Their shock and horror at a TikTok clip of a teenage girl emotionally opening college acceptance letters drew an explosion of laughter from me and their response to an ex-convict’s prison tattoo tutorial illustrated Judge’s impeccable ability to do bad Southern accents in the guise of both characters. Through the two half-hour episodes sent to critics, the answer is that Beavis and Butt-Head are predictably watching a lot of TikTok and they’re rather hilarious doing so. So what are Beavis and Butt-Head watching in the new series, and is it funny? That, then, is probably the most important thing to mention or discuss in a review of what Paramount+ is formally calling Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butt-Head, as if there were motley random Beavises and Butt-Heads traversing the digital realm finding mirth in mentions of wood. It was a straight-ahead story that left no room for the ageless chums to kibitz about the latest music videos (as the original series did), MTV reality shows (as the 2011 reboot did) or whatever it is the kids watch today. One thing the movie didn’t do, however, was delve into Beavis and Butt-Head’s 2022 viewing diet. This summer’s Paramount+ feature Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe was a more effective positioning of the characters within our modern context, as they had to learn about white privilege and carceral injustice and did so in their own inimitable fashion. Their 2011 MTV revival was solid if unremarkable, more a toe’s dip in the new millennium’s cultural waters than a full immersion.
So it isn’t the least bit surprising that these characters, birthed in a 1992 short film and then popularized in a 1993-1997 TV series, would be fully adaptable to new generations of media literacy with almost no alterations at all.
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