Like 1996’s Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe actually feels designed for a feature-length running time, rather than a padded 22-minute TV episode. Over three decades with these characters, Judge has developed a pretty solid sense of scale. She invites them to join the mission, which they interpret as an invitation to score with her.īefore you can say “This sounds like a plot line from For All Mankind,” Beavis and Butthead cause a catastrophe in space, get sucked into a black hole - heh-heh-heh, “hole” - and find themselves in a 2022 full of technology and terminology they don’t understand, all while being pursued by shadowy government forces and versions of Beavis and Butt-Head from an alternate dimension. At the Johnson Space Center - heh-heh-heh, “Johnson” - Beavis and Butt-Head’s unexpected comfort with a particularly sexual piece of docking machinery introduces them to the captain (Andrea Savage’s Serena) of an upcoming mission to the space station. Written by Judge and Lew Morton, Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe begins in 1998 with the boys misbehaving at the Highland High School Science Fair, where they’re unable to decide if their current experiment - Butt-Head attempting to see how many times he can kick Beavis in the balls before Beavis passes out - counts as “scientific.” When chaos and, inevitably, fire ensue, Beavis and Butt-Head are hauled in front of a judge who sentences them to a summer at NASA Space Camp. But in proving that Beavis and Butt-Head absolutely have a place in the contemporary world, it suggests that there’s a limit to how deeply we probably want to interrogate that place.

It’s frequently funny and occasionally savage in its commentary on the changed terrain. That doesn’t mean Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe isn’t funny. Thanks to the less-than-benign passage of time, Beavis and Butt-Head have gone from confrontational, anti-social spuds raised on heavy metal and the distant promise of sexuality to non-threatening relics. Paramount Owner National Amusements Takes $125M Strategic InvestmentĪlthough the entire purpose of the 86-minute Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe is to situate the characters in a modern context, maybe you’ll be able to watch the new movie without dwelling, in the thankfully-rare slow moments, on how the actual Beavises and Butt-Heads of 2022 would behave - where they’d congregate and what outlets they would find for their disaffection.

Download paramount+ beavis