You Can Blame South Park For Beavis And Butt-Head Not Getting A Musical Episode
Today is a beautiful day: the "Beavis and Butt-Head" revival is now streaming on Paramount+. The animated series about the misadventures of two of the world's stupidest high-schoolers comes after the streaming service released "Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe," a feature-length film that explained how the boys made it to 2022 without aging a bit. (It involves space travel and wormholes... huh huh... holes.) Now the boys are back, and just as boneheaded as ever, and that means that creator Mike Judge had to come up with some fun new trouble for the duo to get into.
One thing fans won't see these 2-D doofuses do is sing, however, and there's one very good reason: "South Park." That's right, the other cartoon about foul-mouthed, immature boys already did the musical thing in their 1999 movie, "South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut," and Judge wasn't about to try to top the musical madness of that movie.
Judge shared his excitement about the series release with The Hollywood Reporter, and revealed that while we might not get a musical episode, there is a fun musical moment in at least one episode of the new "Beavis and Butt-Head." It's just not something you can dance to.
Beavis backmasks
In the interview, Judge explained that someone pitched a musical episode, but he thought "South Park" had already done that "better than anybody ever." So instead they went with a story where Beavis has a conversation with a literal dumpster fire:
"One of the ideas in that was that fire would be a character. Then [writer] Lew Morton and I just started kicking that idea around that the fire is not telling him to do anything bad. It was so fun to write. Actually, back in the '90s, there was still that lingering thing from the late '80s about how metal albums were accused of putting in backward messaging. And I actually had a couple of cases where Beavis starts talking backward, and if you played that backward, he's saying, 'Stay in school and go to college.' I knew if I put him talking backward, somebody's going to go after the show, and that's what they discovered."
In the late '80s, parents were worried about "backmasking," in which audio that sounds like jibberish is actually dialogue played in reverse. There are stories of parents playing their kids' records backward and discovering prayers to Satan and dangerous instructions, so having Beavis speak backwards and give kids good instructions is pretty darn funny. At least no one will ever get confused by a "huh huh," because that's the same backwards and forwards!
"Beavis and Butt-Head" is now streaming on Paramount+.