Beavis and Butt-Head


Beavis and Butt-Head is an American teen-adult animated sitcom created by Mike Judge for MTV. The series follows Beavis and Butt-Head, both voiced by Judge, a pair of teenage slackers characterized by their apathy, lack of intelligence, lowbrow humor and love for hard rock and heavy metal. The original series juxtaposes slice-of-life short subjects in which the characters embark on low-minded misadventures and comment on music videos in the fictional town of Highland, Texas.
Judge developed Beavis and Butt-Head when making his own animated shorts. Two of these films, including Frog Baseball, were broadcast by MTV's animation showcase Liquid Television. The network commissioned a full series, which over its seven seasons became its most popular program. The original series ended in 1997, but has been twice rebooted, first in 2011 for MTV, and again in 2022 for Paramount+. Starting in 2025, the second reboot was moved to Comedy Central, which renewed the series for an eleventh season. The show has been renewed for a twelfth season.
During its initial run, Beavis and Butt-Head received acclaim for its satirical commentary on society, as well as criticism for its alleged influence on adolescents. The characters became pop culture icons among Generation X viewers, with their sniggering and dialogue becoming catchphrases. The series was adapted into a theatrical film, the successful Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, as well as a sequel, Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe. The franchise also spawned other media adaptations and tie-in products, including comic books, video games, books, and music albums.

Premise

Beavis and Butt-Head are two unintelligent teenage slackers with little to no regard to anything outside themselves, eternally driven by their desire to "score". They are characterized by their complete lack of intelligence, apathy, lowbrow humor, their desire to "score", and love for hard rock and heavy metal. They live in an empty house with a couch and a television set located in the fictional Highland, Texas, attend Highland High, and work at the fast food chain Burger World. Rolling Stone described them as "thunderously stupid and excruciatingly ugly". They spend time watching television, drinking unhealthy beverages, eating, and embarking on mundane, sordid, and low-minded adventures and misadventures, which more often than not involve vandalism, abuse, violence, animal cruelty, or their desire to "score". According to The Baltimore Sun, Beavis and Butt-Head are "at their most incorrect when it comes to sexuality and matters of gender. The nicest thing you can say about them in this regard is that they are budding misogynists." Over the course of the series, they developed more distinct personalities, with Butt-Head as the devious leader and Beavis his hyperactive follower. When Beavis consumes high amounts of caffeine or sugar, he becomes Cornholio, a hyperactive alter ego.
Most episodes integrate sequences in which Beavis and Butt-Head watch music videos and offer commentary. They prefer videos with "explosions, loud guitars, screaming and death", and favor rock bands such as the Butthole Surfers, Corrosion of Conformity, Metallica, etc. The music video sections allow the characters to provide diegetic commentary on the contents of the video; Judge said they allow the characters to say "things that are a little smarter than they ought to be". Judge improvised the dialog on the spot, which editors would then cut together with animation from existing footage.
Judge said he saw Beavis and Butt-Head as "pretty positive characters, generally speaking... They usually think everything's pretty cool. Or, in one way or another, everything sucks." He said his perception of the characters changed over the years: "When I first started out with the first show, which was Frog Baseball, they were just two guys that I would definitely want to keep my distance from... But, by the end of the series, I would think that two guys like that would at least be fun to sit and watch TV with." Judge composed the series' theme song, which is descended from AC/DC's "Gone Shootin'". He later said that the central guitar riff of the theme is that song played backwards. Judge recorded the original theme using a drum machine; for the 2022 revival, the theme was recreated by Gary Clark Jr..
The 2022 revival of the show introduces the duo's parallel universe counterparts who are middle-aged, called "Old Beavis and Butt-Head"; they're unemployed and live in a motel-style apartment.

