Beavis and Butthead Do America

Mike Judge, USA 1996, 81mins

For the uninitiated (anyone who has spent the past five years sequestered in a Buddhist monastery?) Beavis and Butthead are a couple of teenage metal freaks with limited vocabularies and even more limited intelligence and social skills. They spend their time attempting to be cool, trying to make it with "chicks", and watching MTV.

Every episode of the Beavis and Butthead MTV series had the same basic format: the duo would have a little adventure that was interspersed (with little regard for narrative chronology) with sequences where they watched MTV and passed judgement on music videos - most commonly that "this sucks". These music video interludes were what made Beavis and Butthead suckier than it ought to have been. Watching them the viewer could often feel the hand of some MTV fartknocker trying to sell some crappy band. Indeed Beavis and Butthead's judgements could even make or break bands - schlocky industrial- metallers White Zombie got a major sales boost by receiving the B&B seal of approval, whereas poodle rockers Winger suffered from their association with B&B's wimpy classmate Stuart.

Over time the ratio of music videos to B&B seemed to shift in favour of the former and more and more videos would get a long showing rather than receiving a Pavlovian "change it" response from the duo.

Enter Beavis and Butthead Do America. The film is 90 minutes of 100% pure Beavis and Butthead action, devoid of MTV marketing. Its plot ­ Beavis and Butthead try to find their beloved TV ­ is essentially irrelevant, being little more than an excuse to string together a series of vignettes that showcase B&B's comic double act. Part of the fun comes in guessing what they'll say or do in any given situation. With violence always the preferred option and a vocabulary of half-a-dozen stock phrases, the choices are sufficiently limited for a B&B drinking game to be a viable possibility.

Beavis and Butthead Do America: it's like the TV series with all the sucky bits removed.

Keith H. Brown
EUFS Programme 1998-99