America’s favorite pair of giggling, bone-headed, head-banging slackers are back with the reboot of Beavis and Butthead. The irreverent MTV cartoon from animator Mike Judge returned on Thursday with a pilot episode on its new home of Paramount+, arriving a quarter century after the end of the show’s initial run (and 11 years after the seldom discussed 2011 reboot).
The reboot finds the titular duo catching up on all the things they’ve missed in the past decade. The first half of the episode finds our heroes attempting to get out of an escape room that is actually a bathroom (at an escape room storefront). In between flushing things down the toilets they take breaks to ridicule college acceptance reaction videos and an instructional clip on how to give prison tattoos like something out of an even lower-brow America’s Funniest Home Videos.
During the second half of the episode, titled “The Special One”, pyromaniac Beavis discovers an ability to communicate with fire. It turns out that fire hasn’t given up on Beavis the way the rest of society has, and it encourages the malcontent to exercise, recycle litter, and write a book report on Call of the Wild.
In the midst of Beavis’ fire-taught self-help class, he and Butthead set their sights on Cale Dodds. If you don’t know who Cale Dodds is, Facebook message one of the guys you went to high school with who still goes to all the football games. From their couch of judgment, the two rip apart Dodd’s Hitch-meets-Love Actually music video for “I Like Where This Is Going”, which is as predictably formulaic as his song.
“This is like all those movies where, like, the good-looking cool guy teaches the dork how to score, and he like trains him,” Butthead observes, following it up with some more modern terminology. “He’s grooming him.”
“They told us about these kinds of guys in health class,” he adds. “They may come across as friendly at first, they may even sing you a country song. … Here’s what happened to a young man who went home with Cale Dodds.”
While Cale Dodds may not be the most high-profile artist (or at least he wasn’t yesterday), the remaining episodes of Beavis & Butthead promise criticisms of today’s top stars. Per Pitchfork, the new season will feature music videos from Olivia Rodrigo, Post Malone, Camila Cabello, Tyler, the Creator, and more. Also on the docket is K-pop powerhouse BTS, who come packing with a dedicated fan Army that Beavis and show creator Mike Judge are evidently members of.
“BTS is a guilty pleasure—but maybe not even that guilty: I like them,” Judge told The Hollywood Reporter. “I have pretty mainstream tastes. I think because I used to be a musician, people think I’m going to be a music snob. I’m not at all. I like a lot of very sugary pop music. We did that a little bit with Bon Jovi in the ‘90s, Beavis liking them more than he should.”
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Check out the premiere of Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butthead reboot on Paramount+.
Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butt-Head | Series Premiere | Full Episode | Paramount+