A Life Through Film #043: Beavis and Butt-Head Do America

The decade's wisest cultural critics venture forth from their home and discover the breathtaking wonders of the US of A

Release Date: 12/20/1996

Weeks at Number One: 1

Thanks for reading! This is my ongoing series where I track the evolution of American culture in my life by reviewing every number one film at the weekend box office since I was born in chronological order. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading my introduction post here, and be sure to like and share the review if you enjoyed it!

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Besides maybe the 1960s, no other decade is as defined in cultural memory by its counterculture than the 1990s.

Gen X’s cultural adolescence became everybody else’s problem early in the decade, thanks to Nirvana and the ensuing alt-rock boom. Gangsta rap, extreme sports, and late-in-decade developments like Attitude Era pro wrestling, South Park, and nu-metal all capitalized on a mass teenage sense of irony and aggression. Without the possibility of a nuclear world war dangling over their heads like previous generations of adolescents, Gen X found themselves coming of age in a time of boredom that their parents found comforting, even as the youth felt stifled. Teen media sought to give them some excitement.

In prior decades, countercultures were true grassroots affairs until the bitter end when, inevitably, someone has to sell out. The ‘90s were different in that much of this rebellious, youth-driven media was corporately run nearly from the word go. Nevermind was a major label release, the X Games had massive sponsors like Red Bull, and Mortal Kombat was backed by some of the most powerful forces in the video game business getting it into every arcade in America. Parents could be as mad as they wanted that their kids were getting into violent games, music, and hobbies, but this era of youth in revolt was a targeted push by corporate America to get ahead of and capitalize on teenage tastes.

One corporate force in particular was a power pusher of the Gen X counterculture. Kurt Cobain doesn’t become the voice of a generation if the kids he spoke for didn’t see him all the time on MTV.

The music and pop culture channel was far more tapped into actual teenage tastes back then than any current cable network today, driving both the early ‘90s alt-rock boom and the late ‘90s teeny bopper explosion through the power of music video driven branding. Brand deals with extreme sports figures and pro wrestling companies furthered MTV’s brand power as a hub for teen culture. Presenters on the channel like Carson Daly and Pauly Shore became celebrities in their own right thanks to their popularity as video jockeys.

Nowadays, the channel exists as the whiff of a shadow, a hub of useless reality television lost amid hundreds of other cable offerings in an era where more and more people are cutting the cord. MTV ran the teenage ‘90s though, at least partly thanks to its most iconic antiheroes.

Even after all my research into them and their origins, Beavis and Butt-Head remain an enigma to me. Why do they look like that? Why do they sound like that?

It’s almost certainly a generational gap. I get it. I remember the shocked looks of confused terror from The Olds when they saw the stuff I enjoyed as a teenager (Epic Meal Time was always tough to explain). I guess you had to be there, wrapped up in the zeitgeist of irony, nihilism, boredom, anger, and music of the moment, to really vibe with Beavis and Butt-Head.

Here’s the concept for the show, if you’re like me and have never watched an episode. Beavis and Butt-Head are animated, moronic, misanthropic 15-year-olds who barely go to school and don’t know how to be functional human beings in society, polite or otherwise. They aren’t smart enough to care about education, politics, or basic ideas of what things like “jobs” entail. It isn’t clear if they have any families. If they believe in God, it’s because they see their beloved TV as His manifestation on Earth. They like to destroy things, hurt each other, and watch music videos (a nice piece of brand synergy). They mostly communicate with one another using annoying chortles and kicks to the nuts.

To Beavis and Butt-Head, things either suck or rule. It’s a simple system for unexamined lives, and yet their show was one of the biggest of the ‘90s. Beavis and Butt-Head started out as a weekly half-hour show in early 1993. By September of that year, it was broadcast twice daily every weekday with a spin off show and an hour-long primetime block on Saturdays. The pair were immediately a merchandising empire unto themselves, the go to t-shirt decal for kids of various levels of disaffection everywhere.

There is so much contemporaneous coverage of the show that not only frames it as one of the most beloved shows on television, but one of the most influential. Like so many other teen interests before and since, the show caused a moral panic.

The kids were not alright, they were learning how to be stupider and more violent from this idiotic cartoon! Two different cases involving the tragic deaths of toddlers initially put the blame on fans of the show recreating the chaos of Beavis and Butt-Head. Like the outrage over video game violence at around the same time, that turned out to be unfounded (neither perpetrators had ever actually watched the show). But the ire of parents wasn’t solely based on these tragedies.

