What do you get when you give two morons a baseball bat and a frog?
One of the most successful -- and controversial -- animated series of all time.
This is the untold truth of Beavis and Butt-Head.
As a high schooler, Mike Judge loved to doodle in his notebooks during class,
but he eventually pursued a career in engineering. When he happened to attend an animation festival,
however, he rediscovered his longtime love of cartooning. He revealed to the AV Club:
"I'd always wanted to try animation. I thought of
animation as something I wanted to try if I was ever rich or retired."
Judge spent $200 on a Bolex camera, acquired a lightbox, some ink and paper, and drew a
cartoon about a nerdy office worker named Milton. Judge sold his cartoon, Office Space,
to the now-nonexistent Comedy Channel for $2,000, and it went on to inspire the 1999 comedy of the
same name. That was when Judge realized that making cartoons could be a full-time job.
"Then we'll be able to get money and chicks and stuff."
"Yeah. Yeah! We are there."
Judge canceled his plan to become a math teacher and created another animated short
called Frog Baseball. The short starred two deviant youths — Beavis and Butt-Head,
both voiced by Judge — violently abusing a small amphibian . MTV's animation showcase
Liquid Television bought the short, and network executives liked it so
much that they signed Judge to produce 65 episodes of Beavis and Butt-Head.
Not only are Beavis and Butt-Head among the most uniquely unintelligent characters in TV history,
they've got two of the most original names seen on the small screen. Creator
Mike Judge got those monikers from real-life inspirations, telling Wild Cartoon Kingdom:
"When I was in college, a 12-year-old kid next door called himself Iron Butt. [...] His friend,
actually, we called Butt-Head, even though that wasn't his name. Then there
was a kid in the neighborhood about three blocks away, his name was Bobby Beavis."
Judge says that the real-life Beavis was nothing like the cartoon character:
he just liked the name. The characters' distinct voices came from real-life, too:
Judge explained to The Daily Bruin that Beavis' high-pitched cackle
"Came from this guy in my calculus class that would sit in the front,
and always bite his lip and turn back and go 'heh heh.' That to me just turned into his laugh."
As for Butt-Head, Judge says that the inspiration for him came from his childhood,
having once dealt with uncomfortable dental problems. Judge revealed:
"I had braces in high school, and they'd scrape your cheek,
and you ended up talking like Butt-Head.That's how I got the voice for Butt-Head,
just a guy talking with a mouth full of wires."
Not counting a couple of shorts that aired on Liquid Television,
the first episode of Beavis and Butt-Head debuted on MTV on March 8, 1993, to immediate success.
Network Vice President Abby Terkuhle told the Los Angeles Times:
"They're perfect for MTV. They like and respond to things that our audience finds humorous.
Maybe our audience can see a little bit of themselves in Beavis and Butt-Head."
MTV knew it had a hit on its hands and made plans to produce merchandise and feature the
duo elsewhere in its programming, all before its premiere. Unfortunately, plans took a turn:
just a week after its premiere, MTV halted the show's three daily airings. With just a handful of
animated segments, the network had to rerun them endlessly during premiere week because Judge and
his animation team had fallen behind. Instead of showing the same few episodes for weeks,
MTV pulled the show momentarily and brought it back in May 1993 with plenty of new material.
"Hey Butthead, how long till something good's on TV?"
"Uh, two hours, dude."
Beavis and Butt-Head watch TV, attend high school, and slack off at work in a sleepy little
town called Highland. Its sandy terrain, constant sun, and hot temperatures suggest that Highland is
located somewhere in the American Southwest, such as New Mexico or Texas. The ambiguous location of
Highland was Mike Judge's intention: he said in an interview at the Austin Film Festival,
"I grew up mostly in Albuquerque. And I was in Dallas when I created it,
so I was thinking somewhere in between those, like, just one of those,
like a little town [...] like Lubbock, or you know, Portales, New Mexico."
