The world has only grown stupider over the past three decades, making the return of animation’s crown princes of idiocy, Beavis and Butt-Head, long overdue. Arriving June 23 on Paramount+ (along with their entire MTV TV series catalog), Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe is an admirable follow-up to 1996’s Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, proving that amusing inanity never goes out of style. In fact, such absurdity transcends eras, as does the senseless duo in their latest adventure, which follows them through a time-space portal that transports them from the cozy confines of 1998 to the perplexing landscape of 2022.
Situating Beavis and Butt-Head in a modern context would seem like a premise ripe for pointed satire, and there are definitely a few digs at contemporary culture sprinkled throughout Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe. Yet for the most part, the film’s scenario is merely an excuse for the same brand of braindead chuckling and sexual puns that have always defined Mike Judge’s comedy. Judge once again voices both hyperactive blonde-haired Beavis and nonchalantly doltish Butt-Head in this sci-fi saga (which he wrote with Lew Morton), whose animation—from famed studio Titmouse—is as familiar as its protagonists’ dim dispositions and dynamic. There’s nothing especially new here except the particulars of this narrative, which makes sense considering that Beavis and Butt-Head are entertaining precisely because of their reliably juvenile and horny responses to everything and everyone they encounter.
“There you have it—the greatest story ever told,” intones Butt-Head at the conclusion of directors John Rice and Albert Calleros’ Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe, and though that description is certainly up for debate, what’s not in question is the fact that Judge’s metalhead morons remain icons of perpetual witlessness. As they describe it, their second feature film is a “tale of two heroes on a quest to score. Across time and space. It’s a story of sex, violence, and power,” and it opens at the 1998 Highland High School science fair, where the winner will be awarded a trip to NASA space camp. For Butt-Head, however, it’s just a random venue at which he can partake in one of his favorite pastimes: repeatedly kicking Beavis in the nads. This leads to the sort of fiery mayhem that is pyromaniac Beavis’ bread and butter, and it lands them in court, where a judge makes the unlikely decision to try rehabilitating these wayward youths by sending them to said camp at Johnson Space Center, whose sign immediately prompts Butt-Head to quip, “It says Johnson.”
Beavis and Butt-Head care about nothing except banging their heads to rock and attempting to lose their virginity, the latter something they appear destined to never achieve. Still, they become convinced they’re going to get it on with a woman when space shuttle captain Serena Ryan (Andrea Savage)—who’s always accompanied by her pitifully underappreciated and resentful lieutenant commander Jim Hartson (Nat Faxon)—shows them the docking mechanism that will be used to connect her craft to the Mir space station on a mission to deliver a telescope used for observing black holes. This giant apparatus looks and works just like a penis and a vagina, and thus Beavis and Butt-Head are instantly mesmerized. Upon proving their preternatural adeptness at controlling this phallic machine, they’re enlisted to join Ryan and her crew on their assignment—a task they readily accept because Ryan promises they can “do it for real” in space.
Beavis and Butt-Head are like even dumber variations of Being There’s Chance the Gardener, stumbling their way into one ludicrously inapt position after another, and once in orbit, they predictably wreak havoc, resulting in their own voyage through the black hole and into today. There, they’re visited by Smart Beavis and Smart Butt-Head—alternate multiversal versions of themselves who inform them that their time-space jaunt has begat instability that threatens all of reality. That should be the nominal motivation for Beavis and Butt-Head to embark on their subsequent odyssey, although what really propels them forward is a desire to reconnect with Ryan, who’s now running for re-election as Texas governor, because they continue to believe that she wants to sleep with them.
Action comes via Ryan and the feds (Gary Cole, Chi McBride) hunting the teens, while gags about Siri and a brief stroll through a college campus are the prime means by which Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe pokes fun at our present circumstances. That reaches its apex when Beavis and Butt-Head accidentally drop in on a gender studies class where they talk about “sluts” and, for their inappropriateness, receive an eye-opening lesson on “white privilege”—and excitedly take it to mean that they’re entitled to whatever they want, including strangers’ food and police cars.
One wishes more of the material was as relevant as that, or as self-referential as Smart Beavis telling his counterpart that the portal back to 1998 is hidden behind the university’s Classics building because no one cares about humanities, and then snickering, “Satirical comment on the times.” Nonetheless, there’s something comforting about Judge and company casting Beavis and Butt-Head’s exploits in largely old-school terms, and in fact knowingly doubling down on it, such that in response to Butt-Head giggling about someone saying “dictates” because it includes the word “dick,” Beavis complains, “So one word sounds like another word. Big deal. Who cares”—only to then laugh when Ryan says “deep state assets” because, well, “ate ass.”
If that doesn’t make you chortle, then Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe isn’t for you. Those with a fondness for the mindless pair, however, will take to their newest outing, in which the replacement of a television with a bookshelf is a calamity of epic proportions (books being “the worst thing in the world”), Beavis eventually downs so many pills that he morphs into his TP-obsessed alter ego Cornholio, and nods to ‘90s touchstones—in this case, Touched by an Angel and Michael Bolton—are occasional. Unlike its cinematic predecessor, Judge’s sequel doesn’t feature a voice cast filled with luminaries such as Bruce Willis and Demi Moore. Yet that generally works in its favor, allowing it to maintain strict attention on its giant-headed know-nothing heroes—and, in the process, to gleefully embrace their abject refusal to develop a brain cell and (uh-huh-huh, uh-huh-huh) grow up.