Everyone agreed that Beavis and Butt-Head marked a new intellectual low in the history of television; its young fans thought that was awesome. Older cultural critics, on the other hand, saw the success of Beavis, Butt-Head, and their fellow cartoon troublemaker Bart Simpson as a troubling sign of America’s future.

Dr. Daniel Murphy, a history professor at Hanover University at the time, took it one step further, claiming in a 1993 lecture that the pair represented the end of modernism as we know it. Not because they were nihilistic, pop culture-obsessed dullards that kids loved, but more than that, they weren’t even original. After pointing out that Beavis and Butt-Head shared more similarities than not with the Marx brothers, Murphy lamented the death of originality in a way that still rings true today:

We are living amidst other people's ruins, fashioning pale and increasingly crude imitations of other people's masterworks. Modernism, and with it the tottering edifice of the Modern Age, is dying not with a bang, but a whimper.

All this intellectual and parental handwringing likely just made Beavis and Butt-Head more popular amongst the youth. What’s the best way to get teenagers to act a certain way? Tell them that it really bothers their parents when they do.

MTV only ever requested small changes to the content of their cash cow after the first tragic death incorrectly attributed to it, but if they shared any philosophical concerns with the biggest critics of Beavis and Butt-Head, they never let it stop the merchandising bonanza around the show. Beavis and Butt-Head were an IP worth hundreds of millions of dollars within a year of the show’s first episode. Even by 1993, it was clear a movie was inevitable.

Still, the existence of 1996’s Beavis and Butt-Head Do America was not always a sure thing. The suits at MTV and their partners at Geffen Films spent years talking show creator Mike Judge into making the movie, even floating the idea to him of doing a live action adaptation of his characters rather than sticking to animation. Judge, though, had reason to be protective of his imbecile cartoon sons. They had totally changed his life.

At the start of the ‘90s, Judge, then around 30 and a Silicon Valley engineer, quit his job making computer chips to pursue a dual childhood dream of making blues music and cartoons. Judge purchased all the tools necessary to begin crafting his own home animations, the content of which were inspired by people he had met at work and kids he remembered from high school.

His first animated short, 1992’s “Office Space,” made local festival rounds and later inspired Judge’s first live-action film of the same name. Even in this early work, the hallmarks of Judge’s style are clear: charmingly amateurish artstyle, sardonic, dark humor, and a skewering of the mundanities of regular American life. “Office Space” made a local splash, but Judge was already working on his next project. The world wouldn’t have to wait long for him to take those ideas to the big leagues.

Later in ‘92, Judge made his fourth short, and the first to feature Beavis and Butt-Head, “Frog Baseball.” The title is not a metaphor for anything. The boys play baseball with a frog who does not survive the ordeal. There weren’t too many more wrinkles to add to Beavis and Butt-Head as characters from here, and this initial appearance was all it took to take Judge’s work to the next level.

Judge submitted the short to MTV for use on their alternative animation showcase Liquid Television. The success of the short on that show led to network and artist signing a deal that year for a full 35 episode season of Beavis and Butt-Head, with episodes split between misadventures of the title characters and the pair riffing over the network’s music videos. The timing couldn’t have been better; the alt-rock boom was filled with the big guitar riffs and macho lyrics that meatheads like Beavis and Butt-Head could joke about for hours.

The immediate success of the show in 1993 led to a 1994 renewal, MTV now asking for 130 episodes. Judge, who had continued making the show at home all by himself at this point, used this as an opportunity to expand the team. A new animation team was formed in New York, while an ancillary studio in Korea also assisted with creating episodes.

For the record, I don’t think Mike Judge made Beavis and Butt-Head to be prescriptive to American kids and teenagers. The characters were never meant to be role models, and with Millennial hindsight they’re clearly a parody of the media’s perception of Generation X. They were lazy, obsessed with their TV, not that smart; these are complaints that have been levied at teenagers since the dawn of time, just swap out “TV” for the era’s technology du jour. Judge’s work took these worries to their extremes, which allowed teens to live vicariously through the sometimes bad, often just annoying behavior of Beavis and Butt-Head.

MTV added a disclaimer to the show telling kids not to try the stuff they saw the characters do in real life, but the more chaotic moments I’ve seen from the show are so ludicrous and over the top that it almost felt like a deterrent in its own right. It would be like telling kids to not follow in the footsteps of Bugs Bunny.

