A Cartoon Christmas

One of the things I’m lovin’ about Netflix Instant Watch is that we’re starting to see cartoons pop up there that haven’t seen the light of day in years…

Such is the case with Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventures, whose first Hanna-Barbera-produced season began airing on CBS in September of 1990, just a year and some change after the duo’s first movie. Wanna see the intro?!

The most amazing thing about the show, besides that face-melting theme song, is that Excellent Adventures somehow managed to land the entire main cast from the film! Okay, maybe the inclusion of Alex Winters doesn’t impress you, but it looks to me like Keanu Reeves has never provided his voice to anything else ever, with the exception of a few Matrix spinoffs.

Even the anti-establishment George Carlin took a little Flintstones money

Outside of a few minor differences (Bill’s dad got fatter, their teacher was promoted to principal, the Circle K became the “Kozy Korner,” etc.) the cartoon was remarkably faithful to the film, as far as cartoon spinoffs go, and fans dug the hell out of it it. Sadly, it was not to be…

Early CG time tunnels? INCLUDED!

CBS wasn’t happy with the show’s performance, so Fox decided to take the reins a year later, handing production over to DIC Animation, the hilariously inept producers of Legend of Zelda cartoon I posted last week. Instead of traveling exclusively through time, the second season saw Bill and Ted embarking on sillier missions throughout pop culture, featuring more comedic plotlines and ridiculous sitcom parodies.

A briefly produced cereal is about the only merchandise we’ve got to know a Bill & Ted cartoon ever existed

Worst of all, Fox axed Alex Winters and Keanu Reeves as the voices of Bill & Ted, and replaced them with the actors starring in the live-action TV show adaptation the network was mounting. Both versions lasted less than ten episodes in 1991, so I’d like to think they kinda killed one another.

With the cartoon airing on two different networks, produced by two animation companies, and film ownership passing from Orion to MGM to wherever, rights to the animated Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventures have remained tangled ever since. Only a single episode had been made available for purchase (only as a special feature on Bill & Ted’s Most Excellent Collection) so you gotta love that we live in age where Netflix can cut through the red tape and make nostalgic gems like this available. Now, if I can only find the Teen Wolf cartoon…