I was ready to ignore Paramount Plus, which recently launched in the UK, because who needs another streaming service in their life, right? Then I saw there was a new Beavis and Butt-Head movie on there, written and directed by series creator Mike Judge. Damn. They got me. I'm in my mid-30s, and I grew up watching these idiots on Channel 4 every Friday night, so Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe—their first feature length misadventure since 1996's Beavis and Butt-Head Do America—is aimed squarely at someone like me. I'm always wary of beloved characters from a bygone era being revived for a new audience, but I should have known Judge would be able to pull it off. Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe is both brilliantly stupid and just plain brilliant.
In the real world, the first run of Beavis and Butt-Head ended in 1997. There was a comeback series in 2011, but the movie seems to forget it existed. This new story is set a year after the show's cancellation, in 1998, where the boys are continuing to live their best lives: meaning eating nachos, watching music videos, and terrorising their neighbours. Like the previous movie, their oblivious stupidity and the promise of 'scoring' with a woman who has no interest in them, leads them on an odyssey—only this time it's a space odyssey. Don't ask me how, but Beavis and Butt-Head join NASA and end up getting sucked into a black hole, emerging in a strange, confusing new world: Texas in the year 2022. It's an absurd, far-fetched premise, even by this series' standards, but just go with it.
Unphased by being flung into the future, our heroes continue their quest to score, ignorant of a larger problem looming over them. Shortly after arriving in 2022 they're visited by hyper-intelligent versions of themselves from another dimension—Smart Beavis and Smart Butt-Head—who tell them that if they don't return to their own time in the next two days, both their universes will be destroyed. You can guess how seriously they take this as they search for the woman they want to sleep with—a NASA astronaut turned governor of Texas—instead of the portal leading back to 1998. As the title suggests, Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe is basically a very crude sci-fi movie, which feels a bit out of place at first, but Judge somehow makes it work.
There are further complications in the story, including the fact that Serena, the former astronaut, wants to kill them; and the US government is after them too, thinking they're aliens. That's a lot of plot, and it's quite convoluted, but it doesn't really matter. It's all just an elaborate excuse for Beavis Butt-Head to stumble from one ridiculous situation to the next, leaving chaos and devastation in their wake, and—somewhat surprisingly—learning a few personal lessons along the way. The show has always painted Beavis as a fundamentally decent, good-hearted person, led astray by the dismissive and cruel Butt-Head. Do the Universe leans into this more heavily than anything before, and brings a glimmer of humanity to these characters. A sign of Mike Judge's advancing years, perhaps?
Then again, maybe not. These moments aside, this is otherwise very much classic Beavis and Butt-Head. Innuendo, gratuitous violence, sniggering at words like 'wood' and 'insert', toilet humour—all comfortingly present and correct, as if the past 25 years hadn't happened. But that's what I want from a Beavis and Butt-Head movie. They're idiots. That's who they are. To betray that would be to betray the characters. In the same way I now get sadly wistful watching Jackass as an older man, there's something wonderfully nostalgic about seeing these two fools kicking each other in the nuts. Judge's Beavis voice might be a little deeper, and the animation is cleaner, but it's remarkable how consistent this new movie is with the original series in look, feel, and spirit. It's a revival done right.
But it's not completely stuck in the past. Tossing these '90s relics into the modern day results in some fun self-aware moments where they try to get to grips with contemporary society and technology. At one point they stumble into a college and find themselves in a gender studies class. There they learn about an exciting new concept called 'white privilege' and proceed to rampage around the campus doing whatever they like, idiotically empowered by it, which they inevitably take too far and end up in jail. I would have liked Judge to go further with this, though. The fact they've been transplanted into a whole other century doesn't factor into the story as much as you might expect, and moments where they're being chased by government agents feel a little too similar to Do America.
The plot might crumble under its own preposterous weight sometimes, but Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe is a fine return to form for these characters—and for Mike Judge, whose distinctive approach to comedy I've dearly missed. I'm also delighted to discover, despite meaning I'll have to sign up for Paramount Plus again, that brand new episodes of the show are coming later in the year. Admittedly, I don't know if we actually need a Beavis a Butt-Head revival in 2022, but I'll take it—and hopefully this leads to Judge bringing back King of the Hill too. I complain about old shows and movies being revived and repackaged by giant corporations to cynically appeal to people's nostalgia, but I'll let this slide. Some things are worth bringing back, and fart jokes are eternal.