The return of Beavis

I am not sure if I should take the following news with joy or dread: MTV is bringing back Beavis and Butthead. Yes, there are going to be all new episodes and everything. One of the best shows of the 90’s will return to the airwaves and…and…well, hopefully not ruin another aspect of my youth.

Now don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love Beavis and Butthead. I own every DVD of the show that they have ever released, watched it religiously in my dorm room and post graduation and still quote episodes pretty much verbatim. I still think it is at times the funniest thing I have ever seen and Mike Judge has gone on to prove just how much of a comic genius that he is. However, I have a bad feeling about this.

Partly this is due to the fact that MTV has become a big pile of suck. Now I completely understand that I have aged out of MTV’s target market but I would at least think that I would understand what teenagers want to watch. Jersey Shore has its moments and it was fun when you could laugh at the characters but now you laugh at them while realizing that they are millionaires, which takes a lot of the fun out of it. Shows like Teen Mom or Baby Daddy or House of Skanks don’t really make one have great faith in the network.

Then there is the fact that a huge portion of the comedy in Beavis and Butthead were the critiques of the music videos. Some of the best parts were the two of them absolutely ripping on the bands or even praising something for being surprisingly awesome. That worked because MTV was all about videos at the time and everyone had a video. Now MTV does not show videos at all and I’m not sure if bands even make them other than to put something on YouTube. I’m not sure how they recreate those moments.

But I guess what is really worrying me is that Beavis and Butthead are ultimate symbols of the 90’s and Gen X and I don’t know if they will translate well into the 2010s. You can make the argument that dumb kids are dumb kids and that the humor is pretty much universal but I think that there is a basis to the entire setup that is pure 90s. The Metallica and AC/DC t-shirts (with Stewart wearing a Winger one). The sitting around watching basic cable. The endless quest for finding something to do. There were no cel phones or internet. In a modern version of Beavis and Butthead they would be online all day, watching midget porn and insulting people in newsgroups. They’d be abusing people on Facebook. It just isn’t the same. True it is just a case of misspent youth but the time I grew up is different than the present. You just can’t drop the characters in and have them act exactly the same.

Still, if we can get an appearance from Daria I won’t complain. And I always wondered what happened to Principal Vickers.