It was around the second season of Beavis and Butt-Head that MTV came to Judge to talk about a movie adaptation. The network rightly pegged it as easy money, since everything else plastered with Beavis and Butt-Head’s faces was selling like hotcakes. But Judge didn’t want to rush even more than he already had, especially since MTV wanted to make a movie using live-action versions of the characters. I’m always against adapting animation using real actors, but I can see where the network was coming from. At the time, there had been no commercially successful animated movies that weren’t aimed at little kids. Who could have guessed that Beavis and Butt-Head would crash their way through that glass ceiling?

Once the network acquiesced to the movie being animated, and after a bit more thought, Judge signed off on the project and, alongside regular series writer Joe Stillman, began the screenplay for what eventually became Do America.

The pair quickly discovered an easy way to naturally expand the scope of the source material to feature length. As a show, Beavis and Butt-Head takes place solely in the small town of Highland, Texas. The movie, by contrast, tells a road trip story of the characters bumbling their way around the US, from Vegas and the Hoover Dam all the way to Washington DC. The inciting incident that sparks the journey, a stolen TV, quickly sends Beavis and Butt-Head into the middle of an arms smuggling conspiracy, thanks to them accidentally agreeing to act as hitmen for a dangerous criminal (voiced by Bruce Willis, of all people).

If this all sounds silly, congratulations, you’ve figured out Beavis and Butt-Head.¹ These are famously moronic characters who at no point are smart enough to understand the story that they’re in. And surely that’s the downfall of the movie, right? These clowns might be funny for 15 minutes at a time, but this is feature length narrative with no music video breaks. Surely they just aren’t built for this kind of content.

Full disclosure, I went into Do America assuming that I would hate it. Beavis and Butt-Head are annoying, ugly to look at, and are just not something I connect to as someone born in the middle of their heyday.

And yet, I walked away from their cinematic adventure positively delighted.

For me, the weakest part of Do America was its opening minutes. By this point, my lifetime experience with these characters was extremely limited, so I was not mentally prepared for the experience of hanging out with Beavis and Butt-Head for an extended period of time. These opening ten minutes act as the perfect litmus test for how much you’ll enjoy the rest of the adventure.

Do America assumes that if you’re watching it, you are a 13-year-old boy and the year is 1996. The movie does very little to establish these characters or flesh them out at all because you’re supposed to be sitting at the multiplex with a firm idea of who Beavis and Butt-Head are. Plus, it’s not like there’s much to dive into. From the word go, these characters (both voiced by Judge) are CONSTANTLY chittering and chuckling to themselves. They’re single-mindedly obsessed with television and girls, broken up only by moments of violence between the two of them. They are pure id, driven to simple pleasures however necessary.

Does that sound like a good time to you? Or fertile ground for a fun comedy adventure? If not, just go ahead and skip this one. The comedic stylings of Beavis and Butt-Head were so entrenched and successful by the release of Do America that changing it for the pair’s feature length debut would be actively harmful to the brand. There is no lesson to be learned here. No moral, no growth, but that’s the point. These are the wacky misadventures of the most annoying cartoon characters you’ll ever meet, whose trip across the country is driven by comedic coincidence and their own inability to comprehend anything more complicated than a sweet guitar riff. In a way, it’s liberating.

If anything, these idiots are trailblazers. Recently, writer Brendon Holder penned a fascinating examination of “rotting,” the phrase currently being used to describe the time many of us need to feed our screen addictions. The palliative scrolling that he describes in that piece, in which we tune out the world and let the infinite content wash over us, is not dissimilar to how Beavis and Butt-Head live their lives at all time. Our heroes go through increasingly insane circumstances that take them all the way to an armed ATF confrontation outside the White House, but all they want is to be able to sit down in front of their TV and laugh at stupid music videos. They crave the rot.

Yet I wouldn’t describe Beavis and Butt-Head Do America as brainless. It’s as sharply written as you’d expect from Mike Judge, building running gags on top of one another until they begin to weave and escalate in a way that elevates and informs the narrative climax. I thought the lead ATF officer’s obsession with cavity searches was a cheap joke for the first five times that it happened, but it evolves in such a way through interaction with new characters and other jokes that I found myself literally guffawing at it by the end.

It helps that the world surrounding Beavis and Butt-Head is only mostly normal. They’re the goofiest aspect of this movie, and most other characters they interact with barely acknowledge their presence, probably out of discomfort. But every so often, they run into another weirdo who doesn’t quite fit into the world around them. Whether it’s the aforementioned ATF agent, the criminal couple who rope the boys into their plan (Willis and Demi Moore, really married at the time), or their neighbor Tom Anderson, a precursor to later animated Judge protagonist Hank Hill, Beavis and Butt-Head work best as characters when someone else is trying to figure out what their deal even is.

