Children of the ’90s will remember MTV’s animated anthology series Liquid Television for gems like the avant sci-fi Æon Flux, early Beavis and Butthead, or even the show’s theme music composed by Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh. The oddball indie animated showcase was one giant bizarro world blending the strange and amusing works from names like Richard Sala, Charles Burns, and Peter Bagge. It looks like MTV is hosting a giant Liquid Television portal — a virtual treasure trove of these early works which pushed boundaries and in many ways helped revolutionize the art of animation. Check out MTV’s archive and hit the jump for a peek at a few of our faves from this out of print series. Play some “Frog Baseball,” dig into a little 1990′s infomercialism at its weirdest, experience an early live-action/comic book work from Charles Burns, and more below.
Last month, when MTV released a five-minute preview of the rebooted Beavis and Butt-Head, one question plagued fans of the original series: Why are they watching Jersey Shore? For those of us who hoped the show’s return would mean a new space for music on the network, the clip was a harsh reminder that times have changed. Although many of us groaned over this development (another show whose de facto star is Snooki?), Jess Harvell at the Village Voicepraised it as shrewd, both culturally and as a marketing decision. “The whole point of Beavis and Butt-Head‘s video crit, aside from the hilarity, is that they were the much-derided stereotypical passive MTV viewers absorbing whatever the channel threw at them,” he wrote. “In the ’90s you were as likely to happen on a Blues Explosion video as you were to see ‘End of the Road’ a zillion times in 24 hours. In 2011, Beavis and Butt-Head sucking up endless hours of reality TV is realistic in a way that zinging the Arcade Fire probably isn’t.”
But, as it turns out, creator Mike Judge’s reasons for replacing Sonic Youth with Snooki aren’t nearly that involved. “It’s licensing,” he told Billboard. The issue originally came up in the early ’00s, when the DVD release of the original series was delayed and heavily edited because the show had never secured home video rights for the music videos Beavis and Butt-Head critiqued. And there’s some good news for those who would miss seeing the boys stick it to “Rico Suave”: The show will include music videos (Deadmau5, MGMT, Yolanda Be Cool, and T-Baby have already been cleared, while Judge says, “We’re working on Lady Gaga”), in addition to Jersey Shore, Teen Mom, 16 and Pregnant, and a selection of UFC fights and film clips.
Get out your metal T-shirts and Burger World uniforms: Beavis and Butt-head are coming back to MTV. The cartoon duo, who “huh huh”ed their way through animated adventures and music videos from 1993 to 1997, were a favorite of Gen-X and Gen-Yers, most of whom stopped watching MTV years ago. So while we’re happy to see the boys back, we wonder how they’re going to fit into the network’s current programming model. After all, their primary original function was to provide Mystery Science Theater 3000-style commentary for music videos; since the channel’s not that into music anymore (the “M” in their name notwithstanding), the L.A. Times predicts that the boys will riff on MTV shows like Jersey Shore and Skins. Which could prove fruitful, since Snookie is just as hateable as Poison.
But, perhaps more pressingly, the teens and tweens who watch MTV nowadays may very well have no idea who the hell Beavis and Butt-head are. Yes, the Skins kids made the announcement at MTV’s upfront, and Justin Bieber was all excited about it on Twitter. But they don’t know Beavis and Butt-head. Not like we do. And so, as a public service for today’s youth (boy do we feel old), we humbly offer this brief guide toBeavis and Butt-head. Read More »
The future is unknowable, but that hasn’t stopped prognosticators from trying to imagine what’s in store for us a few decades, or even a few millennia, from now. Popular culture has envisioned a future both utopian (think George Jetson and moving sidewalks) and bleak (like Mike Judge’s cult film Idiocracy). But, whether optimistic or dystopian, visions of the future are rarely right — in fact, most of these predictions are wrong, often hilariously so.
Paul Milo has produced an exhaustive compendium of predictions of the future in his highly readable, often laugh-out-loud funny book Your Flying Car Awaits. Suitable for dipping into or reading all the way through, it looks at predictions in a wide range of areas — from the future of health and travel to the prospects of nuclear energy and space exploration. The insights are as vast as the predictions are head-scratching. (Jet powered cars? Talking dolphins? Come on.)
Save for the Britney Spears meltdowns and Tom Cruise couch-jumping fiascoes of the world, public opinion on any given celebrity is usually a pretty static thing. Everyone likes Will Smith. People have generally good feelings about Reese Witherspoon. Many can’t stand Katherine Heigl lately, but it’s not like she isn’t a teensy bit deserving of all that ill will. What we’re getting at here is that, for being a generally likable celebrity who’s never gotten himself into a weird public spat with Matt Lauer, Ben Affleck is an oddly polarizing figure. His career hasn’t been unlike that of a politician in that his approval ratings have run a wide gamut over the years. (Remember those rumors that he was running for senator?)
This month he’s back in theaters as a stoner sidekick type in Mike Judge’s Extract, and it suddenly finally feels OK to embrace B-Fleck again. Why now? We think we’ve managed to distill Ben’s likability down to five simple tenets. Read More »
A decade after Office Space, writer/director Mike Judge salutes Labor Day with a new workplace comedy about blue-collar incompetence.
Jason Bateman stars as the owner of a flavor-extract factory employing a staff of dunces. While he deals with his passionless marriage and his lust for a sly new hire, a worker’s oddball accident threatens to ruin the company’s future. The farcical plot is anchored by Judge’s keen sense of workaday humor and a gallery of memorable losers, topped by Ben Affleck’s loony, long-haired slacker. Read More »
Clifton Collins Jr. as Step in Extract Photo Credit: Sam Urdank/Miramax Film Corp
Clifton Collins Jr. has played a death row prisoner in Capote, a hit man in Traffic, and most recently, a Romulan officer battling the USS Enterprise crew in Star Trek. While his on-screen transformations appear effortless, one look at his bookshelves — laden with tales of serial killers, drug cartels, and pimps — reveals that Clifton does his homework and never phones anything in. We’re not sure what this says about his latest role as the victim of freak factory accident in fall’s long-awaited Mike Judge film, Extract.
After the jump, read on to find out about how Clifton went “balls to the wall” and performed a risky stunt while filming, and who was more computer literate back in the day, him or his buddy Judd Nelson. Read More »
Can Office Space writer/director Mike Judge make lightning in a bottle twice (four times if you count Beavis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill, which we don’t)? As we sit here suffering from a case of the Mondays, we certainly hope so — we need a new workplace movie to quote.
. Suitable for dipping into or reading all the way through, it looks at predictions in a wide range of areas — from the future of health and travel to the prospects of nuclear energy and space exploration. The insights are as vast as the predictions are head-scratching. (
