The Bill and Ted movies starring Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves finally saw the end to their trilogy with Bill and Ted Face the Music a couple of years ago, but fans are still discovering the original films, and discovering elements in them that have apparently remained hidden for decades. It appears that a new 4K transfer of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure has revealed an easter egg that even Alex Winter didn’t know was there.
Winter shared a tweet from Shout Factory, which produced a brand new 4K transfer of the first Bill and Ted film. In the attached image, it’s revealed that the Great Ones, the citizens from the future that send George Carlin’s Rufus on his quest to help Bill & Ted, are hovering above a platform that includes the Circle K logo. Check it out.
🤯 I have absolutely no memory of this. @ed_solomon do you? https://t.co/JKCgpZu6KMOctober 17, 2022
The Circle K convenience store also plays a key part in the movie, and so it seems this is meant to be a little easter egg referencing that, since Bill and Ted had a significant impact on the future, even the Circle K, where they first met Rufus, became important in the future.
In the film, Bill and Ted are sitting outside of Circle K when the time traveling phone booth first arrives. Keanu Reeves utters the now oft-quoted line “Strange things are afoot at the Circle K,” which likely went a long way to immortalizing the scene. The Circle K itself, located in Arizona, became a landmark in its own right, though the particular Circle K used in the scene recently closed down.
It seems that, due to the lower video quality of previous versions of the film, this little reference had been difficult to see, but due to the new 4K edition, the Circle K logo became clear. It was probably much easier to see on the theatrical big screen, but even then, it would have been a minor reference, and early in the film people watching for the first time would not have even realized it was a reference.
Alex Winter tags Bill and Ted writer Ed Solomon in his tweet to see if the man behind the entire franchise was aware of this reference. As it turns out, this was just as much a surprise to Solomon as it was to Winter.
Absolutely NO idea about this little fun fact https://t.co/PstA7BkjJPOctober 18, 2022
In a follow up, Alex Winter suggests that the easter egg was likely the work of the film’s production designer Roy Forge Smith. Considering that nobody else seems to have been aware of it, that seems like the best possible bet. He apparently snuck this in back in the late ‘80s and it made it to 2022 before it was noticed.
