Mark Reviews Movies: BEAVIS AND BUTT-HEAD DO THE UNIVERSE

Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe, Paramount+

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 22, 2022

The dunderheaded duo of Beavis and Butt-Head return to bumble their way through space, time, the modern world, cellphones, handcuffs, gear shifts, and other complex or very basic things. There's no particular reason for Mike Judge's animated creations to come back for a story that basically explains how these teenagers of the 1990s can still be teenagers in 2022. Well, there is one reason: The guys are still funny. Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe, which arrives 30 years after the pair's first appearance, shows that the two have a comedic quality that is—as odd as it may seem to say such a thing—timeless and universal.

That's primarily because they can fit into any situation, and Judge and Lew Morton's screenplay almost goes out of its way to prove that idea. Here, Beavis and Butt-Head, both voiced by Judge, go to space camp, into space (both on a shuttle and, after they annoy the crew one or ten too many times, through the vacuum of it), to the future (well, their future and our present), and through a series of adventures that would almost certainly get anyone else into lots of danger.

We'd call these episodes misadventures, except that Beavis and Butt-head are incapable of making mistakes or experiencing mishaps. They simply exist to chuckle at accidental or unlikely double entendres, unintentionally cause destruction or cause a lot more than they initially mean to, and think about or monumentally fail to try to have sex with just about any woman who exists within 15 feet of them.

The whole conceit of these characters is a one-joke affair, of course, but the main reason Beavis and Butt-Head have persisted—through and even after four years on television, their first feature film Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (a very, very funny film indeed, by the way), and a brief return to TV about a decade ago—depends on the clever ways Judge and company adapt, re-contextualize, and stretch that joke. In this film (directed by John Rice and Albert Calleros), the filmmakers definitely stretch the gag a bit too much in certain ways and not quite enough in others, but who cares? Again, these guys are still funny.

All the way back in 1998, Beavis and Butt-Head are high school students in a small Texas town—just as they always have been. At the school science fair, Butt-Head is happily kicking his friend in the crotch, as an announcement reminds everyone that the fair's winner will receive a free trip to a camp run by NASA. Anyway, Butt-Head notices an automatic kicking machine, and Beavis watches the thing, aimed at his crotch, wind up, hilariously unaware of the obvious consequences. The end result is a massive fire and standing before a judge who's feeling generous that day.

That's how the two, in an effort to reform them, end up in space camp. If the unwitting and antisocial nature of these characters is the foundation of the humor (misunderstood by particular groups and politicians in the '90s, as if Judge's intention was to praise these oblivious teens who never get what they want), the willingness of adults, like that judge and the people at NASA, to mistake their stupidity for sincerity, their vacant stares for attention, and their one-track mindsets for dedication is the engine that keeps the humor going. In this case, after Beavis and Butt-Head spend hours doing something that looks quite suggestive with a couple of remote-controlled models, shuttle commander Serena Ryan (voice of Andrea Savage) suggests the teens should join her crew on a mission to fix a space telescope. They think that means she wants to have sex with them, naturally.

After plenty of funny gags (One involving that telescope, aimed directly at the sun, shows how willing the filmmakers are to make the predictability of a joke the source of its strength), Beavis and Butt-Head are launched into space, enter a black hole, and land in the year 2022. From there, Serena, now the state's governor, and a Pentagon suit (voiced by Gary Cole) go hunting for the duo. She wants to kill Beavis and Butt-Head in order to cover up her previous attempt to kill them, and he believes they're aliens and wants to dissect them.

If there's something missing here, it's that those characters, as well as some other adults who pop in to misunderstand Beavis and Butt-Head and get them started on new adventures, feel separated from the joke, existing only to keep the plot going. There's also, perhaps, a lack of awareness of just how much the world has changed since the '90s. The pair end up with a cellphone, for example, leading to Beavis starting what he believes to be a romantic relationship with a virtual assistant—a turn so pathetic that it adds an unexpected layer of melancholy to the blond doofus (A dream, in which an imaginary girlfriend serves as his protector, only bolsters that notion). Then again, it's probably a good thing they don't do the obvious and mention sex to that phone, or there'd be no plot for all the personal time they'd be taking with the search results.

Otherwise, we get plenty of smart setups (alternate-universe Beavis and Butt-Head, a stop in a gender studies class, and being handcuffed while the antagonists debate their fate) that continually show how dumb these two are in new ways (the "smart" versions' larger vocabulary only obscuring their retained ignorance, the two taking the concept of "privilege" as an invitation, and somehow screwing up an easy escape, only to accidentally wind up in a car chase). This duo might not needed to have returned, but Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe gives us plenty of reasons to be grateful that they did.

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