When the 1996 film Beavis and Butt-Head Do America went into production, an animator slapped Texas
license plates on some cars in background shots. Judge was happy to go along with it, joking,
"So now it's Texas."
Half of any Beavis and Butt-Head episode involves the titular characters wreaking
havoc on their school and around the neighborhood.
The other half involves the characters sitting on a filthy couch and offering
savage critiques of music videos. Once in a while, Beavis and Butt-Head would come across a band that
"rocks" or "rules," and viewers would get a little animation of the guys head-banging or dancing.
Musical artists that received this exposure and an on-air seal of approval often experienced major
boosts in record sales. Before Beavis and Butt-Head debuted in early 1993,
the band White Zombie had sold just 75,000 copies of its 1992 album La Sexorcisto:
Devil Music Vol. 1. After the cartoon featured a White Zombie video, sales quadrupled, and
the album hit the Billboard top 40 chart. Babes in Toyland's little-noticed 1992 LP Fontanelle
started selling about 1,000 copies a week after "Bruise Violet" hit Beavis and Butt-Head.
For a rock band in the 90s, getting your video on the show was a recipe for musical success.
For every band that enjoyed the exposure they got from Beavis and Butt-Head,
there was another that took offense when the show made fun of them.
In one episode, the boys briefly view an Aerosmith clip, and come to the conclusion
that the band is pretty cool — even if they're old. According to Mike Judge,
Aerosmith pressured MTV into taking it out, and they never watched another Aerosmith video again.
On another occasion, MTV once told Judge to stop making fun of the hair
band Winger because the channel, quote, "had a good relationship with them."
Even if an artist liked the show, their music could still get nixed.
During the brief 2011 Beavis and Butt-Head revival,
Kanye West wanted the duo to watch and riff on one of his videos. Judge told Rock News Desk:
"He wanted it on, and then somebody who owns, like, six percent of the songwriting said no."
"Uh. Yeah."
"Makes sense to me, yeah."
Beavis and Butt-Head weren't exactly what most parents would call good kids. They catcalled
women, they were rude to adults, they listened to loud and aggressive heavy metal music,
and they loved playing with fire. Beavis in particular was a pyromaniac, and in early
episodes, he'd flick a lighter and shout so often that it was basically a catchphrase.
In October 1993, about six months after Beavis and Butt-Head premiered on MTV,
a five-year-old Ohio boy named Austin Messner got a hold of a lighter and set his bed on fire.
The blaze quickly spread throughout his family's mobile home. Messner and his mother, Darcy Burk,
escaped but the boy's two-year-old sister unfortunately died in the fire.
Burk and local authorities placed the blame for the tragedy squarely on Beavis and Butt-Head.
She claimed to have recently caught her son playing with matches and removed his bedroom
door so she could keep an eye on him. Area Fire Chief Harold Sigler told The New York Times:
"When you take a child in the formative years, and you get these cartoon characters
saying it's fun to play with fire, this is going to stick in that kid's mind."
MTV spokesperson Carole Robinson promised the network would look into the issue,
and ultimately ended up removing all references to fire from past and future episodes of the show.
In 2008, Messner, who was 20 years old at the time, came forward with his side of the story:
"I literally NEVER saw the cartoon. How could I? It was 1993,
my Mom was a drug addict. We couldn't afford cable!"
"It's stupid just to blame a TV show for the problems that a family is having.
I mean it's not real, anybody knows, that's not real people."
Beavis and Butt-Head spawned all kinds of tie-in merchandise,
including the 1993 Geffen Records album The Beavis and Butt-Head Experience. It included a cover of
Sonny and Cher's 1965 hit "I Got You, Babe," as performed by Beavis, Butt-Head and the real Cher.
In the cover, Beavis and Butt-Head explain how the legendary performer checks all the
boxes for what the duo wants in a woman. During a spoken interlude in the song, Butt-Head asks Cher:
"Didn't you used to be married to that Bono dude from U2?"
When she clarifies the situation, explaining she was married to Sonny Bono,
Butt-Head calls her ex-husband a "wuss," and Cher agrees, saying:
"[...] Well kinda, yeah."
