With new episodes of Beavis and Butt-head set to premiere this week after being teed up by their new movie, Beavis and Butt-head Do the Universe, creator Mike Judge has been opening up about the show’s wild prominence during the ’90s.
Originally released on MTV, the cartoon featured two teenage morons as they watched music videos and got into all kinds of mayhem out of sheer boredom and stupidity. While the show’s comedy style quickly found an audience, it also became a lightning rod for controversy thanks to Beavis’s love of fire, which had to be frantically yanked from the series. Beavis wasn’t even allowed to say the word following accusations that a five-year-old committed arson because of the cartoon.
“The show came along at a time when there wasn’t a whole lot going on in the world,” Judge told IndieWire. “Things were pretty good. The Cold War was over. Crime was starting to go down in the ‘90s. Suddenly there was this whole thing about blaming violence on television. ‘Beavis and Butt-Head’ was served up perfectly as the show that defined that.”
However, Judge revealed that he wasn’t causing concern with just parents and the media. He apparently had one particular fan who did not appreciate that Beavis and Butt-head made white people look bad. Yup:
Back in the ’90s, I got a string of hate mail from this one neo-Nazi white supremacist because of the way I was portraying white people. He was accusing me of being Jewish, too. He would circle my name in articles and say things like, “Is this real name Judge-stein?” He was just a really awful dude. Every now and then these days, someone celebrates this work the wrong way, but I don’t see it as often as the reverse.
Neo-Nazi hate mail aside, Judge has been pretty happy that, as far as he can tell, Beavis and Butt-head never took off with Donald Trump supporters.
“I haven’t really seen any of the MAGA-head right-wingers celebrating these guys,” Judge said. “Beavis and Butt-Head are such losers. They’re not tearing ass with a giant truck or anything. So hopefully it doesn’t cross paths with all that.”
Beavis and Butt-head starts streaming new episodes August 4 on Paramount+.
(Via IndieWire)
