The 1989 film Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure features a pair of dim-witted teenagers traveling through time to retrieve historical figures to make an oral presentation for their history class.
Bill and Ted use a phone booth as their time-traveling vessel.
The creators of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure originally intended their time travel vessel to be a 1969 van. They were concerned that the van might too closely resemble the Delorean in Back to the Future.
The time machine was initially going to look like a 1969 Chevy van, but the filmmakers decided that was too similar to the DeLorean from "Back to the Future." Instead, they made it look like a vintage phone booth.
The television series Doctor Who originally aired in 1963. "The Doctor" is a Time-Lord who explores the universe usually fighting off some type of threat at different points in history.
The Police Box that the Doctor travels around in is really a Type 40 time and space machine from Gallifrey, his home planet. TARDIS stands for Time And Relative Dimension in Space.
"The Doctor" uses the TARDIS as a time traveling vessel.
The similarities between the TARDIS and a time-traveling phone booth are far more apparent than the similarities between a 1969 van and a DeLorean.
Is there any evidence that the filmmakers of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure were influenced by the TARDIS from the Doctor Who series?