The screenplay also takes time to poke fun at the outrage over Beavis and Butthead itself. An opening dream sequence shows the pair as rampaging monsters, normal people running away in terror as they do their usual thing and destroy a cityscape in the process. The ATF mistakenly label Beavis and Butt-Head as the most dangerous figures in America for unknowingly smuggling a deadly virus, even though our protagonists don’t even recognize the chaos that they cause everywhere they go. It’s not the driving message of the movie, but Judge does a good job framing the moral panic over his characters as a joke in and of itself.

My biggest gripe with Do America is that it’s lacking ambition in a couple of areas. The animation is serviceable, even good in a couple of moments (like during a trippy sequence scored and designed by Rob Zombie as the boys nearly die from heat exposure in the desert), but never great. The team stuck to the general style of the show, which, while iconic, didn’t allow for big moments of impressive blocking or fluid movement. Weirdly, despite being an MTV production about a couple of heavy metal devotees, the soundtrack for Do America feels tepid and ancillary. Red Hot Chili Peppers, AC/DC, and White Zombie are cool to hear every once in a while, but those songs aren’t as essential to the overall package as they should logically be.

Maybe it’s silly to call out a lack of ambition for this movie specifically. Judge and Stillman do a great job crafting a fun, loosely connected adventure for these characters that builds to a shockingly satisfying ending. Does a movie about Beavis and Butt-Head of all characters need animation on the level of a Spiderverse movie [both are 5/5] or an all-timer soundtrack like Pulp Fiction [another 5/5]? Absolutely not. It might have been nice, but it also would have gone against the slacker, everyman style that made the show popular in the first place.

Maybe Beavis and Butt-Head Do America simply caught me on a good day, but after an opening stretch where I found myself annoyed by the boys and their moronic obsession with scoring chicks and watching TV, I found myself getting it. Once the movie revealed to me that these characters were so stupid that they didn’t understand that airplanes fly you places, something clicked for me. Dr. Murphy was right; this is just classic comedy-of-errors stuff, no different from Duck Soup [3.5/5]. As someone who grew up watching Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry reruns, I was able to lock into this movie’s comedic tempo.

There is a high chance you will hate this movie if you try watching it. Hell, the trailer might be enough to give you a permanent ick against this entire franchise. I totally get that. It’s an annoying, obnoxious premise, so much so that it riled up a whole decade of parental outrage. But Beavis and Butt-Head Do America tickled the part of me that enjoys Airplane! [3.5/5] and the early Scary Movie entries. Honestly, it’s more thoughtfully constructed than that latter series, and far less problematic with time. It takes real comedy chops to make something so outwardly sophomoric feel so rewarding.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Mike Judge nailed it here. Do America is about as good a Beavis and Butt-Head movie as you could hope for.

But I’m not exactly a brave outsider critic for saying that. The movie holds a 71% on Rotten Tomatoes, better than most movies I’ve covered for the column.² Roger Ebert really dug it, giving it 3 out of 4 stars and pointing out the obvious to those around him who still didn’t get it:

It would be easy to attack B&B as ignorant, vulgar, depraved, repulsive slobs. Of course they are. But that would miss the point, which is that Mike Judge’s characters reflect parts of the society that produced them. To study B&B is to learn about a culture of narcissism, alienation, functional illiteracy, instant gratification and television zombiehood. Those who deplore Beavis and Butt-Head are confusing the messengers with the message.

Meanwhile, Mick LaSalle from the San Francisco Chronicle offered a more negative take on the movie. He actually also thinks the movie is as good as it could hope to be, but sees that as a lower ceiling than I do:

Beavis and Butt-Head Do America...has some funny moments, and if you're a Beavis and Butt-head fan, you'll enjoy the movie. If you're not a fan yet are somehow coerced into seeing the picture, you probably won't hate it. But you might hate yourself for liking it.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a movie release that was better timed than Do America. The film premiered on December 20th, 1996, just as the nation’s teenagers were getting out of school for Winter break. Fired up, jazzed, and maybe even feeling a bit mischievous, the youth of Gen X had the perfect outlet for this exuberant joy: their old pals Beavis and Butt-Head. The movie crushed its opening weekend with a $20 million gross, the highest ever for a non-Disney animated film. It wasn’t just Beavis and Butt-Head though; keep reading to the end for another major movie that capitalized on this teenage bloc.

