The tragedy of Beavis & Butt-Head is that you can't legally get the actual complete-with-music-videos episodes due to licensing issues. I thought maybe YouTube would make this possible given their deals with all the labels, but nothing to date.
Fortunately you can torrent pretty solid TV rips. I was both too young to watch as a kid and didn't have cable, but I watched the whole series with my wife almost 10 years ago now and it was so good. It's hard to believe that show was so controversial. In many ways it was one of the friendliest, nicest shows. I wonder if younger generations would appreciate it.
> It's hard to believe that show was so controversial
It was controversial because of the potty-humour and the chaotic puerile antics of the characters. They had a certain irreverence for authority and many conservative do-gooder types didn't like that.
> It's hard to believe that show was so controversial.
I guess you don't know about the kids who set their houses on fire (allegedly) because Beavis was burning stuff and saying "Fire!, Fire!" on air, or the accompanying congressional hearings on the state of the media. The show was on at 7pm when it first came out I think; after that shit it went to a 11pm "adult-only" show with lots of disclaimers about how you shouldn't do what the characters do. No more fire references, no huffing glue, etc. MTV was seriously worried they'd lose their license I think.
I heard about those (probably-not-so-alleged) incidents at the time. The overpass rock throwing was a particularly bad one, too. I have a friend, a person who's far from your typical "square" who's a bit older than me and absolutely hates B&B because he knew lots of kids who emulated them and did stupid things, and it really bothered him at the time. That would probably be me if that had been my experience.
That said, I don't think it's fair to judge something by how some tiny cohort responds to it, especially when we're dealing with extremes like setting your house on fire or throwing rocks from an overpass. There may be an argument to be made that if you're setting your house on fire, maybe a television show wasn't the root problem?
And yet, where I live, we had our own "overpass rock throwing" incident just a few years ago. No Bevis or Butt-Head involved.
Who's to say the people who do these things wouldn't have found another equally horrifying outlet for their frustrations if Bevis and Butt-Head weren't a thing?
Stuff like that always happens. Remember all the outcry against the Grand Theft Auto video games inciting children to commit crimes? People still blame "The Warriors" for teaching teens to jump turnstiles in the subway and get involved in gangs. There is an entire chapter of Mein Kampf dedicated to how the youth play their music too loud and spend too much time partying. I'm sure vaudeville was the work of the devil before that.
Small nitpick - cable broadcasting isn't "licensed" by the FCC in terms of content. Now whether lawmakers would have passed explicit legislation regarding such content, is another story (the 90s was full of threatening to do just that, with video games getting some heat too thanks to Mortal Kombat and Night Trap).
B&B gave me some interesting ideas as a young boy. I distinctly remember watching it and my Grandma asking me if my mom approved that kind of show. I said yes with no hesitation as she turned it off. To make it better MTV spring break was happening near my family vacation house and they made a special appearance.
CKY, Tom Green, random Skater VHS interludes, and later Jackass sealed the deal on my juvenile delinquency.
The DVDs were pretty widely available, sadly. I knew someone with one through the local university snowboard club. Not my favorite person to put it mildly.
I had the same problem with a show I liked from back in the day called Northern Exposure. Fortunately I got my hands on a very rare copy with the original music.
WKRP is a great show! Thanks for reminding me. Yep, we watched it on DVD and it was weird when they played generic musak instead of whatever sick jam you knew was actually in the show.
Depends how large each disk is and how many you've got. At a certain point you're begging to have a disk fail during a week+ rebuild. With a 5 disk array of 8TB disks I wouldn't go fewer than 2 disk redundancy myself.
...oh of course the difficulty of replacing that data is also a factor.
It’s less of an issue with 5, than 1. With 1 you still have the issue of a disk failing and having to rebuild. But you just have to have more raw and less available.
If you have 4 8TB disks set up as a volume in RAID1 or 5, you have the same risk of disk failure affecting the entire volume. But you have 16TB available in RAID1 and 24 in RAID5.
You could create two volumes with RAID1 but then data management is more of a hassle, and you could just bump it to 6 drives and have two RAID5 volumes.
The interpolated music videos were extraneous to the episodes. There was an animated short and there was B&B watching videos and saying stuff and the two were completely unconnected. That they were spliced together the way they were was to the detriment of the show. I remember one episode about B&B being stranded on an island in a mall and mixed in with that was them at home watching videos.
I'm not sure everyone agrees that it hurt the show. I liked it, I thought it went with the cartoony, not-too-serious theme. Plus it exposed me to great music and weird music videos.
