BEFORE: Oh, yeah, I have access to Paramount+ now, because of some merger with Showtime, and since we pay for Showtime on premium cable, that means we also get access to the Paramount streaming service. I don't have much use for it, unless there's something on it that is exclusive and not streaming anywhere else. Also, I might watch the other seasons of "Star Trek: Discovery" this summer if things slow down at the movie theater, which they tend to do in July and August. (I know this sounds crazy, but the theater is run by a college, and the summer session doesn't seem to hold events there.). I watched Season 1 for free when it aired on CBS, but I refused to pay for another streaming service to watch the rest.
I enjoyed "Beavis and Butt-Head Do America", or at least I think I did, so this is one of the rare things on Paramount+ that I'll allow to rise to the top of the list. We also watched the new South Park specials like "The End of Obesity" because they don't seem to be making any new regular 30-minute episodes to air on Comedy Central any more.
David Herman carries over from "Strays".
THE PLOT: After a judge sentences them to space camp, a black hole sends our adolescent heroes 24 years into the future where the duo misuse iPhones, embark on a quest to score and become targets of the Deep State.
AFTER: Yeah, I probably could have passed on this and not missed anything, it's not like there's any new ground being broken with a new Beavis and Butt-Head movie. They waited 26 years to make another movie with these characters, so clearly there wasn't much demand for one, or else Mike Judge just didn't need the money, but then suddenly he did. I hung out with Mike Judge once, he came to our booth at San Diego Comic-Con once in 2006, but that was 18 years ago, no contact or encounters with him since then. I remember a lot of sketchbooks or autograph books suddenly appearing out of nowhere when people realized there were THREE noted animators standing in the same booth, but Judge got bored of signing things very quickly and said (in a very Butt-Head-like voice), "This sucks, I'm gonna go look at some swords or something..."
So, from what I know about animators, they tend to be very self-centered people who keep wanting to do original stuff, much of which doesn't work, so eventually they are forced to return to their characters who were popular once, and find a way to revive them. I think there's a new "Beavis & Butt-Head" series now, I don't know if they watch music videos together in the new show, because who even knows what a music video is any more? I don't think MTV has even aired one in 15 or 20 years, and once upon a time that was ALL they played. Anyway, if you're curious how these characters could have not aged (or matured) at all in the last 26 years, this film explains it, they were sent 24 years into the future, from 1998 to 2022. A real, actual, story-based reason why they haven't been on TV in so long - it's not necessary, but I guess it's nice that it's there?
Look, this could have been worse, they could have explored a whole multi-verse of Beavises and Butt-Heads, with hundreds of variations, or they'd have to travel between the dimensions in some kind of "EveryBeavis EveryButtHead All at Once" kind of thing. Or worse, like the Spider-Verse franchise which assumed that if five Spider-Men were good, then 270 Spider-Men would be even gooder - but at some point "more" just becomes "way too much", doesn't it? Honestly, I was hoping something for a little closer to "Bill & Ted Face the Music", but this one just didn't go that way. They actually showed some restraint here, but I bet if this was made after last year's Oscars it would have been a whole different deal.
Instead there's just ONE other version of themselves that our heroes encounter, from a parallel dimension where everything is kind of futuristic and/or backwards, so they are called "Smart Beavis" and "Smart Butt-Head" but OF COURSE the ones we're familiar can't really wrap their heads around the whole interdimensional counter-part thing, or properly follow their instructions or advice at any point, because, well, they're dumb and I guess that's part of their charm.
It all starts when they accidentally burn down their school's science fair, after coming a bit too close to actually participating with a valid science experiment and maybe getting a passing grade on something. Nope, fire is a much better result, let's not set that entertainment bar too high. The judge at their trial, for some reason, blames society for them not being properly educated and awards them the prize from the science fair, 8 weeks at space camp. It's a little tough to say whether that's a reward or a punishment, and for that matter, is space cool or is it too nerdy for them? Doesn't really matter, it's just a story device that gets them aboard the space shuttle so they can wreck that, too.
Serena, the female Space Shuttle captain is ready to sacrifice herself, because there are seven people aboard the shuttle, and only enough oxygen for five. But Beavis and Butt-Head, who all along keep thinking that Serena wants to have sex with them, put on spacesuits to go watch her change clothes from outside the shuttle (classy...) and she takes the opportunity to smack them into space with the shuttle's arm. She thinks she's killed them, but is surprised when they turn up again, 24 years later, after traveling into the future via black hole, and by then she's the governor of Texas, and they are the skeletons in her closet, the two kids who died aboard her shuttle. You might think that she'd be happy to see them, because if they're alive, she didn't kill them back in 1998, so yeah, the movie gets this a little backwards, because instead she just wants to kill them. Again. Is that just because of how annoying they are?
It's weird, I know, she wants to kill them to cover up the fact that she murdered them. Also the Pentagon is tracking them because of the time anomaly that brought them back to Texas, thinking that they are aliens. Umm, no, they're just stupid kids who don't seem to understand anything about modern society, so I guess I can see how that got confused, aliens wouldn't get all our human things, either. Meanwhile, Smart Beavis and Smart Butt-Head keep trying to get them to go through time portals to return to 1998 and fix continuity before the universe collapses, but these two knuckleheads keep getting distracted, and also failing upwards. They get stuck in a Port-a-Potty because, well, this isn't exactly Shakespeare stuff.
Our heroes visit a college, learn about white privilege, and misunderstand it completely, thinking this means they have the right to steal a police car. They go to jail and an inmate asks them to hold his bag of drugs, but of course Beavis swallows them and does the old Cornholio bit for a while, though it's long past the point of being funny. Finally they get back to their old house, only to learn that it's up for sale, Beavis' mother died at some point and the house has been empty for a while, but they've somehow gotten it in their heads that if they can meet Serena there, she'll have sex with them, which couldn't be further from the truth. Really, this is a case of a movie firing in many directions at once, hoping to hit some comedy at some point.
I mean, maybe it's for the best - during a very backwards car chase, Smart Beavis and Smart Butt-Head show a vision of what their lives will be like, once they go through the portal and get back to a reality where they never went through the black hole in the first place. They're old and fat and still watching TV together, so just keep reminding yourself that things could always be worse than they are, then they don't seem so bad. It's actually pretty good advice. You have to figure that if you could see across the non-existent multiverse and learn about the other versions of your life, maybe in 50% of those, you'd be worse off. Or just don't bother and try to make the best of the life that you get.
Also starring the voices of Mike Judge (last seen in "The Front Runner"), Gary Cole (last seen in "Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!"), Nat Faxon (last seen in "Charlie's Angels" (2019)), Chi McBride (last seen in "Let's Go to Prison"), Andrea Savage (last seen in "You People"), Carlos Alazraqui, Susan Bennett, Mary Birdsong (last seen in "Made of Honor"), Greg Chun, Phil Davis, Chris Diamantopolous (last seen in "Empire State"), Zehra Fazal, Ashley Gardner (last seen in "He Said, She Said"), Brian Huskey (last heard in "The Bob's Burgers Movie"), Toby Huss (last seen in "Balls of Fury"), Phil Lamarr (last heard in "Quiz Lady"), Whitney Martin, Michael Massimino, Jim Meskimen (last heard in "Driven"), Tig Notaro (last seen in "Together Together"), Toks Olagundoye (last seen in "Unicorn Store"), Jimmy O. Yang (last seen in "Me Time"), Stephen Root (last seen in "Stanley & Iris"), Martin Starr (last seen in "Spider-Man: No Way Home"), Tru Valentino
RATING: 4 out of 10 trays of nachos
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