Are Bill and Ted funny or just stupid?

"As much as there's some really broad, light, silly stuff, there's a second level of humor that is very hip and sophisticated," says Mr. Kroopf, adding that the scriptwriters, Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon, "wrote with a very serious mind. They didn't set out to write a silly slapstick comedy; they set out to write something with two endearing characters in the tradition of Abbott and Costello and Laurel and Hardy. There's a level of literary jokes running through the first one, and philosophical jokes through the new one. It's that feeling of having something that can operate on several levels at once -- a good, fun ride in terms of a comic adventure, and then satiric or parody-style humor as an undercurrent."

Who are Bill and Ted's comedic influences?

"You can go all the way back to cartoons that have a little bit of satire and parody," says Mr. Kroopf. "That's one of the things that has made cartoons work. If you run Wile E. Coyote off the cliff or drop a ton of bricks on him, the kids will think that's funny. But Chuck Jones can't resist doing a satire on commercialism by labeling everything. Rocky and Bullwinkle always had political satire running underneath something that a 5-year-old can get as simple physical comedy."

Are Bill and Ted just rip-offs of the Sean Penn character, Spicoli, in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High"?

"No, not at all," says Mr. Winter. "Bill and Ted are not surfer dudes. They're not part of that culture. Spicoli's comedy was drawn from the hazy cloud that he lives in, the fact that you're looking at a human being who is only about 15 percent aware of what he's doing from moment to moment. Bill and Ted's comedy comes from very different things. They're much more physical comedians; they're clowns. Another thing that separates us from Spicoli is that these characters are trying to tackle real feelings and real emotions. They are struggling to work within the parameters of the real world. What they want is very real -- they want to be great rock-and-roll musicians, and that's a very tangible thing. Their only problem is that they're too stupid to be able to achieve it."

Is the sequel going to be lame?

"It's not as innocent and easy as the other one," says Mr. Reeves. "It's more complicated, and it's got some trippy images in it. It's not violent, really -- we're not swearing, and it's not that dark -- but there is some weird stuff. We die."

Mr. Kroopf says: "We wanted to try to set this in a different arena. We wanted to give Alex and Keanu some acting challenges, so it wasn't like we just run them through the movie and they say 'excellent' and 'party on' every other word. So we bagged the idea of doing another time-travel movie, and the first idea we came up with was having Bill and Ted go through heaven and hell."