Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventures

A great series spawned by a great and truly inspiring movie. Although the TV series was not highly successful it doesn't mean that it was not a classic. I used to watch this show religiously because this is a great TV series. If you get a chance to watch it, do it.

Bill and Ted are memorable, even in animation land. Once again we see the adventures of the two groovy guys and their cool dude Rufus (voiced by George Carlin) but this time not live action, which is sort of a drawback. But it is still a nice cartoon. Lively, but not too bad.

If you can get past some corniness and goofiness, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventures is actually a pretty watchable and fun extension of the original film. (This is true only for the first season. Skip the second. The quality difference is jarring.)

Despite being a Saturday morning cartoon, it captures the adventurous and light hearted spirit of the first movie well. Bill and Ted retain their most excellent friendship with little conflict. Voice acting is spot-on, with Alex Winters and Keanu Reeves coming back to voice their respective characters and adding to the show's charm.

However, it also lacks the depth of the original film, some episodes feel repetitive, and the humor can be hit or miss at times. Even with these flaws, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventures is a totally solid Saturday morning cartoon.

I used to watch this show as a kid and I was always a fan of the two films. The first season was great, it had the two main actors doing the voices of Bill and Ted and even George Carlin voiced the animated Rufus. The episodes are funny and have factoids about history littered throughout the episodes....And then the second season happened. No Keanu, no Alex, no George. They changed the animators and the theme song, and everything went down hill. Bill and Ted sound like they are going through puberty in the second season and the episodes aren't funny and they lost the magic.

The first 13 episodes of "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventures" benefitted from having Messrs. Winter, Reeves and Carlin reprising their roles from the movie, and was also a fairly amusing spinoff in its own right.

Imagine my shock one Sunday morning to find entirely different voices, animation, and even theme song - Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon's creation had also spawned a live-action TV show of the same name on the Fox Network, and when the cartoon jumped from CBS to Fox everything changed... it was the stars of THAT show who did the voices. And that, to steal a line from the sequel, "was non-non-non-non-heinous!" Even the writing was inferior.

As long as you watch the Hanna-Barbera episodes you'll be okay (hard to pass on a cartoon with Little Richard). Party on, dudes...