Beavis and Butthead Do America - Blu-ray Review

[Michael Scott]

Beavis and Butthead Do America



Movie:
Video:
Audio:
Extras: :
Final Score:


​

Movie
Ahhh, the 90s, before South Park, and before Mike Judge’s hilarious King of the Hill. It was a time where “shock” TV was Beavis and Butthead, made up of two ridiculous Texas teens who giggle, set things on fire, and generally looked around to score. It was sort of a weird mix between Daria and South Park and pure Mike Judge. The show lasted an insane 8 seasons (at the time, only The Simpsons was going that strong) and I remember 14 year old me begging my older brother to let me go to the theater with them to watch this. You know, because the show was so crude (for the times) that my parents wouldn’t even let me watch it, let alone go see the movie.

Looking back without the rose colored glasses, Beavis and Butthead wasn’t exactly high class comedy. In fact, it wasn’t even that good. But it was still funny to 13-17 year olds (the target demographic according to Judge), and watching the movie really brought back ALLLLLL those childhood memories. Suprisingly the movie actually holds up rather well, as long as you roll with the fact that you’re giggling at people making butt, boob, and poop jokes the entire movie.

Beavis and Butthead (both played by Mike Judge) wake up to find that someone has stolen their precious TV, and the two really can’t survive without said TV. So they head off on a quest to find another TV, even if they have to steal it. After stumbling through stupid hijink after stupid hijink, the pair stumble into a motel room where they meet a drunk and bumbling Muddy Grimes (Bruce Willis) who thinks they’re the hitmen he hired to kill his wife. Offering the kids $10k to “do” his wife (you can already see where this is going), he sends the due off with their mission.

Naturally Beavis and Butthead take it in the most sexual way possible, thinking that the guy has just paid them 10 grand to go sleep with his wife Dallas (Demi Moore). Dallas is a bit smarter than Muddy AND the boys, who takes advantage of their teenage idiocy to sew in a biological weapon that she’s smuggling into Beavis’s shorts and sends them on to Washington D.C. where she’ll meet up to “do” them. What happens next is a basically Beavis and Butthead wandering from one bus stop to the next giggling at boobies, making crass jokes, and generally just being idiots while ATF Agent Flemming (played by Robert Stack) leaves a wake of body cavity search in their wake as he tries and hunts them down.


The first 10-15 minutes had me banging my head on the counter wondering why I ever enjoyed the stupid show to begin with. However, once the movie kicked off with Demi and Bruce Willis’s characters I started getting back into my 14 year old mentality and giggling along with it. The movie actually holds up better than I remember, and introduces us to the inspiration to Hank Hill, which would spin off into the MUCH better King of the Hill in a few years. Even though it was only a year or so before South Park would start, Beavis and Butthead Do America felt a bit rough and raw with the satire. Mike Judge has always played better to character humor rather than satire, and the show is best watched while as high as you possibly can get. That being said, I got more than a few giggles out of Beavis’s “The Great Cornholio!!” routine and remembering just how much the “burnt out loser goth/emo/punk/rocker” trope was active during the 90s.




Rating:

Rated PG-13 for continuous crude sex related humor and language, and for drug related scenes




Video:

Right off the bat I’m going to say that the Blu-ray looks leaps and bounds better than the old DVD. However, the show is not going to be made into polished CGI just because we want it. Mike Judge had the show crudely drawn and animated from the beginning, and the TV show wasn’t given a bigger animation budget just for the movie. It’s rough, crudely drawn with heavy lines and some wonky shading, just like the show. The film was one of the last to use Cel animation and then transferred to film before production, so it looks rather grainy as well. On the plus side, Paramount gave the disc a nice bitrate and the grain is fully intact, with no signs of DNR or other digital tampering. There’s some mild speckles and bits of print debris and damage, but otherwise it’s a VERY solid encode of a rough looking product.









Audio:

The audio actually surprised me though. I was expecting a very front heavy mix judging by my memory, but this was actually fairly dynamic. The sounds of airplanes blasting off, ATF agents crashing in to do a body cavity search, and plenty of other hijinks really kept the surrounds kicking. There was even a decent amount of bass (though not to be confused with a really bassy track). The dialog was well placed up front, but like usual, the voices do have a bit of a harshness and rawness that is indicative of Mike Judge. Solid mix.











Extras:

• Audio Commentary by Mike Judge and Yvette Kaplan
• The Big Picture – A retrospective making-of segment that features the journey to the big screen including story, voice casting and more, including a look at the hallucination scene – drastically different from the animation in the rest of the film – and an extended version of the scene.
• We're Gonna Score! Scoring Beavis and Butt-Head Do America – Composer John Frizzell and Mike Judge detail the use of music in the film and how they came up with the perfect compositions to accompany the visuals of the big adventure
• The Smackdown – A montage of all the characters in the movie getting slapped or fighting
• MTV News "Celebrity Shorts" – With Jennifer Tilly, Snoop Dogg and MORE...
• Trailers
• TV Spots

Final Score: ​

Beavis and Butthead Do America is not really going to bring in a new audience. In fact, it’s probably going to alienate most everyone who DIDN’T grow up with the acquired taste of a show. It was originally a show for teenage burnouts about teenage burnouts, and reveled in a complete lack of sophistication. As a teen in the 90s this was spot on my generation and the new Blu-ray is a revelation to those of us who grew up with that old DVD. The show may not look amazing due to the rough and crude animation, but the Blu-ray is head and shoulders better than what we had, although rather light on the extras. Definitely a movie for the fans.


Technical Specifications:

Starring: Mike Judge, Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, Cloris Leachman
Directed by: Mike Judge
Written by: Mike Judge, Joe Stillman, Brian Mulroney
Aspect Ratio: 1.85.1 AVC
Audio: English: DTS-HD MA 5.1, French DD 2.0
Subtitles: English SDH, French
Studio: Paramount
Rated: PG-13
Runtime: 81 Minutes
Blu-ray Release Date: December 7th, 2021

Recommendation: For the Fans

 

[tripplej]

Thanks for the review. I never really understood this show and I was in the target audience range back then.. Each one has their taste, I guess.