Thursday marks the return of
Mike Judge's "Beavis and Butt-Head" to MTV, after 14 years enough time for a baby to have grown up to be Beavis or Butt-Head.
The cartoon, which began in part as an ironic, idiotic but not inaccurate commentary on the network's original bread and butter the music video will now include among its targets movies, viral videos and the kind of shows that have come to represent MTV in the duo's absence, series like
"Jersey Shore" and "16 and Pregnant." ("This would be a better show if they showed them actually getting pregnant.") What's odd is how nearly they resemble some of their new targets "This guy looks like he might be stupider than us" and how with the passing years they've come to sound less like snarky kids and more like grumbling old men: the Statler and Waldorf of their generation.
Nevertheless, this is a kind of American classic that goes right against the grain of what cartoons are supposed to be. Handmade and homely, slow and awkward, it evokes the awesome inertia of the bored teenager for whom life seems not endlessly promising, but merely endless. It is dumb stuff in the opening episode, the pair, having seen a bit of "Twilight," look for something undead to bite them, in order to "score chicks"