Beavis and Butt-Head only lingered in theaters until early April, but it had an impressive domestic gross of $63 million overall, more than making up its $13 million budget. It’s unclear if Do America received any kind of foreign release, which doesn’t surprise me. The whole Beavis and Butt-Head franchise feels specifically locked to America in the ‘90s.

And yet, it couldn’t last forever. The show aired its 200th and final episode in 1997, less than a year after Do America. Judge was burned out, and wanted to move onto other projects. Thankfully for America’s rude teens, South Park came along not long after and kept the crude, animated antics going.

Judge spent some time working on his other animated show, King of the Hill, a brilliantly wry sitcom whose reruns fascinated me as a kid. In 1999, Judge released his first live-action film, a full-length adaptation of Office Space [4/5]. Though a commercial bomb, the satire of white collar doldrums remains a cult favorite, which has kind of been the running motif of Judge’s post-B&B career.

King of the Hill and Office Space are brilliant, but never the biggest comedies in their fields. His 2006 spoof Idiocracy [3/5] bombed hard at the box office, but has grown only more and more popular over time as its relevance continues to be proven. I’ve even heard decent things about 2009’s Extract, probably Judge’s least-regarded movie, another box office bomb that, if history is anything to go off of, will find its audience more as the years go on.

Meanwhile, Beavis and Butt-Head have had a few attempts at comebacks. A whole new show in 2011 only lasted one season, probably because the characters weren’t even watching music videos anymore. Instead, they’d joke and chuckle over MTV reality show clips, the only other content the channel had left. A new, more conceptual series premiered on Paramount+ in 2022, alongside a new movie, Beavis and Butt-Head Do The Universe.

This latest version of the pair just got renewed for a third season, but I’ve heard literally nothing about the show because I don’t hang out very often with dudes in their mid-40s.

Beavis and Butt-Head now exist as cultural echoes of a far-away time. Their target audience are middle aged nerds who remember laughing at their music video commentary back in 1994. Their purpose is to convince these people to subscribe to Paramount+, a streaming service that offers an infinite supply of content that Beavis and Butt-Head would have killed for back in their heyday.

Just like every other counterculture, the interests of Gen X that used to feel so edgy and dangerous have now been fully absorbed into the American capitalist machine. It’s no different than the Grateful Dead having a residency at the Vegas Sphere, or Tony Hawk becoming more known as a video game title than as a skateboarder. I can already feel it coming for me and the things I thought were cool in high school. One day, I’ll turn on the TV and see a paunchy, middle-aged Ezra Koenig from Vampire Weekend trying to sell me a car. It’s just how it goes.

It’s quaint to compare the original panic around Beavis and Butt-Head with the actual content. Looking back now, in an era where kids can watch any horrible content they want with the tap of an iPad screen, a cartoon being a little too violent and dumb feels like a silly thing to be worried about. The slacker, braindead idiocy that Beavis and Butt-Head represented almost feels quaint compared to the hyperactive, content-brained youth of today. At least in the ‘90s, you could only appease your screen addiction in the living room.

In the end, Gen X turned out fine (three seasons of that new Beavis and Butt-Head series shows that a lot of them can afford Paramount+ no problem), despite the fact that they were watching this, playing Mortal Kombat, and listening to Soundgarden. Of course they did. Most of them were just kids having fun.

Strip away all the hubbub from parental groups and out of touch politicians, and you’ll find media that was always good, because of course it was. It wouldn’t have struck a nerve with the nation’s youth if it wasn’t, on some basic level, well constructed. Beavis and Butt-Head Do America is a shining example of this. A well-written, stupidly funny misadventure that says nothing, means nothing, and ultimately does nothing. What more could you want? It rules.

Rating: 4/5

Works Cited

What Else Was In Theaters? The horror comedy Scream came out same day as Do America, making December 20th, 1996 a holiday for snide media-obsessed teens everywhere.

Though it never topped the box office, Wes Craven’s meta slasher had a strong word of mouth presence, gaining more and more of an audience as the weeks and months went on. It eventually earned a $100 million domestic gross, and kickstarted both its own franchise and the late ‘90s teen slasher boom. The movie as a whole is pretty good, but its iconic opening scene is one of my favorite little vignettes from this part of the decade. 3.5/5

Next Week: It’s time to finish off the box office toppers of 1996, not with a bang, but a tepid, Travolta-fueled whimper. We’re looking at Nora Ephron’s Michael next Friday in the column.

See you then!

-Will

1. Sorry, that was mean. Too much ‘90s snark. I’ll pull it back.

2. Probably. In the spirit of Beavis and Butt-Head, not gonna fact check myself