The exchange was improvised in the studio in one take.
Geffen executive Tony Berg told the Los Angeles Times:
"She was not just a willing participant, but also she
got into the self-deprecation of it and how funny it was."
Cher's ex-husband didn't find it funny, though. Sonny Bono told the Los Angeles Times:
"I've got very thick skin so I would probably lose about one second of sleep over the whole deal.
But in a way I'm sad to see Cher reduce herself to that kind of humor."
Rightfully considered problematic today, Beavis and Butt-Head debuted one of its
silliest and most memorable bits in 1994: Beavis's alter ego, The Great Cornholio.
Whenever he rapidly consumes massive quantities of coffee or sugar,
Beavis pulls the neck of his T-shirt over his head and declares himself "The Great Cornholio."
"You can take me, but you cannot take my bunghole, for I have no bunghole. I am the Great Cornholio."
Using a quasi-Latin American accent, Beavis typically causes mayhem as the
Great Cornholio while demanding toilet paper from strangers. If anyone dares
interact with Beavis while he's in Cornholio mode, he yells out his rhetorical catchphrase:
"Are you threatening me?"
The character seems like a baffling collection of nonsense, but its origin comes from a true source.
Mike Judge told Phoenix New Times:
"It just hit me like a ton of bricks one night when I was about to go to
sleep — Beavis should pull his tee-shirt over his head and start babbling."
Judge doesn't remember where the name Cornholio originated, but can pinpoint the inspiration for
the voice — an irate customer from when he worked as a movie theater ticket-taker. He explained:
"I had to tell people to wait outside. And this one Middle Eastern guy came up and said,
'No! I will not wait outside!' [...] And I said I was sorry but those were the rules, and he said,
'Are you threatening me?' He kept saying it, and it stuck in my mind."
When Beavis and Butt-Head originally aired on MTV in the mid-1990s, the channel was primarily
an outlet for music videos. The title characters, who were music-loving metalheads, fit seamlessly
into the format. Each animated episode was broken up with segments of the duo watching pop and rock
videos on MTV while offering commentary ranging from unabashed praise to pointed putdowns.
Beavis and Butt-Head creator Mike Judge also voiced both Beavis and Butt-Head,
and in order to record the video commentary, he employed a particular but loose process.
He told Wild Cartoon Kingdom in 1994:
"I just go in and improvise a lot of them. A lot of times,
one of the writers will come and just hang out and kind of help out. But we
just watch the video a bunch of times and then I go into the booth and mess around."
Segment producer Susie Lynn would edit Judge's bits and jokes,
merging them with clips from the music videos and recycled animation from the show. Judge revealed:
"All the cutaways of B&B during the videos are all pulled from past
shows. Once in a while we'll animate one."
Despite being each other's best and only friends, Beavis and Butt-Head routinely cut each other down
with crass, crude, and demeaning insults. Most are full of words we can't say here,
but there's one that stuck out for its timbre, creativity, and reference to
something more profane: dill weed. Plenty of kids and teenagers in school hallways
imitated what they heard on Beavis and Butt-Head, lobbing the same insults at each other.
Unlike the other phrases, however, "dill weed" was actually created and coined by Mike Judge himself.
It's an adaptation of an insult he'd used and heard as a kid. Judge told The Awl:
"When I was in junior high in the '70s
people would call each other d—weed. It was a pretty common insult. I tried to do it in
'Beavis and Butt-Head' and standards and practices at MTV wouldn't let me say it."
During a recording session, he improvised the word "dillweed" instead,
and it stuck. Judge elaborated:
"It kind of got a laugh, and it cleared with the network censors, so I just kind of kept doing it."
After more than 200 episodes, the hit movie Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, and millions
of teens imitating The Great Cornholio, Beavis and Butt-Head ended its run on MTV in November 1997.
The two-part finale featured a live Thanksgiving special with MTV News personality Kurt Loder,
and a final animated installment called Beavis and Butt-Head Are Dead.
