10 ms·

How Beavis, Butt-Head and Daria disrupted cable

92 points by hhs 5y ago

AndrewBissell 5y ago
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.
- k12sosse 5y ago
  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.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    Everyone forgets it was mostly MST3K with music videos, aside from the odd short story.
  - ryandrake 5y ago
    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. 1: https://www.youtube.com/c/joeybtoonz/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/joeybtoonz/videos
- technothrasher 5y ago
  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.
  - saturdaysaint 5y ago
    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.
    - eplanit 5y ago
      He's one of the most important, insightful, and yet woefully underappreciated social observer/reflector of the past 25 years.
      - city41 5y ago
        His understanding of humans is just uncanny.
    - prepend 5y ago
      Extract was only so-so.
    - PhasmaFelis 5y ago
      Idiocracy is underrated? Pretty much anywhere on the internet you can find people who took its weird spin on eugenics as scientific fact.
  - AndrewBissell 5y ago
    You should really check out the 2011 episodes. I only watched them once, when they came out, but I still remember a lot of the jokes.
boomboomsubban 5y ago
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.
- hhs 5y ago
  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.
  - boomboomsubban 5y ago
    Calling slightly edgier cartoons "disrupting cable" seems like a stretch.
    - grawprog 5y ago
      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.
addingnumbers 5y ago
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.
- dkarl 5y ago
  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.
wodenokoto 5y ago
I love daria. 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.
- sumtechguy 5y ago
  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.
  - wodenokoto 5y ago
    I was talking about daria, not because and butthead.
- autoexec 5y ago
  > 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.
Zelphyr 5y ago
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...
dmitryminkovsky 5y ago
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.
- johtso 5y ago
  Ah yes, the glorious "King Turd" collection. Where there's a will there's a way.
  - dmitryminkovsky 5y ago
    Amazing. Never knew it had a name. Thanks.
  - gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
    When I get my NAS set up that’s the first thing I’m transferring onto it. With RAID 1 of course! uhhhhh losing those files would suck uhuhuhhuhh
    - prepend 5y ago
      RAID5 will help quite a bit with large media collections.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
        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.
AdmiralAsshat 5y ago
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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maxx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maxx
- bitexploder 5y ago
  As a teen I didn’t quite get Aeon Flux, but I loved the animation style.
  - riffraff 5y ago
    As a fellow teen at the time: it was confusing but I liked it a lot, tho I could have done without the tongue twisting kissing animations. But then they did "Alexander" in the same style and it was awesome I cannot believe that show is not more popular.
    - AdmiralAsshat 5y ago
      I assume you're referring to Alexander Senki, or "Reign: The Conqueror"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign:_The_Conqueror https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign:_The_Conqueror 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.
- SEJeff 5y ago
  The Maxx was incredible. Those were the days when MTV actually had music videos. I loved watching all of MTV's "oddities" with my aunt.
- zxcvbn4038 5y ago
  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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brothers_Grunt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brothers_Grunt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexx
euroderf 5y ago
Let us not forget that MTV ran without commercials for two or three years.
iddan 5y ago
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
- kazinator 5y ago
  I was late 20's in the Daria time frame. Yet, as I noted in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28011399 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".
kazinator 5y ago
I like Daria; I have all the episodes somewhere on some hard drive thanks to Bittorrent. Regarding Beavis and Butt-Head, I made a script in the early 1990's that produced randomized B&B laughter, using samples. hhehhh hehh huh .. hhe eheh ...
EvanAnderson 5y ago
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.)
jimmygrapes 5y ago
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.
- nullc 5y ago
  Turn it off. Don't listen, don't fund it. It might not make a difference, but it'll make it no longer your problem.
- ViViDboarder 5y ago
  > and all I can say without laughing too hard is that these arguments are extremely wrong. I’m not trying to imply anything, but why do you think you’re uncomfortable?
  - bitwize 5y ago
    (Church Lady voice) Could it beeeeeeee... WHITE FRAGILITY?
lgleason 5y ago
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.