Cast

Beavis and Butt-Head was created by the American animator Mike Judge. He graduated with a degree in physics but struggled to connect with his work in computer science. In the late 1980s, he began making short animated films on his own; he taught himself how to draw and animate and would shoot his projects with a cheap Bolex 16mm film camera. He made several shorts, including Frog Baseball, which marked the first appearances of the characters. Judge cold-called networks to pitch this concept, and would send out VHS tapes with prints of his films. The voice of Beavis was based on a kid in his high school calculus class, who would always snicker in a distinct way at their attractive female teacher.
The art style of what became Beavis and Butt-Head was intentionally disruptive; Judge wanted it to look like "it was drawn by an insane person." The comic strip Peanuts was an unlikely influence: Judge stated that Schulz's line work and sketchy sensibility worked its way into his as well. He was also inspired by the work of John Kricfalusi, and fellow Texas animator Wes Archer and his film Jack Mack and Rad Boy Go! Aesthetically, Judge likened the program's best episodes to comfort food: "I think there’s something kind of relaxing about it," he noted. He claimed the wacky comedy of The Beverly Hillbillies was an influence on the show. Other elements of the setting are left up to the viewer's imagination: there is little said of the characters' backstories, or their parents, and it's unclear whose house the characters are couch-surfing. This aspect of the show was also inspired by Peanuts, where the characters also seem to inhabit a liminal world without parents.
Originally it is not mentioned in which state they live, and Mike Judge imagined them living in a small town in New Mexico. But when a background artist, without Judge's knowledge, wrote Texas on cars’ license plates, he decided that they lived in Texas. MTV bought Frog Baseball and two other films to air as part of its late-night animation showcase, Liquid Television, from which it commissioned the series.

Production

1993–1997: First seven seasons and first film

In September 1992, MTV flew Judge to their New York headquarters to commission a full series of the concept. Executives initially approved 35 episodes; the show's seven-figure budget floored Judge, who had only made the films on his own for $800. The original series aired from 1993 to 1997. The show hired four staff writers, who would work up a treatment to present to Judge, who would then revise it to capture his artistic voice. One early writer, David Felton, found it best to write the characters from a primitive state of mind: "You go to that place in your mind where thoughts begin and then just stay there." The music video commentary was more-or-less improvised by Judge, who recorded them alongside an engineer in Austin. Judge had also tried to have the duo comment on the network's other programs, like The Real World, but found that recording dialogue on top of dialogue too confusing for viewers.
After writing, the episodes were storyboarded and went to the layout phase of animation, before being transferred to cels and photographed. Judge estimated it could "take anywhere from five months to a year before it's on the air." To save time, the animators made a stock selection of different movements like head turns to simplify editing the program. Though earlier seasons were produced at MTV's midtown Manhattan campus, Judge preferred to produce the show from his Austin home; in a Los Angeles Times piece from 1994, it observes: "Judge makes occasional trips to New York to approve the music videos that will be used in the series and to take care of other business, but generally works by fax, FedEx and video conferencing from Austin." Animation was also partially handled by studios in South Korea.
The show's first season was animated by J. J. Sedelmaier Productions, while the rest was handled by an in-house animation unit for MTV. Initially, the show's animators condensed the show's art style down to the industry standard of limited animation, which Judge likened to a Saturday morning-type style. He was specific about the show looking intentionally off-kilter: "there's something kind of interesting about seeing drawings animated that look like they were done by a 15-year-old in his notebook," he later said. In describing the show's style, Elizabeth Kolbert from The New York Times wrote: "They are drawn with purposeful crudeness and their motions have the jerky, seasick quality of marionettes."
Getting the show to a place to where Judge felt it was running smoothly was difficult. He was particularly embarrassed by the first five episodes of the show, with its crude animation style, and was ready to end the show after the second season, when he felt like he was running out of ideas. He claimed he got a "second wind" in the series' third season, which is where he felt like it hit its stride, and he also felt particularly inspired during the series' fifth season. The relentless pace in making the show was wearing him down, which is why he chose to end the series after its 1996 film adaption.