “Circuits of Time Directory” (presumably due to a script change that didn’t make to the props department) to guide the boys through their adventure. It probably has the directory, rather than some sort of in-built database, so that the boys can understand how to work it (these days it would have a touch screen). If you pause the video when Bill is flicking through the directory (go ahead, I’ll wait) you can clearly see that the book only has four recurring pages, and all the target eras they must visit to complete the report are listed (I imagine that made the Prop a lot easier to make, but in-universe it might mean that the Directory is actually a very clever video interface of some sort). Each era and location listed on those pages seem to have a 10 to 14 digit dialling code (twice as long as most telephone numbers in the 80s – modern phone numbers are 15 digits including international codes and so on)
When asked how it all works Rufus responds, “Modern Technology William!” — which doesn’t tell us an awful lot.
So what can we deduce from what we see?
- The Circuits of History fill some sort of hyper-dimensional continuum.
- There are an awful lot of them (at least one hundred trillion based on the 14 digit codes)
- They appear to move relative to each other constantly.
- They are never straight and appear to branch off at times.
- Sparks of energy (that appear alive in the case of the frog like thing) leap between the circuits and look like hands when they grab the booth.
- Each day requires you to dial one digit higher for the future and one lower for the past.
- Time keeps ticking, so if you spend and hour in the past, you have an hour less in the present (although there is some wriggle room in this, as they appear at night the day before the report when it is around noon the next day).
- The booth disappears into the ground (grabbed by hands of lightning) and appears from sky (at least one booth height above the ground and occasionally hundreds of feet).
Dial a date?
Now since each day is a digit higher, and the numbers are 14 digits that’s potentially 100 trillion days or 273,972,603 years. The Earth is estimated to be 4-5 Billion years old at the moment, so the booth cannot access all of Earth’s history. Part of the number must be a location code (or something similar), otherwise they’d only be able to travel in time to San Dimas (unless the Booth uses some form of Telepathy to decide where the dialer wants to land – which would be a little too TARDIS-like).
So instead there may be a limit.If we assume that the earliest the booth can go is when they fix it (San Dimas 1,000,000 BC), and 2688 AD is the latest date it can reach, then we have only 366,053,390 days (or thereabouts) that can be targeted. So we can assume 9 digits target the time and 5 digits the location.
Since the Earth has a surface area of 5 million square kilometres (71% of which is water and we’ll assume cannot be targeted) then the booth has an accuracy of about 1.45 square kilometres. That seems a little big when they are able to target Bill’s house and the Circle K so accurately. Perhaps instead, each day has one hundred thousand locations that are considered historically important, or more likely one hundred thousand people of importance. Since the Circuits of History move relative to each other, I suspect they are tied to the movement of historically important people. With their hyper-continuum location being an analog of their real-world location.
Lil’ Red Umbrella
The antenna connects the booth to the circuits, energising the booth so that it can fall vertically out of normal space-time and into the hyper-time dimension of the Circuits of History. The energy appears from the antenna and flows down the booth, there it makes the ground beneath the booth into some sort of hyper-dimensional window, that stays open for a few moments after the booth has travelled (both Napoleon and Rufus travel in time by following a booth). Lightning shaped into hands grabs hold of the booth (and Napoleon when he is nearby) and drags it into the Circuits of History.
Since the music of Wyld Stallyns allows communication with all forms of life (according to Rufus) I believe that these creatures that live in the Circuits are called and directed by the Booth to grab it and move it through time.
After the antenna is damaged by the morning star in medieval England the Time Booth seems to behave oddly. The boys say that it is out of control, and they visit a number of locations for “extra credit” speakers. The ride seems to get more erratic as well, with the Circuits of History curling and looping in ways it didn’t before. This erratic behaviour may be the reason that the Booth arrives back when they met Rufus when they dial San Dimas, rather than arriving when they left. It might also explain why the Booth arrived at the Circle K rather than at Ted’s house (which presumably was a different location code). Although if the location codes do work on the known positions of historical figures (in this case Bill & Ted themselves) then that would explain it. I think this erratic behaviour is due to the damage interfering with the communication with the creatures that live in the Circuits. The green frog-like one seems to be attracted to the booth in motion while the antenna is damaged.
The Bogus Paradoxes
Some say the movies don’t make sense, that these most triumphant excursions are riddled with Paradoxes that flaw the very premise. Their arguments usually go something like:
- How can Rufus know he has to go back in time and stop the boys from failing history when he lives in a future where they didn’t fail history?
- If famous historical figures are removed from history, how can they be famous anymore?
- How can the heroes even know Rufus’ name? He never tells them.
- How can Bill and Ted set up traps (and so on) to get out of trouble?
Well, starting at the top:
Professor of History (and Physics of Acoustical Reverberation) Rufus is sent back by the leaders of San Dimas 2688 to ‘save’ their history. He and the Leaders know that he needs to do this because the boys left clues in that history. They probably wrote more than one song about how Rufus helped them along, and the records of passing history (and how) probably became part of the band’s legend.
If you remove a person from history and take them to the future then they won’t be in the past to affect it. The future you take them to, shouldn’t be the one you left, at all. But the famous historical personages are still famous when they arrive in San Dimas 1988, which seems to defy common sense. How can they be famous for anything other than suddenly vanishing with two idiots that fell from the sky in a flash of light?
The answer is quite simple, the historical figures were put back again, and therefore their history is intact. Although, I do wonder what the effects of their adventures had on the famous historical figures that we met… Did they just write it off as a crazy dream? You’ll note that the Princesses Joanna and Elizabeth, who were not put back, are not famous, in fact they appear in no history books at all, which is obviously an important clue.
Rufus’ name is an odd one. We learn Rufus’ name from Bill & Ted when they encounter their earlier selves and tell them, “Listen to this guy, Rufus.” The boys, like us, learn Rufus’ name from Bill & Ted, the information is never actually told to them by anyone else, it comes from nowhere in an Ontological Paradox. Of course, there is an argument that can be made that perhaps Rufus isn’t actually his name. He never confirms or denies it, and may have started using the name after the Great Ones had called him it. But Chuck De Nomolos, who knew Rufus before he met the boys, refers to him as Rufus when they meet in the second film, so that seems unlikely.
Bill and Ted start playing the ‘Time Game’ where they can state that they are going to come back in time later and leave themselves things like, keys, trashcans, messages and tape-recorders on timers. As long as they remember to do these things later, they have to happen. There’s no real trick to it, when you have a time-machine (although I do question the exact mechanism they used to set up the trashcan in the jail).
Conclusion
All of these effects and apparent paradoxes extend from the one simple and unavoidable conclusion:
In the San Dimas universe the Novikov Self-Consistency Principle (which was formulated after the first movie in 1990) holds true, time is immutable. The time-travellers cannot alter history, they just insure that it remains on track. Everything that we observe seems to confirm this.Even De Nomolos’ actions (it turns out) are essential to the band’s success. He creates the circumstances that mean their debut at the Battle of the Bands is seen by the world, and even gives them another booth to insure they can head off for 16 months intensive guitar training. The only real question has to be why Chuck De Nomolos thinks that he can alter history in this universe.
TL;DR
The history of the Bill and Ted universe is self-consistent and immutable. Time travel cannot alter the past, only guarantee it happens the way it is remembered. At least, until they make that third movie…
Anyhoo my Excellent friends, that’s all I’ve got, Party On Dudes!
Other articles in this series:
Popcorn Paradoxes: Terminated Timelines
Popcorn Paradoxes: Paradoxical Polaroids
Popcorn Paradoxes: Flux Capacitor
Popcorn Paradoxes: Superman (1978)
CJ Moseley
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