Question: Why was Beethoven arrested? He wasn't doing anything illegal.
Answer: This appears to be a reference to Beethoven's real-life arrests. He had a dark side, often drinking excessively and prowling the streets at night, peering into peoples' windows. Police mistook him as a drunken vagrant.
Question: When Bill and Ted are captured by King Henry and his men, King Henry tells his men to put them in the "iron maiden" (or something to that fact). Bill and Ted get excited before King Henry tell his guards to execute them. What was the joke I missed? What is an iron maiden and what did Bill and Ted think it meant in order for them to get excited about it?
Question: When Bill asks Rufus why they didn't land in the San Dimas of tomorrow, Rufus said it's because they had to dial one number higher. Could someone please give an example of this?
Answer: Hard to give an example without knowing for sure how it works, but the best guess is say the number was 555-1234 then it may be 555-1235 or 666-2345. Just a guess.
Question: Is the portrayal of the historical figures and their respective surroundings accurate in any way?
Answer: Yes and no. The basic premises are all right; the years are accurate, and maybe the costumes. Napoleon was at war in 1805, and Joan of Arc was undoubtedly in church at some time during 1429, etc. But everything with the mysterious King Henry and his two teenage daughters in the middle ages is completely fabricated. Although there were four King Henrys during that century, none of them fit the age or family situation seen in the film.
Question: Why does Rufus send Bill and Ted off on their own, instead of going with them and helping them?
Answer: The adventure wasn't just about helping Bill and Ted with their essay. It was also about helping Bill and Ted achieve independence, which would later contribute to their reputations in the future. If Rufus just told them exactly what to do, they likely wouldn't have learned to achieve their independence in the same way. They needed to learn it for themselves.
Question: When the historical figures are arrested for causing chaos at the mall, it's clear what most of them did; i.e. Billy the Kid fired his gun, Genghis Khan wrecked the sporting goods store, etc. So what exactly did Sigmund Freud and Socrates do to get arrested?
Chosen answer: It was critical to the storyline to keep all of the historical figures together, which is the primary reason they were all arrested at once. We might speculate that mall security received a number of reports of "odd" characters wandering around the mall. In addition to the shenanigans of Billy and Genghis, Beethoven was pounding out a raucous keyboard performance, Joan of Arc essentially hijacked a dancercize session, and Abraham Lincoln was accused of theft and fled from a vintage photography studio. Importantly, Socrates and Freud made rather strange advances on a couple of (probably underage) teenage girls in the food court, which would surely be enough to get two elderly men arrested in this day and age.
Question: What brand of sunglasses does Rufus wear?
Chosen answer: Oakley.
Answer: While it's not unusual for musicians to try out new instruments (playing a few rifts and even entire compositions) in a music shop, Beethoven's extended sampling-keyboard performance went wild, drawing an enthusiastic mall crowd into the relatively small music shop. The shop manager no doubt felt overwhelmed and called in mall security to clear out the shop before any damage and/or theft occurred. Keep in mind that the security team was already scrambling to respond to several simultaneous disturbances throughout the mall, all caused by 7 strangely-dressed oddballs (more than half of whom only spoke obsolete dialects and ancient languages). The time-travelers were, thus, probably all perceived as one group of pranksters or escapees from a mental institution.
Charles Austin Miller