Ahead of this week's premiere, Paramount made the revival's first two episodes available to members of the press (heh, heh, heh, "members"), and for the TV-watching bits, it sure seems like someone connected an Internet video-streaming box to the duo's ancient rabbit-ear television. These scenes are clearly curated by and for people who watch videos on the Internet. Once again, we're back to the old TV series shtick of fully animated episodes interrupted by video-watching joke fests.
This week, the animated series' second revival emerges two months after a feature-length Paramount+ film, Beavis & Butt-Head Do the Universe (itself an "Ars" film thanks to its send-ups of American space travel and multiverse sci-fi concepts). While this revival briefly referenced a then-burgeoning YouTube, the 2011 version wasn't ready to imagine a universe in which either Beavis or Butt-Head knew how to work a desktop computer or a TiVo. This was when MTV essentially acknowledged that the "M" in its name had been all but wiped out by reality shows, dating contests, and blacklight nightmares. You may have missed the first Beavis & Butt-Head revival, which lasted only one season in 2011 and updated the series' TV sequences to include snippets of original MTV programming, particularly Jersey Shore. Last month, Paramount+ brought back a tiny percentage of original Beavis & Butt-Head video-watching sequences, but most did not make the cut.) Advertisement (In the years since, those licensing rights are far messier. MTV had the rights to rebroadcast those videos at the time, and in a way, Beavis & Butt-Head became another MTV broadcasting block of videos when it ruled the pop-culture world. The rest of each episode was filled with the titular characters (heh, heh, heh) watching music videos while Judge rattled off jokes in their voices.
Plus, instead of animating full 22-minute episodes, each episode only had roughly 10 to 12 minutes of traditional animation. Crude animation kept costs down while also pairing well with the series' grungy '90s tone. (I'm not sure that any older episodes featured a drill, but maybe they did.)įor anyone who missed Beavis & Butt-Head in the '90s, the MTV series wasn't just a massive pop-culture sensation but also a cleverly low-cost operation. A primer: The original series, the 2011 rebootĪnd, of course, Beavis' longtime best friend, a drill. But one thing stands out as an interesting generational marker: a change to the series' old TV-watching scenes and how their execution reflects a new era of app-fueled media consumption. This means a few things for the series, and some of those aren't relevant to Ars Technica (though I'll summarize my general thumbs-up opinion later). Yet crucially, the series has been taken over by a new generation of writers and directors who grew up on creator Mike Judge's original version. If you still fondly recall the '90s pastiche of the world's two stupidest teens' giggling, moronic hijinks, with "TV" interruptions between scenes, Beavis & Butt-Head's newest episodes, debuting Thursday, August 4, exclusively on Paramount+, will do it for you. The easiest review of this week's new Beavis & Butt-Head TV series revival could probably be written as:
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