OC HIGH / STUDENT NEWS & VIEWS : BEAVIS AND BUTT-HEAD : Rude but Cool Show Is Just a Reflection of Society

The goal of Beavis and Butt-head creator Mike Judge was entertaining today’s teen-agers, not promoting malice to society.

Combining short spurts of cartoon with heavy-metal MTV videos, Beavis and Butt-head appeal to teens--like me--with short attention spans and a tendency to flip through the channels and land and stay on Channel 34 (or whatever channel the show appears on in their area).

All I can say is that the show’s funny, though weird, and cool, but mean.

Beavis and Butt-head are both 14; Beavis is blond; Butthead is brown-haired with braces. Their most outstanding feature is their laugh, which goes to the rhythm of “huh-huh, huh-huh” (Beavis’ is higher: “heh-heh, heh-heh”). They will laugh at anything, funny or not. Their notorious line is: “Heh-heh. This sucks.” Their bad side includes burning things, harming animals, sniffing paint, kidnaping, making bombs, activating grenades--the list goes on.

Both attend school when they feel like it and are ignorant of current events (in “Citizen Butt-head,” neither knew who the President was).

Is there a new age coming where these two dimwits will fit in? Will youngsters grow up seeing Beavis and Butt-head as the new standard in cartoons?

But wait. Think of cartoons past. Undoubtedly Tom and Jerry were mean; they probably inspired most of the animal activists today. What about the Transformers’ show, in which evil robots invade our planet with a lot of shooting?

There are a lot in real life that is more violent than Beavis and Butt-head. Don’t blame the recent Laguna Beach fire on Beavis and Butt-head. Real arsonists did it. How about seeing it in a different perspective? How about seeing Beavis and Butt-head depicting the arsonists and making fun of them? Beavis and Butt-head play on society; they emphasize society’s bad points. However, the show does not sway a stable society.

Are kids getting mixed messages from the show? Sure, but don’t they get them from all shows? They say such things as: “I think we have a wiener (winner)” and “Testes (testing) . . . 1 . . . 2 . . . 3.” They laugh when anybody says “master” or “hard.” But is this any worse than “Saturday Night Live’s” “Orgasm Man” or “Sensitive Naked Man”?

If viewers aren’t mature enough to get Beavis and Butt-head comments as jokes, then their parents should cancel cable. Can you really blame two animated lunkheads for an action such as arson or cat-killing? I think that the age of the main character should be the youngest age for its audience (for example, Bart Simpson should appeal to 10-year-olds, while the infamous duo should appeal to, at the youngest, 14-year-olds).

How can you change something that is a reflection on society? “Beavis and Butt-head” will definitely last through the ‘90s because it is the looking glass in which we see ourselves. As long as we survive, the duo, with all the splendor of its incessant laughter, will too. If the show did get canceled, it would mean the era is changing. But I say, as Beavis and Butt-head would, “That would totally suck.”