It was still integral to the experience of the show, and some of the funniest stuff was in there. Consider their reaction to "If I Only Had a Brain" by MC 900 Ft. Jesus. It's just Beavis singing along with the bass line while Butt-head, his frustration mounting, tells Beavis to shut up and eventually smacks the shit out of him. But somehow it's one of the funniest bits on the show.
No mention of The Maxx, which is a shame. That was another supremely well-done animated show from MTV's heyday that gorgeously adapted an Image Comics series. It was closer in tone to Aeon Flux than Beavis and Butt-Head, which is probably why it's not remembered.
Remember "The Brothers Grunt" from the same cartoon block? A cartoon about five constipated trolls with drinking problems searching for their lost brother. That was probably the weirdest thing I ever saw on TV until I encountered Lexx on the sci-fi channel -- the epic tale of a security guard, a sex slave, a dead assassin, and a robot head flying around the universe in a giant bug while trying to find something to eat. Including links to prove I'm not making these up.
I wouldn't say the animation style is the same, necessarily, but you are correct in noting the similarities, as Peter Chung provided the character designs.
Parts of The Maxx are uncomfortable, but unlike the other shows mentioned here it's not just empty edgy humor: serves a thematic purpose. Really well done adaptation of the comic.
This article gives me no idea how they disrupted cable. This reads like a thirty something forced to write about the fortieth anniversary of MTV, which a quick search of the author shows is (probably) accurate.
It's useful to keep in mind that article authors generally don't write their own headlines on news sites; the article itself doesn't ever claim MTV's animation "disrupted cable," whatever that means, but instead claims that they were a laboratory "for animators who wanted to work outside of TV conventions at the time," which is a pretty defensible claim.
(Also, remember that headlines often get changed after publication; the headline as I'm writing this actually says "Here's How Beavis, Butt-Head And Daria Upended TV Animation". Due to the quirks of many CMSes, the `<title>` tags often retain the original headline.)
This may help - seems like the author tried to in some places:
> For animators who wanted to work outside of TV conventions at the time, MTV became a destination and a laboratory. According to Maureen Furniss, who is an animation historian at the California Institute of the Arts, "[MTV] showed people in the public things they had never seen before in animation and gave opportunities to a lot of independent animators and experimental animators."
> "MTV animation was truly an outgrowth and extension of MTV on-air promotion and MTV on-air promotion was incredible. It was a creative laboratory, " Terkuhle says. "We were not only allowed to take risks, but encouraged to take risks and the executives had our back."
> That ethos of a creative laboratory that took risks drew show creators to pitch and push for ideas that wouldn't end up elsewhere on television.
It might be easy these days with the amount of edgy cartoons that exist now to forget back then, there really wasn't any. Shows like The Simpsons, Ren and Stimpy, Beavis and Butthead, and even Daria I suppose were not really like any other cartoons out there.
They subverted the tropes everyone had taken for granted since the 50's or so that TV was expected to have. They outraged parents and the extreme conservative groups that wielded fairly significant power at the time.
Shortly before that we had 'the Dungeons and Dragons' scares and it was the time of the violent video game and explicit music crackdowns. Those cartoons became targets for those same kinds of people.
Without those shows, we probably wouldn't have the kinds of cartoons we have today.
I would definitely include more than just the two cartoons in the article and MTV as the sole disruptors of cable.
But, the cartoons of that era were definitely disruptive in a way that's hard to appreciate without experiencing.
Some shows even did this explicitly -- Space Ghost, Coast to Coast!, for example, was a remix of a 60s era show into an absurdist late-night talk show, using the same animation assets and everything.
And it spawned a whole genre of similar shows in the 90s/early 2000s that formed most of the original Adult Swim lineup.
>It might be easy these days with the amount of edgy cartoons that exist now to forget back then, there really wasn't any.
You're talking about shows up to twenty years removed from Bakshi cartoons like Fritz the Cat or his eighties Mighty Mouse show. The Simpsons and such definitely popularized the medium, but it didn't create it.
>Shortly before that we had 'the Dungeons and Dragons' scares and it was the time of the violent video game and explicit music crackdowns.
There is always content that is slightly edgier that conservatives freak out over. Some outraged people didn't disrupt cable, cable embraced the cartoons and pushed things further with things like the creation of Adult Swim.
Fritz the cat was a feature film not a TV show. Mighty Mouse was an actual kids show cancelled over a reference to a character supposedly snorting a line of something and Bakshi's reputation.
There was a bit of separation between TV cartoons and feature length ones back then. You're correct, the precedent for adult oriented animation had been set years before, but I wouldn't really compare movies like that, or even the more adult oriented anime shows and films in Japan at the time to that era of western TV cartoons.
