We are days away from the return of television history's most dimwitted duo as the new film Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe premieres on Paramount+ on June 23. Ahead of the release, creator Mike Judge recently appeared at Neuehouse Hollywood, per THR, to screen and speak about the film. He first explained how the return of Beavis and Butt-Head was finalized just before the start of the pandemic, meaning everyone involved had been working on the movie remotely. Judge gives particular credit to Paramount Media Networks & MTV Entertainment Studios' Chris McCarthy and Keyes Hill-Edgar with pulling the trigger on the revival.
"They were the guys who took the risk and funded this whole thing. I’ll never forget, we had lunch in March 2020, on Friday the 13th, literally the day before the lockdown happened I think Michael Rotenberg [Judge’s 3 Arts Entertainment manager] said, ‘They just want to know that you’re not crazy,’ and I don’t think I was. We sealed the deal literally the next day and the whole world, or most of it, and the country locked down. We proceeded to make this entire movie without ever being in a room with one another, only on Zoom, until tonight. We’re finding out how tall everyone is.”
Originally, Beavis and Butt-Head had a very successful run on television with seven seasons airing on MTV from 1993 to 1997. The first feature film adaptation, Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, hit theaters in 1996. In 2011, Judge brought back the duo for an eighth season of Beavis and Butt-Head on MTV. In the years since, there have been rumors and chatter of another revival, but it has taken more than a decade to finally get the boys back on the screen again. As for why this new revival took so long, Judge says it was in part due to some friction behind the scenes.
“There were a lot of reasons. They did some stuff that violated agreements with me and things like that but [a sequel] almost happened a few times. We did the new episodes in 2011 and it almost came back several times. About every three years they wanted to do it again.”
Beavis and Butt-Head Are Fun to Portray
So, why now? Judge had been continuously asked about their return, but it wasn't until these recent plans for a new film and TV show revival came along that he was ready for it. He explains that he had happened to record a guest appearance for the band Portugal. The Man at Coachella that involved doing the Beavis and Butt-Head voices. Judge realized upon revisiting those voices that he still had a lot of fun recording them, pushing his interest toward doing another revival.
“It’s really fun to do. I hadn’t done it in so long. It’s not like I sit around and do the voices in my spare time or anything but the band Portugal. The Man asked me to do an intro thing for them at Coachella. We used a song or two of theirs for Silicon Valley and so I did it and thought it sounded like Beavis and Butt-Head... Paramount wanted to do it so I thought why not. It has been a long time. There are people working on the [new] show that weren’t born when it first started.”
Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe starts streaming on June 23 on Paramount+.