Idiocracy (2006)

Director: Mike Judge

Cast: Luke Wilson, Maya Rudolph, Dax Shepard, Terry Crews

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. Does anyone get out of the mid-aughts without having seen it? Although it has been years, the refrain, “spelled thusly” is frequently repeated in these parts.

Did I Like It: Since those years have passed, there arises one fundamental question: As we have made quantum leaps in the field of willful ignorance in those intervening years, does the film remain as funny as it once was, or has it been rendered utterly depressing?

There are plenty of jokes which I can’t imagine played all that well nearly twenty years ago* that I just have to sit stone faced through now. Just because they are being uttered by avowed morons. But aside from that, the film is just as perfect a blend of science fiction and the mid-aught comedy sensibility of the time that I’m prepared to say to say that it still holds up.

In fact, as I type that, I might be willing to go a step further and say that it remains a step above other films which might lay claim to that same genre. Movies like Men in Black (1997) or Galaxy Quest (1999) might be sci-fi comedies, but ultimately too tame to actually have anything to say about the future**. Then—when I think about comedies twenty years ago***—I wonder what a movie like this would be if it were directed by Judd Apatow or any of his acolytes, and it is almost guaranteed that the film would be something less than still watchable.

*You’ll pardon me, while I disappear into the mists of time for just a moment.

**Yes, even Galaxy Quest. You know where to find me if you want to fight me.

***Whoops. There I go into the mists again.

Beavis and Butthead Do America (1996)

Director: Mike Judge

Cast: Mike Judge, Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, Cloris Leachman

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. Did anyone have HBO in the 90s and get around seeing this one? I think my parents might have even seen it at some point.

Did I Like It: I’ve been going through a bit of an MTV-renaissance lately. Well, I suppose it can’t be counted as much of a rebirth, when I never really watched the channel in my youth. And yet, between The Real World Homecoming (a show in which I thought I would never have any interest), my HBOMax hunger strike*, and Beavis and Butthead Do The Universe (2022), I’ve been parking it at Paramount + on the regular, and it more often than not feels like its the late 90s early 2000s all over again.

There’s an odd simplicity to this movie, when compared with its much later progeny. Universe felt the need to wrap the affair in a thoroughly meta plot line. That was probably rightly so, in order to bring the two heroes into the weirdness that is the end of the first quarter of the 21st century. Here, Beavis and Butthead (both Judge) are content to be what they were at their most pure: Two dimwitted and ultimately malevolent sex maniacs, too stupid to realize they never need to go on the journey insisted on by the road movie int which they have drifted.

That may feel like a complaint, but it isn’t. This is as pure a delivery system for Beavis and Butthead as one is likely to find. The only way to amplify this movie’s primary quality would be to stop the proceedings in the middle to be an unrelated concert film complete with running commentary. That might have worked less as a feature, but I would direct the reader to Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie (1996). It could have worked. We would have watched anything that year.

*They know what they did. Odds are you do, too.

Beavis and Butthead Do The Universe (2022)

Director: John Rice, Albert Calleros

Cast: Mike Judge, Gary Cole, Nat Faxon, Chi McBride

Have I Seen it Before: Nope.

Did I Like It: The animation may be upgraded—and haltingly at that—past the point where it has any remaining charm from its 90s roots, but I’ll be damned if I wasn’t laughing pretty consistently from beginning to end. In a year surprisingly full of multiverse-themed films, it proves to be my second-favorite example, right behind Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) but oddly more satisfying than the perfunctory Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022).

The movie is completely self-aware about its position in the universe, quite literally. Pitching itself as the dumbest science fiction movie ever made (it might feel a rivalry with Mike Judge’s other opus, Idiocracy (2006)) and luxuriates in that role. The plot is almost not worth mentioning, but due to the almost instinctual stupidtiy of NASA (the organization and their employees prove dumber than the protagonists) Beavis and Butthead (both voiced by Judge) are flung from the late 90s where we last left them, and into a COVID-less, but no less fraught 2022.

Do B and B have any place in our current era? If we take them on face value—as more than a few parents, including my own—did back in the day, almost certainly not. They are so unrepentantly venal that they make the cast of Seinfeld look like the Missionaries of Charity. And where comedies of the bleak-hearted surely lean on farce, but at his best Judge harnesses societal satire and seamlessly fuses it with the farce. B and B may be grotesquely stupid, but they were forged that way by the time which they came from, and as I type these words I realize that 2022 has been waiting for them to come home this whole time. Could they continue on like this? They’ve gotten this far, who am I to say?