This Custom Card Would Like Us to be Excellent to Each Other

Want to see two most excellent dudes on a custom card?

Okay, behold:

It's Bill S. Preston, Esquire, and Ted "Theodore" Logan. And together they are . . . WYLD STALLYNS!

 

The design is based on the team leaders/checklist cards from the 1983 Topps baseball set. And really, why wouldn't Bill and Ted have ended up in 1983 at some point on their time-traveling adventure, rubbing elbows with a couple of baseball stars of the time like Johnny Bench and Ozzie Smith? I can picture Bill or Ted seeing Ozzie and saying "Whoa, it's the wizard dude from baseball!" (As Ozzie proceeds to do a backflip, further impressing them.)

 

Anyway, more on the design: Of the various color combinations from the original set, I went with the neon blue and dark purple used for the Braves and Blue Jays, as those colors seemed like a good nod to the '80s era. It's a most triumphant scene with what could easily be the San Dimas High School baseball field in the background there, too. And I figured it was about time that the two members of Wyld Stallyns appeared on a trading card together. 

I must admit, however, that I failed to do any trading card research before setting off on the creative process this time. It turns out that in 1991 a company called Merlin produced a 128-card set featuring the two dudes (Bill & Ted's Totally Excellent Collector Cards), and in that very same year Pro Set released a 100-card set of their own (Bill & Ted's Most Atypical Movie Cards). 

 

So my Bill & Ted custom card is not as unique as I thought.

 

Bogus.

 

I still like it a lot, though. And to tie it back to baseball, "Wyld Stallyns" could very well be the name of a minor league baseball team from San Dimas, California, don't you think? I mean, you've got the Binghamton Rumble Ponies these days.

As for the actors themselves, Alex Winter (Bill S., Preston, Esq.) got his name out there a couple of years before the first Bill & Ted movie with a role as a vampire named Marko in The Lost Boys (1987). Along with Bill & Ted in 1989, Winter also earned some coolness points by appearing in a Red Hot Chili Peppers video ("Knock me Down"). He's also done voice-over work for a couple of Ben 10 animated films (2007, 2009), and has more recently gotten into the directing field, working on the 2020 film Zappa and 2022's The YouTube Effect.

And then there's Keanu Reeves (Ted "Theodore" Logan). To add another tie to the sports realm, early on in his acting career he played a goalie named "Heaver" who was teammate to Patrick Swayze and Rob Lowe in the hockey film Youngblood (1986). You might also know him as Johnny Utah in Point Break (1991), Jack Traven in Speed (1994), Neo in The Matrix series, and John Wick in the John Wick series. He's also known to be an overall good dude.

 

I haven't seen the other movies in the Bill & Ted franchise (Bogus Journey in 1991 and Face the Music in 2020), so I can only speak for the original Excellent Adventure when I say it's worth a watch—even if you already saw it back in 1989.

 

Aside from that, what's my only other advice?

 

Be excellent to each other. And party on, dudes!

 

Thanks for reading, as always.