SALON

Thursday, Oct 27, 2011 2:02 PM UTC

Beavis and Butt-head shocker: 14 years later, but no more mature

Huh-huh, huh-huh. They made a comeback. But for MTV's cartoon delinquents, it might as well still be 1997

By

Topics: Television, MTV, TV,

Beavis and Butt-head shocker: 14 years later, but no more mature (Credit: MTV)

Huh-huh, huh-huh, huh-huh. Beavis and Butt-head are back. Did anyone really miss them, though? And can a resurrected version of the cartoon duo’s series be anything but a bad idea?

Judging from tonight’s premiere (MTV, 10 p.m./9 central) — the first new “Beavis and Butt-head” episode since 1997 — the answer to both questions is “no.”

Watching a ’90s pop culture-dependent show try to revive itself after 14 years is a weird and vaguely depressing experience, like revisiting your old high school as an adult and failing to feel nostalgic. For whatever reason, creator Mike Judge decided not to age his adolescent blockheads. They’re still gawky, zit-faced teens, but instead of stumbling and blithering through Clinton-era suburbia and goofing almost exclusively on ’80s and early ’90s music videos, they live in 2011 suburbia and make fun of the new MTV staples, “Jersey Shore” and “True Life.”  (They make fun of music videos, too, but the jokes feel slightly off because they’re watching them on MTV, which all but banished videos as a programming mainstay over a decade ago; for some reason it reminded me of seeing Don Rickles in concert in the late ’90s and feeling sad when he joked about Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr., then ended each bit with “God rest his soul.”)

In the first of two shorts, B&B hatch a typically deranged plan to score with “Twilight”-era vampire-worshipping teens by turning undead or supernatural or whatever it is that jailbait chicks are into these days. (Failing to locate any local vampires, they decide that a homeless man with sharp teeth will suffice because he’s probably a werewolf.) In the second segment, Beavis mistakenly eats a slice of red onion while he and Butt-head are watching “The Bachelor,” sheds a reflexive tear, and is mocked for being a sissy. Beavis recovers quickly, but Butt-head keeps teasing him while they watch a “True Life” episode about a porn addict. “One of my favorite things to do is smoke cigars and watch porno — keep it luxurious,” says the porn aficionado, a bespectacled, tattooed, pierced hipster dork who lives with his grandma. “This guy kicks ass!” Butt-head exclaims.

It’s all faintly amusing, just as the original “Beavis and Butt-head” was faintly amusing. The “Twilight” riffing and vampire/werewolf/zombie talk in the first segment is probably Judge’s way of acknowledging that in a sense, Beavis and Butt-head are already vampires; the world has changed, but they haven’t. The payoff  – a flash-foward to Beavis and Butt-head in a nursing home — is pretty sweet. But it also hints at a potentially mind-blowing update that we apparently aren’t going to see.  Think of how unsettling it would have been for fans to turn on the new “Beavis and Butt-head” and see the duo still sitting on that same couch in their mid-’30s, 20 pounds heavier, considerably balder and still incapable of having meaningful relationships with anyone except each other. I’m not sure whether a show like that would win a Peabody Award for its comic brilliance or get canceled after a week because it drove millions of viewers to suicide. But I’m going to dream about it anyway.

Matt Zoller Seitz

More Matt Zoller Seitz.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 13 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations