Beavis and Butthead Do America

MOVIE
VIDEO
AUDIO
EXTRAS
OVERALL

One Disc
1.85:1 Anamorphic Widescreen
English Dolby Digital 5.1
English 2.0 Surround
English Captions
Two Teaser Trailers
Run Time: 80 Minutes
Keep Case

MOVIE
Rated PG-13 for crude talk and a general cartoony offensiveness.

Let me get something off my chest. I hate South Park. I think it represents the most vile extension of what used to be an edge of the blade art form, being filthy, being offensive and still being smart. South Park to me crossed the line. I think, in all, they are nothing more than a series of jokes based around children almost swearing, and the movie took that one further by letting them swear. So, wait, you're thinking, did I just somehow wander into Windom Earle's South Park review by accident? I thought I clicked the Beavis and Butthead header. You did, this is just filler, er, background. [Windom hopes you didn't notice that.] South Park, and its creators rank right up there with the Farrely Brothers as ineptly doing what others have done better for their entire careers. Notably John Waters, and you can hear me expound his virtues elsewhere on this site. But in the early nineties Mike Judge came along. First with two cartoon shorts, Milton and Frog Baseball. Milton aired on Saturday Night Live and later became the basis for Stephen Root's character in Judge's masterpiece Office Space. Frog Baseball, a much cruder and less intelligent short made its way to MTV and gave birth to Beavis and Butthead. Like The Simpsons, Beavis and Butthead had trouble finding its groove, but when Judge realized that it wasn't all about the gross gags. You could have those, and still have wry social commentary. This is what elevated the show, and why I still will defend to the death my right to like this and dislike South Park. So, before every TV franchise had to be a movie, but at the start of this trend, development began on a Beavis and Butthead movie, and we all wondered what it was going to be like. After all, in the show, the titular duo do little more than sit on their couch, watching TV. Then the bombshell dropped, it was to star Adam Sandler and David Spade. Huh? What? A LIVE ACTION BEAVIS AND BUTTHEAD MOVIE? The hell? It almost happened. Luckily Mike Judge was able to convince the powers that be at MTV Films and Paramount that these two needed to be cartoons and the film was made.
And getting them off that couch was simple. Beavis and Butthead (both voiced by Judge) have their TV stolen. They go on a quest to retrieve it and wind up being mistaken for hit men by a drunken criminal named Muddy (voiced by Bruce Willis) looking to get even with his wife Dallas (voiced by Demi Moore) and offers our two heroes a large sum of money to "do her." Naturally our mentally incompetent friends don't realize that in this case "do her" means kill her, not, well, DO her. So they head across the country to Vegas and get targeted by the FBI as suspects in an international germ warfare plot. They're tracked by agents Fleming (voiced by Robert Stack) and Bork (voiced by Greg Kinnear) all the way to Washington, DC and into the halls of the White House. (Where of course Butthead hits on Chelsea with the line: "I see you have braces. I have braces too." Additional voices are supplied by the likes of David Letterman and Chloris Leachman.
So what is it about these two that I enjoy so? Stupidity is funny. Often funnier than sarcasm which often precludes it in cartoons. Homer Simpson is funny for the same reason. It's absurd stupidity to the point where you wonder how these people have survived for so long without any semblance of human intelligence. When Butthead, at the beginning of the film looks to the spot where his TV sat, then to the footprints on the floor, then to the broken window, then back, then to the footprints leading out the open front door, then back and proclaims that he thinks he just figured something out, we laugh. We laugh even harder when he explains that what he just figured out was that "This sucks." These two are fun, without being mean, or overly disgusting and their movie is intelligent, even if they are not. They make their way from their home town to Vegas, through the great north to Washington, DC and home again as a criminal plot to assassinate world leaders with a plague, a hit scheme and the FBI all swirls around them and they are oblivious.
I'll admit, though, when I first saw this movie, I wasn't thrilled with it. This is perhaps that, like Office Space that came later, it takes a while to peel back the layers and see the true intelligence behind things. Also, I think these two are a better fit on the small screen than the large. This is armchair watching with a beer and some pretzels. The writing is crackling and the voice work is great, and so what if Anderson (voiced by Judge) sounds a lot like Hank Hill on King of the Hill (also voiced by Judge). This is a movie that makes the old Butte, Montana joke work, and that's hard to do for an audience that isn't entirely Junior High kids. It's slight and at times mindless entertainment. But there are far worse things in the world, and far worse movies to go along.

VIDEO QUALITY
The video quality is a mixed bag, ranging from grainy to pristine, from dirty to clean. The film is presented anamorphically in its original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.85:1 and looks much better than the video version, but still, this is an animated film without the funding that Disney can afford to put into animation, cleaning every cel or just doing away with cels altogether and putting the frames together via computer. Beavis and Butthead is done the old fashioned way, cel by cel, frame by frame, and thus a bit of dirt, sweat and blood is seen in the print, and the digital format amplifies these imperfections.

AUDIO QUALITY
By and large this film is in stereo. For all practical purposes this is stereo. The only notable exceptions are the Roller Coaster of Love sequence and the airplane take-off and landing where the sound travels into the rear speakers. Without that, you wouldn't be able to tell that this is a classy Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack. But then, the film wasn't designed for this. Oh, well, still disappointing.

EXTRAS
Another great disappointment from our friends at Paramount. They won't even deign to give us the original theatrical trailers for this release, just a pair of fairly stupid teaser trailers. There are the extras my friends. OH! AND THEY HAVE INTERACTIVE MENUS AND CHAPTER SELECT! Sorry, sometimes I get a little excited.

CLOSING THOUGHTS
Mike Judge's shining moment was still yet to come when this film was released, way back when (1996), but this still marks quite an achievement from a guy who animated his first shorts by himself in his garage and achieved such fame from them. Now that the DVD is finally down to a reasonable price (just over $10, down from Paramount's standard $24 or so) it's worth picking up, and if that History of Beavis and Butthead ever returns to stores, it'd make a nice companion piece. Or you could just stand it next to Office Space and proclaim in a loud and proud voice that you have the entire Mike Judge oeuvre. Can't beat that with an ugly stick.