After a fourteen-year hiatus, everyone’s favorite morons return for thirteen brand-new episodes. 

CRITIQUE

Did you miss them as much as I did? Of course you did. Why else would you be reading this? Anyway, it’s been a long time coming. Mike Judge retired his most famous creations in 1997, turning his full attention to King of the Hill, Office Space, and a couple things most people don’t care about. But now he’s back, overseeing a new season of Beavis and Butt-Head, bringing the terminally stupid duo into the reality-TV age. Aside from the fact the boys don’t spend most of their time watching music videos, not a whole lot has changed. That’s a good thing. 

Like a lot of people, I first encountered the pair while watching an episode of MTV’s Liquid Television. I couldn’t believe I was watching two teenagers smack a frog with a baseball (or what they likely did to that poodle), but I laughed like hell. Same thing happened a couple months later; the encounter with Sterculius was one of the damned strangest things I’d ever seen, but it was undeniably funny. I was a constant viewer of the subsequent series, sticking with it to the very end (explains a lot, huh?). I wasn’t all that disappointed to see it come to an end, as the final season (delayed by the production of Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, which I’ve seen more times than I care to admit) made it clear the show had run its course and/or Judge had lost interest.

Although I’m now in my early forties and should therefore be too old for such nonsense, I was more than a little happy to hear Judge was coming back. I also wasn’t exactly surprised, as nothing he’d done in the years following the demise of King of the Hill had caught on. I was a little worried the show wouldn’t work; I’m older, Judge is older, and the world isn’t the same place. But despite a new stable of writers, Judge’s inability to get Beavis’s voice quite right, and a lack of music videos for the duo to watch, this is pretty much the same dose of subversively dumb fun it was back in the ‘90s. And Beavis is now able to yell “Fire!” to his heart’s content, which is awesome.

It appears everyone in the town of Highland was stuck in suspended animation for the fourteen years the show was off the air, as time has passed but no one has aged. Beavis and Butt-Head are still however the hell old they were way back when, but the first episode has them checking out one of the Twilight flicks, ripping on Kristen Stewart for standing around with her mouth open and coming to the conclusion they can score chicks if they can somehow become vampires or werewolves. (They mistake a homeless guy for a werewolf, and his bite leads to results they never saw coming.)

Later episodes feature the Beavis injuring himself after giving in to temptation and attempting to photocopy his ass, a porn shoot, a round of creationists vs. evolution, our heroes mistaking a women’s health clinic for a whorehouse and doing their best to finally get laid, and the welcome, hilarious return of The Great Cornholio. It’s mostly good stuff, although never as good as the best of the original series. Much like the recent return of Futurama, the show has some rough patches that need smoothing over, some growing pains that need relieving.

Nothing here is as flat-out hilarious as “Sick,” “Choke,” “Spanish Fly,” or “Way Down Mexico Way” (the uncut version of which is my all-time favorite episode), but the show’s still funny, reveling in stupidity while simultaneously slyly satirizing American stupidity. (I firmly believe this is what it does; that’s a hallmark of nearly all of Judge’s work. Those who think the show is a glorification of idiocy aren’t paying attention.)

MTV used to be a venue for musical groups looking to become famous, whereas now it’s a venue for idiots with no discernible talent looking to become famous. This shift has resulted in some changes to the Beavis and Butt-Head format. They still critique the occasional music video (for example, they think T-Baby’s sublime “It’s So Cold in the D” is an episode of Real Housewives of Detroit), but most of the time they’re watching MTV’s reality programming. (The bits with the music videos also aren’t as funny as the old stuff, largely because the video themselves are so bland. They do give milquetoast Jake Walden the thorough savaging he has coming, though.)

They’re particularly fond of Jersey Shore (when Snooki diagrams the house’s various hookups, Butt-Head says she’s attempting to trace herpes back to its original human vector) and Teen Mom (man, those girls are stupid). This is incredibly apt, as the bozos on those shows are exactly the sort of people who don’t realize Beavis and Butt-Head is satire. Many accused the original series of being a large component of the dumbing-down of society, so it’s only right the show skewer the results of that dumbing-down.         

THE VIDEO

The show is presented in its original 1.33:1 aspect ratio. The 1080p transfers have been encoded with AVC, and all thirteen episodes are housed on a single 50GB disc. You may be wondering why the show is created at that arcane ratio, and the answer is simple: it allows animation from the original series to be recycled. The sequence where the boys watch and comment on MTV programming largely employ the same bits of footage the old show did; only the story bits feature totally new footage (a few brief snippets of the new story sequences are re-jiggered and spliced into a couple of the TV-watching sequences).

The viewing experience can get a bit weird at times; because some of the videos and TV clips are framed at 1.78:1 or wider, you end up watching a widescreen image letterboxed within a windowboxed 1.33:1 image. The shifting image quality only compounds the weirdness of the experience; the older animation is noticeably softer, dirtier and dimmer than the new animation and the videos/TV clips (the latter of which also varies in quality from source to source).

The new footage is just as crudely animated as the old stuff, but the color palette is wider and more vibrant. As far as the new stuff goes, the only flaw that seems to be the fault of the encode is some aliasing and jitter in the line work.   

THE AUDIO

The specs on the packaging mistakenly identify this disc’s audio as lossy Dolby Digital 5.1; what you actually get is DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio. Regardless, it might as well be a stereo track, as there’s not much of anything going on in the surrounds. There is, however, a very good spread across the fronts, and the mix localizes sounds within that space very well.

Dialogue sounds okay, but the higher resolution does point out deficiencies/shortcuts/cost-cutting measures in the recording process. The music in the credits sequences sounds very good. (In all honestly, I found listening to the audio through anything other than TV speakers to be a bit odd. There’s something that’s just wrong about it.)

THE EXTRAS

You don’t get much in the way of extras here, but at least what you do get is presented in high-def.

2011 San Diego Comic-Con Panel (19 minutes) is a Q&A session featuring Judge and series fan/moderator Johnny Knoxville.

Beavis and Butt-Head Interruptions (20 minutes) is a series of short bits in which the boys have phone conversations with the Jersey Shore idiots.

Silence Your Cell Phone (less than 1 minute) is one of those pre-movie theater warnings.

FINAL THOUGHTS