Paramount+
Audio By Carbonatix
It’s been almost a decade since we’ve seen TV’s greatest pair of animated morons use their dwindling intellect to make a fruitless attempt to score. That ends today.
Beavis and Butt-head themselves announced more than a year ago that they were working on a new, feature-length movie for the streaming channel Paramount+. Now the new film has a trailer and a June 23 release date.
The duo’s second film and a full reboot called Beavis and Butt-head Do the Universe will send them to space and forward in time to the present through a series of bizarre circumstances fueled by their unrelenting stupidity. That’s not a huge stretch since their hometown of Highland is based in Texas, but we’ll get to that later.
During their space shuttle mission, Beavis and Butt-head go for a space walk – probably because the astronauts needed a few minutes away from them to collect their sanity. That’s when they get sucked into a black hole and propelled forward in our time to 2022 where they’ll find ways to laugh at the syllables in names of futuristic things like Bluetooth and the Xbox.
There’s been talk of a new incarnation of animator Mike Judge’s creation for over a year and a half. It started at the end of 2020 when Comedy Central announced a complete revamp of its programming, with a greater focus on animation. Some of the shows in development included a Beavis and Butt-head reboot as well as a spinoff of the popular ’90s MTV animated show Daria, which itself is a spin-off of the original Beavis and Butt-head. The announcement was part of a deal created between Judge and 3 Arts Entertainment and included a two-season commitment to the new run.
A year later, Paramount+ released a surprise teaser trailer with Beavis and Butt-head struggling to use the video conferencing program Zoom to make the announcement about the new movie from their iconic red couch.
The duo’s first film, Beavis and Butt-head Do America, hit movie theaters in 1996 at the height of the show’s popularity, earning more than $20 million in ticket sales on its opening weekend, according to Box Office Mojo.
Judge created Beavis and Butt-head in one of three, hand-drawn short animations he made while living in Garland. The short film Frog Baseball featured the famous dunderheads partaking in their favorite pastime, which is exactly what it sounds like. MTV conducted a test screening of Frog Baseball in 1992 that showed an unprecedented positive response from an all-male focus group, which led to a greenlight for a full season and series premiere the following year.
Judge went on to create two more succesful sitcoms including the FOX animated show King of the Hill, also being retooled for a reboot, and the HBO dramedy Silicon Valley.
King of the Hill is not the first series in Judge’s filmography to be based in Texas. That honor goes to Beavis and Butt-head. Judge explained in a Q&A at the Austin Film Festival in 2011 that he never intended to set Beavis and Butthead’s hometown of Midland in Texas. He wanted to create a nondescript Southwest town that was a cross between Dallas and Albuquerque, where he grew up and the source of most of the show’s characters. But during the making of Beavis and Butt-head Do America, artists put Texas license plates on the vehicles in the movie as it went into animation.
“Somebody went and put Texas license plates on everything because it was all just squares,” Judge said. “So now it’s Texas. You can’t undo those things really.”
