Ahead of its August 4th premiere on Paramount+, the Beavis and Butt-Head revival series released a fiery first clip at this year's San Diego Comic-Con. The original series ran for 7 seasons on MTV from March 8, 1993, to November 28, 1997, followed by a single-season reboot in 2011. Created by Mike Judge, the show followed two lazy teens from smalltown Highland Texas as they watched TV, ate junk food, and committed acts of vandalism.
The show's irreverent sense of humor spoke to the Gen-Xers of the 90s, but proved less popular with the viewers of MTV in 2011. The original show's popularity led to the dimwitted duo's first big-screen outing, the hit movie Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, in 1996, as well as the current revival on Paramount+. Two seasons have already been ordered alongside a TV movie, Beavis & Butt-Head Do the Universe, which saw the boys going interstellar. Now, after the events of Do the Universe, they've been transported to 2022, where they're even more ignorant of how stuff works because they missed a few decades.
To celebrate the impending arrival of their continued adventures in Mike Judge's Beavis and Butt-Head, Paramount+ has released a lengthy clip from the upcoming season. Beavis, the resident arsonist of the two, has had a long-time hypnotic obsession with fire, often prompting him to say things like, "Heh. Heh. Fire!" The clip finds Beavis happening upon his favorite thing in the form of a back alley dumpster fire that commands Beavis to do its bidding. Check out the clip from "The Special One" below:
The Paramount revival is bringing another perk along with it, the addition of 200 episodes of Beavis and Butt-Head's original seasons with music videos intact and remastered. A major part of the original show's magic were the segments of the two watching music videos and riffing on them, MST3K-style. But for a long time, these segments had to be cut out of DVD releases and kept most episodes from streaming platforms due to licensing issues. Legally, not only did every song need to be cleared, but every person in every music video needed to be cleared as well, a lengthy and costly process that Paramount has navigated. The new seasons will keep up the tradition of music video riffing with the addition of the two mocking TikTok and YouTube videos to bring them into the modern era.
Times have changed for Beavis and Butt-Head, and not just in how they look, but in the landscape of the world they're re-entering. The original show was met with critical acclaim for its scathing social commentary, but also met with a fair amount of criticism from parents who thought it condoned and inspired violence. That moral outrage surrounding the show has long since subsided, with the show's content seeming almost quaint compared to some modern offerings. Where once parents had to worry about the lessons Beavis and Butt-Head imparted, now the show and its brand of humor harken back to a simpler time. If the clip of Beavis encountering the dumpster fire is any indication, this new Beavis and Butt-Head may have finally matured, if only a little.
Source: Paramount+