92 points by hhs 5y ago

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.

k12sosse 5y ago
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.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  Everyone forgets it was mostly MST3K with music videos, aside from the odd short story.
- ryandrake 5y ago
  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. 1: https://www.youtube.com/c/joeybtoonz/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/joeybtoonz/videos
technothrasher 5y ago
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.
- saturdaysaint 5y ago
  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.
  - eplanit 5y ago
    He's one of the most important, insightful, and yet woefully underappreciated social observer/reflector of the past 25 years.
    - city41 5y ago
      His understanding of humans is just uncanny.
  - prepend 5y ago
    Extract was only so-so.
  - PhasmaFelis 5y ago
    Idiocracy is underrated? Pretty much anywhere on the internet you can find people who took its weird spin on eugenics as scientific fact.
- AndrewBissell 5y ago
  You should really check out the 2011 episodes. I only watched them once, when they came out, but I still remember a lot of the jokes.

boomboomsubban 5y ago

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.

hhs 5y ago
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.
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  Calling slightly edgier cartoons "disrupting cable" seems like a stretch.
  - grawprog 5y ago
    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.

addingnumbers 5y ago

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.

dkarl 5y ago
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.

wodenokoto 5y ago

I love daria. 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.

sumtechguy 5y ago
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.
- wodenokoto 5y ago
  I was talking about daria, not because and butthead.
autoexec 5y ago
> 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.

Zelphyr 5y ago

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...

dmitryminkovsky 5y ago

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.

johtso 5y ago
Ah yes, the glorious "King Turd" collection. Where there's a will there's a way.
- dmitryminkovsky 5y ago
  Amazing. Never knew it had a name. Thanks.
- gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
  When I get my NAS set up that’s the first thing I’m transferring onto it. With RAID 1 of course! uhhhhh losing those files would suck uhuhuhhuhh
  - prepend 5y ago
    RAID5 will help quite a bit with large media collections.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      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.

AdmiralAsshat 5y ago

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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maxx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maxx

bitexploder 5y ago
As a teen I didn’t quite get Aeon Flux, but I loved the animation style.
- riffraff 5y ago
  As a fellow teen at the time: it was confusing but I liked it a lot, tho I could have done without the tongue twisting kissing animations. But then they did "Alexander" in the same style and it was awesome I cannot believe that show is not more popular.
  - AdmiralAsshat 5y ago
    I assume you're referring to Alexander Senki, or "Reign: The Conqueror"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign:_The_Conqueror https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign:_The_Conqueror 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.
SEJeff 5y ago
The Maxx was incredible. Those were the days when MTV actually had music videos. I loved watching all of MTV's "oddities" with my aunt.
zxcvbn4038 5y ago
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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brothers_Grunt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brothers_Grunt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexx

euroderf 5y ago

Let us not forget that MTV ran without commercials for two or three years.

iddan 5y ago

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

kazinator 5y ago
I was late 20's in the Daria time frame. Yet, as I noted in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28011399 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".

kazinator 5y ago

I like Daria; I have all the episodes somewhere on some hard drive thanks to Bittorrent. Regarding Beavis and Butt-Head, I made a script in the early 1990's that produced randomized B&B laughter, using samples. hhehhh hehh huh .. hhe eheh ...

EvanAnderson 5y ago

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.)

jimmygrapes 5y ago

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.

nullc 5y ago
Turn it off. Don't listen, don't fund it. It might not make a difference, but it'll make it no longer your problem.
ViViDboarder 5y ago
> and all I can say without laughing too hard is that these arguments are extremely wrong. I’m not trying to imply anything, but why do you think you’re uncomfortable?
- bitwize 5y ago
  (Church Lady voice) Could it beeeeeeee... WHITE FRAGILITY?

lgleason 5y ago

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.