Heidi: So, Jared. This summer you acquired every season of the original Beavis and Butthead show and re-watched every episode.
Jared: Yes. Yes I did.
Heidi: Why did you do that? Was it in preparation for Beavis and Butthead coming back on? It starts this Thursday.
Jared: No, not at all. It started because I was looking for that one video that was so hilarious to us that we couldn’t find on YouTube. There is this black and white video of this awful metal band and the parents are taking this 15-year-oldish kid on a picnic and the kid is all like, “You don’t understand me!” and he runs away all sad. Beavis and Butthead are like, “Oh, Daddy doesn’t love me!” and “I wish my dad would take me on a picnic, I wish I knew who my dad was.” It was just so funny and sad and smart. I had to find that one video.
To be honest, I kept going out of nostalgia (and also because that video was on the seventh disc I burned). I didn’t have MTV growing up (besides catching the odd 120 Minutes at friends’ houses). When I got to BYU and had TV I really watched Beavis and Butthead a lot. It is a bit of a time capsule to me, the end of high school and right before I went on my mission. And it is not the big bands I really liked, but the mediocre to awful bands that were on the show. Like Material Issue, they were never really that great, but they were around. There is something about remembering how it actually was instead of just the good stuff.
Heidi: I saw Material Issue in concert. I skipped the first day of school in my sophomore year to go to a festival with my neighbor and they played. They were not great, but not really bad either.
Jared: I don’t know, it was just a period in time when I felt really strongly about certain kinds of music. I really liked industrial music and I actually didn’t like that much grunge. You forget that there were a thousand copycat grunge bands at the time and they were horrible. I liked watching someone else say they were horrible.
Heidi: Did you like the storylines or the videos? For me, it was the videos, I thought some of their observations were really acute, really funny. But the episodes themselves — it is kind of like my Butters problem on South Park. South Park is often so smart and funny, but I cringe my way through episodes with too much physical humor or when they are mean to Butters.
Jared: I think that’s because you’re a girl.
Heidi: Because I’m a girl?
Jared: You’re a girl and you weren’t around boys who were like that — nihilistic and cruel. I knew a lot of boys like that. You find cruelty so abhorrent that you can’t see the humor in it.
Heidi: Well that’s true, but I’m not sure it’s a gender issue. I get that there is something cathartic about finding humour in awful stuff, but I think it is a fine line between commenting on something and creating more of it. But, for you, it rang true?
Jared: Yeah, there was always that one kid that got picked on, like the way they were mean to Stewart. Talking about girls in this awful way when no girl would ever come near you. A lot of sitting around talking about things you didn’t really know about.
Heidi: I always had MTV and saw a lot of Beavis and Butthead, but it was like you didn’t have to set out to watch it; it was always on. The time I really paid attention was when we moved to the reservation in New Mexico and we didn’t have cable for a month. We had one of those TVs with the DVD and VCR-player built in and you used to keep a tape in the VCR and record when anything good came on. You called them your Totally Awesome Mix Video Tapes, remember those? There would be videos, funny infomercials, parts of movies, early bits of The Daily Show and lots and lots of Beavis and Butthead.
Jared: That was my anthropological study on television. I wish we still had those.
Heidi: They’re in storage somewhere in America, but we don’t have a VCR to watch them. The tapes were great, but frenetic, you didn’t have anything complete, it was all in fragments.
Jared: I think if you were going to go back in time and have a guide to the early 90s it would be Beavis and Butthead. They were commenting on everything that was going on — grunge, metal, hippie teachers — I hated those do-gooder aging hippie types, I had those teachers — political-correctness and that Gen X sense of no future.
Heidi: Actually, when you watched the episodes this summer, I thought the commentary on gender and sexism was really funny.
Jared: Very smart. It is very difficult to say a lot with such a limited palette — these moronic 15-year-olds with a limited vocabulary.
Heidi: Sometimes I think it’s easier. I think the convention allows you a lot of freedom.
Jared: South Park is like that, but South Park is so much more sophisticated. It is amazing that Beavis and Butthead could do so much with so little. (Looking on his Blackberry) There were 200 episodes of Beavis and Butthead, did you know that?
Heidi: Wow. What do you think of them starting it up again? Good idea?
Jared: Mike Judge is doing it, so hopefully he’ll have the same sharp, witty commentary about today’s kids.
Heidi: Judge is generally underrated, I think. I’ve read that since there aren’t videos on MTV anymore that Beavis and Butthead will comment on Jersey Shore, YouTube clips and the occasional video. Timely, but it makes me a little sad.
Jared: They really couldn’t do the music because MTV doesn’t play music.
Heidi: I know, that’s why it makes me sad. What are your favorite episodes?
Jared: Not so much favorite episodes, as videos. Obviously, the one I looked for this summer. And I love the Live video.
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Heidi: And, I love the one where they call Pavement out for being lazy. The Soundgarden ones are good too.
Jared: And the one with Kathleen Hanna —
Heidi: “Bull in the Heather!” Sonic Youth. So, will you give the new one a chance?
Jared: Yeah, but we might be too old.
Heidi: I’m sure we are.
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I love it! I can’t stand Beavis and Butthead, but I like Jared’s analogy – they are very much like a time capsule of our generation. However, on the flip side I enjoy South Park. Hmm, what’s the difference?
I think South Park is a much better show. Jared and I argued about it this morning (not always soul mates, after all :)), he thinks they are both good, but trying to accomplish different things. I agree, but I don’t think they are of the same caliber. Beavis and Butthead is more about authenticity and a subtle filtering of the times (this kind of reminds me of all the indie movies at the same time, like Linklater’s Slacker). It’s an interesting exercise, but I think it is ultimately limited. Whereas South Park is so much bigger in scope, tends to be more message-oriented and has enough voices to deliver a lot of nuance (irreverntly, but still). But all that aside, I like South Park better because it doesn’t have that nihilism that Jared talked about. I get that there are and were kids like Beavis and Butthead, but it doesn’t resonate. Daria, on the other hand …
I like the one where they are making fun of the band James on the “Say Something” video. Beavis and Butthead want to know what James’s last name is. One of them speculates that the music sucks so bad that James parents would let him use their last name… “We’re sorry James, we love you, but your music sucks, and you can’t use our last name.” Wish I could find that clip.
I saw that this summer, it was hilarious.
loved this! You two are definitely soul mates!
Oh man, I love Beavis and Butthead. I’ve been sorely tempted to find these and show them to our kids, but I think they’re still a little young. Glad to hear they are making a comeback.
I never got into Beavis & Butthead, but my younger brother did. We showed our kids the snippet where they are in the principal’s office and they take over the intercom. One of them holds the mic and says, “Testes, testes, 1, 2 . . . 3?” And then they both laugh uproariously with that annoying laugh.
Jared tried to convince me that the kids could watch a little bit this summer. He showed them an episode and they started chanting, “Diahrrea cha cha cha!” and then some really inappropriate sex jokes came on. He was like, “Oh, maybe not …”
Feeling so very old…..
I found this post because I Googled “Beavis and Butt-head picnic,” because my husband is also going through every episode trying to find the episode with “I wish my dad would take me on a picnic.” Did you find the episode you were looking for, and do you remember its title? He and I went through the same thing maybe two years ago, and I’m sure I saw your post then, too.