Of course, Beavis and Butt-Head don't really die: they just forget to go to school for three weeks.
When someone from Highland High calls to talk with a parent,
Beavis claims that he and Butt-Head are dead to get them off the phone.
So why did the show end? Well, it was time for creator Mike Judge to walk away.
He told the Los Angeles Times:
"I actually wanted to stop a little sooner. After the second season,
I thought, 'How are we gonna do this anymore?' I was completely burnt out."
So by 1997, he wondered:
"Why not retire before it gets too stale or whatever?"
"Hey Butthead, are we gonna die?"
"Uh, probably."
Judge immediately moved on to other projects,
such as the second season of his successful animated Fox sitcom King of the Hill.
Daria Morgendorffer, a cynical, smart, exasperated Highland High School classmate
of Beavis and Butt-Head, didn't appear in Mike Judge's original Beavis and Butt-Head cartoon
or any of the other early shorts. According to HuffPost,
she was created after Judge sold the show to MTV in order to flesh out the world of the series.
Judge's inspiration for the character was independent cartoonist Lynda Barry
and her semi-autobiographical comic strips. Judge told Vulture:
"I partly based the character Daria on how I imagine Lynda Barry would have been in
high school. I drew Daria dressed like Lynda would dress when she went on 'Letterman.'"
After Beavis and Butt-Head became a smash hit, Judge and the rest of the writing staff
slowly eased Daria out of the show. According to The New York Times,
viewers expressed their praise to MTV for the minor character. MTV writer Glenn Eichler said:
"Basically, she was the smart person who hung out with Beavis and Butt-Head to annoy her parents."
In 1995, MTV issued a directive to its collective of writers and producers
to make an animated show with a young female viewership in mind.
Eichler suggested to executives that they didn't need to create anything new — they
could simply spin off Daria onto her own show. Thus, Daria ran on MTV from 1997 to 2001.
In 2009, Mike Judge wrote and directed the comedy Extract, with Jason Bateman starring
as a flavor extract plant owner dealing with a troubled marriage and problems at work.
Earning middling reviews and only $10 million at the American box office,
Extract was a rare misfire for Judge — but it did lead to a brief revival of Beavis and Butt-Head.
"Are we dead?"
"I guess not."
"Oh, yeah yeah."
Judge told Collider that during a marketing meeting for Extract,
someone came up with the idea of a promotional clip featuring Beavis and Butt-head watching a
scene from the movie and commenting about it on their famous couch. Now throw in another
relative flop from Judge — the short-lived 2009 ABC cartoon The Goode Family — and the
stars aligned for a full-scale revival of Beavis and Butt-Head on MTV in 2011.
MTV didn't show many music videos anymore,
so the guys had to provide snarky commentary on MTV reality shows like Jersey Shore.
Unfortunately, the new Beavis and Butt-Head lasted just one season.
It wasn't all bad news for Mike Judge in the world of TV, though:
he would go on to create the hit HBO series Silicon Valley in 2014.
In the summer of 2019, Beavis and Butt-Head creator Mike Judge
revealed to /Film that another movie may be on the horizon. Judge said:
"I think it would have to be something that makes it relevant today.
I think I might've figured out a way to do that."
Indeed, it would seem that he figured it out. Paramount, the parent company of MTV,
announced in 2022 that before the year was out, a new movie featuring the stupid twosome would
hit its streaming service, Paramount+. According to TheWrap, Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe,
the spiritual successor to 1996's big-screen Beavis and Butt-Head Do America,
was described by Paramount as "perhaps the dumbest space movie ever made." Beginning in 1998,
a judge with a penchant for creative sentencing orders Beavis and Butt-Head to attend space camp.
From there, the pair accidentally makes their way onto the Space Shuttle, then deep into the cosmos
before eventually falling through a black hole and returning to Earth in the 2020s. Of course, the
movie will also serve as a launchpad to an entire new season of the Beavis and Butt-Head TV series.
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