‘Beavis & Butt-Head’ Return to MTV this Summer

An approximate release date of Summer 2011 has been announced as the return of MTV's Beavis & Butt-Head, the groundbreaking animated series created by Mike Judge (King of the Hill, Office Space). The original series aired from 1993-1997 on the once influential American cable network and spawned a successful tie-in comic book from Marvel that ran for three years. Judge, who also voices the titular characters as well as much of the supporting cast, will return as executive producer of the new Beavis & Butt-Head, which will simply pick up where the original left off.Beloved by children, teenagers, college students and misanthropes of all ages, Beavis & Butt-Head paved the way for a whole generation of crudely animated, offensively foul-mouthed and unapologetically anarchic cartoons including South Park and virtually every animated series from Adult Swim. A typical episode depicted the depraved duo doing little more than mocking what they saw on MTV, brutalizing the conservative sensibilities of their elderly neighbor, and walking the Earth in a paradoxical fit of great fury and infinite apathy. It was really neat.

As pointed out by Screen Rant's Michael Crider, the landscape of television has become only filthier and more insane in Beavis & Butt-Head's nearly-15-year absence. What Mike Judge and his characters once considered laughably poor programming on 1990s MTV is what many of us remember as a kind of high culture golden age compared to the frat house of horrors the network has since become. Additionally, the bar for animated controversy has been raised impossibly high thanks to some unspeakably vulgar episodes of shows like Family Guy. Most impressively, the creators of South Park earned themselves a genuine fatwah for their work with Islamic themes.

Obviously, Beavis & Butt-Head have it within their power to approach these levels of indecency/amazingness, but we'll have to wait until this summer to see how far Mike Judge is prepared to go to reclaim his throne as the king of crude.

[Via Screen Rant]