As far as western TV cartoons went, prior to those late 80's, early 90's shows, there wasn't really any like them.
>As far as western TV cartoons went, prior to those late 80's, early 90's shows, there wasn't really any like them.
Virtually all those shows creators credit Bakshi as an influence though. Hell, the asshole co-creator of Ren and Stimpy worked with him on Mighty Mouse.
They likely needed cable to be able to successfully move to television, but I don't see how they disrupted cable.
edit they changed the title to "upended animation." While I stil think it's a slight overstatement, that title at least represents what the article is about.
>Hell, the asshole co-creator of Ren and Stimpy worked with him on Mighty Mouse.
But it was him not Bakshi that pushed that adult style onto mainstream television. Don't get me wrong. I really enjoy Bakshi's work but he isn't really the one responsible for bringing edgy cartoons to home television.
>But it was him not Bakshi that pushed that adult style onto mainstream television
We have vastly different memories of Mighty Mouse. Ren and Stimpy definitely took it a few steps further, but it's not like the asshole suddenly started making weird shit after working on Mighty Mouse.
And I've admitted several times that the nineties were more influential for adult cartoons on TV. I just think that has more to do with the growth in cable and the rise of outsourcing animation than any pioneers suddenly wanting to make adult cartoons.
The thing is that these animated shows were doing something that just wasn’t allowed in tv shows at the time but they got away with it because they were cartoons and not real people. At the same time that made it all even more taboo because cartoons were for children.
At that same time the most immoral live action show was married with children, magnitudes less immoral than some of these cartoons. These animated shows really did open the door for making television something that didn’t always have to be family friendly.
Half of that stuff was in syndication after school and the rest was on Nick. Ren & Stimpy was the only one that came close to being “dangerous”. Hell, Veggietales is about The Bible. Simply listing stuff doesn’t make it so.
We have different definitions of edgy. I consider a overtly Christian show about vegetables pretty edgy. In the sense of (a) who would have created that & (b) who would have broadcast that (even among Christian tv channels)?
> I consider a overtly Christian show about vegetables pretty edgy.
When you say "edgy", do you mean "novel/creative"? That would explain the confusion. Definitions 3, 7, and/or 8 at Wiktionary are what we're using: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/edgy You seem to be using definition 2, which is not the common meaning today.
The only shows on that list that are "edgy" by the everyday definition are Ren and Stimpy, I Am Weasel (a spinoff of Cow and Chicken, which was a straight ripoff of Ren and Stimpy's visual and writing style), and sometimes Animaniacs. The rest may have slipped an off-color joke under the radar from time to time, but it wasn't their main thing.
Hang on, are you saying TaleSpin, Magic School Bus, and VeggieTales were edgy and transgressive?
There's a lot of good shows on that list, yes, and they broke plenty of ground in terms of kids' animation quality, but only a few of them were pushing the envelope of "what you can get away with on TV."
Amusing that Captain Planet is on there twice. For what it's worth, Rick and Morty just did a gender-swapped Captain Planet tribute episode a few weeks ago, and they run on AT&T-owned HBO Max.
I don't watch a ton of current kids shows, but the little I've seen still look pretty weird. It's a different weird but that's more just due to general trends.
Plus, like half of those have had/will have reboots.
In the new opening theme they even make a point of showing they've changed, embracing subjects like gender and ethnicity that would have been the butt of jokes at some point in the old show. They recognize these times would not allow certain forms of "humor."
The show for these experimental animations was called "MTV's oddities" [1] and my favorite one was The Maxx [2]. I've never seen anything better actually.
This was great, along with The Head which was on right before The Maxx. An average Joe wakes up with a giant head, and out pops a weird alien named Roy. Of course everyone says it, but MTV was so much better back then (I was also a huge fan of Headbanger's Ball on Saturday nights).
Aeon flux on liquid television was absolutely weird, and that’s what made it so fun to watch. The longer versions that came out later were a huge disappointment.
The B&B shorts on Liquid television were the first I’d seen of that show (“fro-o-o-o-g baseba-a-a-all!”).
The author seems to have forgotten to include any mention of how these shows "disrupted cable".
Expanding the boundaries of acceptable taste in broadcasting wasn't a disruption, it was the linear continuation of a trend, following the footsteps of All in the Family, Married With Children, the Simpsons, and dozens of other shows that slightly broadened the goalposts for acceptable themes in broadcast comedy.
Odds are the author didn't write the headline, and the author mentions MTV's willingness to push the boundaries of acceptable taste as an enabling factor that brought innovative shows to MTV, not as an innovation in itself.
