Culture
Beavis and Butt-Head
“If Beavis and Butt-head were around today, they’d probably be right back on the couch where I left them. That’s where they’ll always be in my mind.” So says Austinite Mike Judge, who created the animated teen duo back in MTV’s halcyon pre-Jackass era and still gets asked about them today. From 1992 to 1997, their half-hour show—a mix of juvenile double entendres (“He said ‘wood.’ Heh-heh-heh”) and withering critiques of cheesy music videos—was a bona fide ratings smash. Their one foray onto the big screen, 1996’s Beavis and Butt-head Do America, grossed $20 million its first weekend (the biggest December opening in history until the next year, when the record was shredded by Scream 2). And then the end came. “I owed MTV one more season on my contract,” Judge says, “but I didn’t want to do it. I was able to negotiate my way out of it.” Judge, who has since gone on to create another popular animated show, Fox’s King of the Hill, trotted out B&B briefly for MTV’s recent twentieth-anniversary gala but has no plans to do anything else with them. Not even to make fun of—heh, heh—President Bush? “Bush’s name would be too obvious a joke,” he says, “even for Beavis and Butt-head.”
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