By Jeremy Sickel
MTV’s resident dumb asses are back; with a twist. With MTV completely abandoning the entire basis of their own moniker, execs had to come up with a new format behind their hit show if they wanted it to find success similar to what it attained in the mid 1990s.
When Beavis and Butthead first debuted, the music video was at its peak and the show thrived on the public tuning in to watch two idiot high-schooler’s mock the videos and make fun of each other. Throw in the occasional scene at school and the juvenile exploits with Daria and Tom Anderson – who later “morphed’ into Hank Hill with a spin-off of his own – and you had the basis of the show.
The new version is a carbon copy of its former self with the two socially gauche, extremely undereducated youth taking shots at current MTV programming. The likes of “Jersey Shore” and “16 and Pregnant” will be the punching bags of the frequently used “cool” or “this sucks”. The show will obviously exemplify a common theme in all cartoon based shows in that time lapses are completely forgotten. So while the source of Beavis and Butthead’s simplistic analysis will change, expect the rest to stay very much the same.
We gotta throw MTV a bone here with this one though. They realize that they can continue to make a buck from previously successful programming with one simple change; by giving a send off to fading shows in the form of their own Comedy Central Roast type mockery. It is an otherwise genius move that could be overshadowed by the simplicity of the show itself. So while tuning in tonight to the premier, forget about how the message is actually conveyed and think more about the message itself.
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