![]() ![]() ![]() At the center were a pair of latchkey teenagers who passed their days in front of the TV, cracking the simplest possible dick jokes and waiting for the day when they might score, occasionally voyaging out into the world to aggravate friends, neighbors, and authority figures alike. On paper, Beavis and Butt-Head was a perfect interstitial show for MTV at the time, as the network transitioned between its early identity as a tastemaker and haven for an array of popular genres and the pop-fueled TRL-era MTV of the decade’s later years. ![]() That Do America was so successful still seems unlikely it grossed $63 million on a production budget of $12 million, and still pops up on cable television to this day as a reminder of what a strange moment in the ‘90s zeitgeist Mike Judge’s series really was. Beavis and Butt-Head Do America only kept that record until the following year, and that feels appropriate given the film’s story of hapless triumph: bursting out to succeed beyond all logic for just a second, before returning back to the status quo. Bill Clinton had recently been re-elected, grunge was either dying or already dead depending on who you ask, and “alternative” was the latest counterculture buzzword on its way to being commodified. And it was on that day, and over the ensuing weekend following it, when a movie about two perpetually tittering dopes raised on obnoxious television and heavy metal had the highest-grossing December debut for an American movie up to that point. This week, Dominick Suzanne-Mayer looks back at Beavis and Butt-Head’s grand arrival on the theatrical stage and how Do America managed to foreground the unspoken sadness beneath the show’s barrage of dong jokes.ĭecember 20 th, 1996. Dusting ‘Em Off is a rotating, free-form feature that revisits a classic album, film, or moment in pop-culture history.
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