My best friend of many years and I were talking yesterday, reminiscing about the job we both had right after high school when Beevis and Butt-Head first came out. He remembered me cracking him up with a weird laugh that I randomly started doing. "You sound like Beevis and Butthead!" to which I replied, "Who?!" Not having cable I hadn't heard of them yet.
So I was Butt-Head incarnate, apparently. Explains some things...
I didn’t really watch it on MTV - just an episode here and there, but ended up sitting through all the DVD’s one summer.
It’s a really great show, and I don’t understand why people get their panties in a twist over the original music being cut out of the DVDs. It was never a part of the story (except for the R:E:M song, but I think they kept it in), which together with its characters can more than stand on their own.
> I don’t understand why people get their panties in a twist over the original music being cut out of the DVDs.
I'm guessing that's because you didn't watch the show while it was airing. The music in Daria originally came from what was new and popular at the time episodes aired. The show's soundtrack was essentially the same as the viewer's day to day soundtrack. You could hear a new song on MTV, maybe spending hours watching MTV just waiting for the song to come back on, and then suddenly the song you've been listening to and listening for all week would turn up in an episode. It wasn't that the songs they used were directly relevant to the story in the episode, rather that the songs were directly relevant to the lives of the viewers. It was something that didn't (and really couldn't) happen anywhere else but because MTV had the access to the music they could pull it off.
Also, if you've mostly only seen the DVDs with generic music you might not realize how good the original soundtrack was. Many many songs used in the show are simply amazing. If you were an avid MTV watcher at the time, watching the show years later with the original soundtrack would bring back many old favorites. You can still find playlists of the original soundtrack at least so if you haven't had the pleasure I'd recommend checking them out.
B&B does stand on its own away from the videos. But the videos are also part of where they really shined. So you can buy the 4 box sets. But you are really getting about 1/3rd of the content from that show. Some of the videos are on the extras discs in the packs. Watching Mike Judge comment on MTV culture through the eyes of B&B was part of the fun. The last season they put the segments in. Watching them riff on Jersey Shore was most amusing.
Very excited to hear about the second Beavis and Butthead reboot! If you were a young fan, the episodes from the first one are definitely worth checking out.
Would love to see Beavis and butthead flip through streamers/YouTube/TikTok content and roast it as heartily as they did when music videos were a thing.
I'd love to see that too. If you like to see people roasting narcissist streamers and "influencers", you might like joeybtoonz[1]. Not for everyone, and there are probably others out there with similar content.
I was as big a fan of B and B as anybody back in the day, but it's been so long I can't imagine a reboot can capture the zeitgeist. It'll be another in a long line of disappointing grave digging, I suspect.
I wouldn't bet against Mike Judge - he went on from B&B to create Office Space, King of the Hill, Idiocracy (painfully underrated), and most recently Silicon Valley.
This made me think of "Liquid Television", where Beavis and Butthead made their first appearances on MTV. There's probably an interesting rabbit-hole to go down re: finding copies of those old shows. There are definitely some pieces that I'd like to see again. (I still find myself saying "You love to bowl" monotonously from time-to-time.)
I didn’t grew up in the 90s but I started watching Daria during high school and it quickly became my favourite show at the time. It was smart, beautifully drawn and said things that even twenty years after the show ended were relevant
I was late 20's in the Daria time frame. Yet, as I noted in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28011399, I liked that enough that years later I torrented all the episodes and binge-watched a good bunch of it. The concept and the characters are good. It's an "artifact of cultural significance".
Beavis and Butthead was the best show ever! It will be interesting to see if they are able to maintain their humor with the current PC cancel culture on the reboot.
I heard this report on the radio version of The Morning Edition, and it was roughly the same as this article... but then Chris Boyd's (sp?) Think came on after, with a follow up about MTV during the same period, and it was almost entirely white flagellation. For every subject brought up about MTV's history and decision making process, there were two or more references to race as an unsubstantiated, assumed reason for what MTV did. I am so very, very tired of this near constant race baiting from NPR and affiliates, but I don't know how to make a difference. And yes, I do know all the arguments assuming that I'm only feeling uncomfortable because of my own privilege or whiteness or whatever, and all I can say without laughing too hard is that these arguments are extremely wrong.
Fortunately you can torrent pretty solid TV rips. I was both too young to watch as a kid and didn't have cable, but I watched the whole series with my wife almost 10 years ago now and it was so good. It's hard to believe that show was so controversial. In many ways it was one of the friendliest, nicest shows. I wonder if younger generations would appreciate it.