San Dimas High School staff, teachers and students are rolling out the welcome carpet for their most famous alumni: William “Bill” S. Preston, Esq. and Theodore “Ted” Logan.
Yes, the two are those same fictional characters from 1989’s “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.”
That’s not stopping the Saints, who have made a nearly three-minute quirky video pitch, asking the duo come to the campus for a reunion — even though they’ve technically never been there, acknowledged Dave Milbrandt, AP government and economics/government teacher and the mastermind behind the effort.
“We were able to recruit staff pretty easily because many of them know the movie, but for our students, it was a little bit of a learning curve,” he said.
In March, Bill and Ted fanatics — as well as the city of San Dimas — got most excellent news when Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter announced filming would start for a third installment of the movie franchise. Since then, city officials made it public they’d welcome film crews to their fair town. In the first installment, San Dimas was played by versatile settings in Arizona.
Milbrandt and fellow colleague Julia Straszewski, a Spanish teacher, joined forces to try to convince the famous duo to come to campus, especially because the school is memorialized in film’s the iconic phrase, “San Dimas High School Football Rules!”
The video pokes fun at all the locations from the film that either don’t exist or aren’t the actual site, Milbrandt said. For example, as one teacher points out in the video, the Waterloo water park is still there, “but for some reason, people call it Raging Waters.”
The next shot of the “San Dimas Mall,” which never existed, is instead the Target shopping center, also known as the San Dimas Marketplace.
The public has always connected San Dimas High to Bill and Ted, said Milbrandt, who has taught at the school for 14 years.
“We have people who come from out of state on college campus tours and say, ‘Because of Bill and Ted, we had to take a tour of the place.’ We’re connected to movie,” he said.
They do wonder where the mall is, he added.
Milbrandt said he hoping the video will catch the attention of either the writers or actors in the film and motivate them to shoot a scene at the school. If not, he said, that they at least stop by for a visit while promoting the film.
And just to make sure they know how to connect with San Dimas High, the video ends with “RSVP on Twitter @SanPrincipal.”
