io9: bill and ted

Tasty Super Scifi Cereal Breakdown

Meredith Woerner — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 10:00:40 PST

As a child, I was forbidden to eat marshmallowy cereal unless it was a special occasion - - so naturally, like any youth told that they can't have something, I became obsessed. I wanted to know what the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle pizza cereal tasted like and screamed for a taste of Batman's bowl of bat wings. I've rounded up a collection of cereal boxes and commercials that should bring back so much breakfast nostalgia, you'll get a contact sugar rush. So, pass the milk and lets go on a cereal sugar bender together.

Jurassic Park Crunch
This 90s cereal turned your milk the color of dino-vomit. Jurassic Park Crunch had dinosaur and egg shaped marshmallows with whole wheat crunchies, but the biggest draw was the roaring box sweepstakes. If your cereal box roared upon opening, you would get to go to the Jurassic Park island itself, or Universal Studios, I'm not sure which. I just remember being promised dinosaurs.

Wheat Hearts and Sugar Jets:
Whatever Mr. Peabody wants me to eat I will.

Powerpuff Girls Cereal
This 90s cereal combined multi-colored Rice Krispie treat-like bits that were laced with POP ROCKS. Plus the Powerpuff ladies kick major butt.

C-3PO's Star Wars Cereal
Kelloggs brought us spacey droid goodness with this 1984 cereal. Their slogan was "A New (crunchy) Force At Breakfast" and had "twin rings phased together for two crunches in every double-O".

Bill And Ted's Excellent Cereal
Cinnamon oats and marshmallow notes? Excellent.

Star Wars Cereal
General Mills' super new Star Wars cereal made grocery shopping a terror as they slapped Hayden Christensen's face on every single box, thankfully they also gave us plenty of Obi-Wan.

Adams Family Cereal
Creepy and cooky cereal from 1991.

E.T.
Created in 1984 this E.T. had his own blend of chocolate and peanut butter cereal, which now sells for a whole lot more. One lucky owner sold his box of E.T. at an Australian auction for $800.

Batman Cereal
Tiny Bat-symbols from 1989; I always wondered what Bruce Wayne would have thought about this. I also assumed it would taste like Capn' Crunch but instead it tasted just like sugar.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Cereal
With pizza shaped marshmallows, sold.

Ghostbusters Cereal

Gremlins Cereal Commercial (breaks down half way sorry!)
This Cap'n Crunch rip off came out in 1985, just don't eat it after midnight.

GI. Joe Cereal

Star Trek Promo Box

The Spock Box.

Monster Cereal (With Star Trek Promotion eeek!)
Hey - You can't have a cereal post with out giving the original monsters their due.

Seriously, there is so much crazy scifi cereal I couldn't name them all... so I've compiled a gallery of other cereals equally as teeth rotting for your viewing pleasure:

And finally, although I can't justify putting Mr. T on this list, I'm including Pee Wee's breakfast of pancakes and Mr. T cereal, as both are fantastic.

What If Your Blog Became A Future Society's Mythology?

Charlie Jane Anders — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 12:39:02 PDT

MGM isn't just remaking Bill and Ted, it's also greenlit a new spec script that sounds very Bill and Ted-esque. Bobism is about a shy college kid who discovers that life 1,000 years in the future is entirely based on his blog. (I'm guessing he learns this from time travelers.) Writer Ben Wexler has mostly done work for television so far, including a TV version of Hitch and scripts for The King Of Queens. [Variety]

Party On With Little Known Excellent Adventures

Graeme McMillan — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 06:30:00 PDT

Ignore rumors of a most heinous remake; there's really only one place to go for more excellent adventures from William S. Preston and Ted Theodore Logan, and that's the semi-forgotten 1991 comic spin-off Bill and Ted's Most Excellent Comic Book. It comes right from the pen of Space Ghost: Coast to Coast writer (and Milk and Cheese creator) Evan Dorkin. From time-traveling to prevent the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, to watching Planet of The Apes marathons with Death, this 13-issue series not only had it all but was willing to share.

Following on from Dorkin's comic version of second movie Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, the monthly Most Excellent Comic Book aimed to take a different tack on the characters... mostly because Dorkin didn't really like the movies:

I'm not a big fan of Bill and Ted, I don't even like the music, but I really found the characters easy to write. You just make them see something amazing that would make the average person drink a beer or drop dead and then they just go "Whoa, cheap looking . . . " You know, like they see the big bang and they think it's dumb.

So, instead of retreads of the movie plots, Dorkin came up with stories that saw the characters travel to other dimensions (including one made up entirely of lost socks), put zombies to work as unpaid decorators, help a newly-unemployed Death find a new career, become superheroes and accidentally destroy time by saving Lincoln from being murdered. Unlike the somewhat shitty cartoon series, the comic worked because it didn't try and redo the movies over and over again, even if doing so might have kept the comic alive for more than a year.

Long out of print, the entire series was recently collected by SLG in two volumes as Bill and Ted's Most Excellent Adventures. Pick them up and, indeed, "party on." "Dudes."

Bill & Ted Comics [Bill and Ted Info]

Bill And Ted's Completely Unnecessary Remake

Charlie Jane Anders — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 06:30:00 PDT

Another classic science fiction franchise is getting the "reboot" treatment, but its biggest star could be even harder to recast than William Shatner's Captain Kirk. A new Bill And Ted movie finally got the green light — probably from the same people at MGM who thought that War Games sequel was a good idea — and it could show up in the next couple of years. The biggest question: where are they going to find an actor who can bring the Keanu? Click through for details.

As in the original, Bill and Ted are high-school students who are in danger of flunking unless they create a "full presentation" on the subjects of all their classes. They travel through time and meet the historical figures they're supposed to have learned about, including Gandhi and Calamity Jane this time around.

The main differences are that the phone Bill and Ted use to travel through time isn't an old-school phone booth, but something "funkier." Their band is called the Atomic Gorillas instead of the Wyld Stallyns. The script is supposedly full of "hip" pop culture references for today's kids, like Bill and Ted worrying they're going to miss The Dark Knight. No clue whether there's a George Carlin character this time around, or who might play him. There are a lot fewer "Whoas."

I was a lot more excited about a new Bill And Ted when I briefly thought it would feature Keanu and Alex back in their original roles, playing middle-aged stoners who have made a mess of their lives in spite of all Carlin's predictions.

If we have to have a remake, maybe it can do something new and interesting with the concept — like instead of being the saviors of a future world, Bill and Ted are actually patsies, given a time machine by someone who wants to wreck history but doesn't want his/her fingerprints all over it. And then Bill and Ted have to undo all the damage they've done. That would be totally excellent. [Moviehole]