Word: butte
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Vulgar and spam-brained as they may be, Beavis and Butt-head need no spin doctors--they were born to win the world over all on their own. The crudely drawn pubescents were first unleashed on the public in a 1992 focus group session MTV held in Teaneck, New Jersey, during which the audience was given a peek at Frog Baseball, a short film by a then 30-year-old novice animator named Mike Judge. The group's response to the film, in which the boys take turns whacking a bat at a harmless amphibian, went way beyond...
...course, they were. Launched in 1993, Beavis & Butt-head, Judge's nihilist satire of a teenage wasteland, went on to become MTV's highest-rated series, despite loud put-downs from some critics who often took the pair's debased antics too literally. The wide-screen adaptation of the show, Beavis and Butt-head Do America, was the surprise winner of the holiday season, taking in $20 million in its opening weekend to finish No. 1 at the box office and going on to gross more than $56 million. Now Judge is bringing his lean, subversive vision of ranch-house...
Like Beavis & Butt-head, King of the Hill is a manifestation of Judge's longtime obsession with an America of tract homes and monster truck shows, Dairy Queens and Wal-Marts. "Mike has surrounded himself in Texas with great raconteurs," notes Sam Johnson, a former Beavis writer who is now executive story editor on NBC's NewsRadio. "They regale him with tales of misfit friends and trailer-park relatives. Mike is repelled by this world and also incredibly attracted...
AIDS has increased gay visibility and even gay acceptance; AIDS is the Chorus Line of epidemics. The new drug treatments and those still in the pipeline are tremendously promising, although the catchphrase "reduced viral load" somehow sounds like a favorite band of Beavis and Butt-head. A generation has been all but erased. AIDS has paradoxically proved that gay lives matter, that the days when President Reagan refused even to say "AIDS" in public are past. Perhaps the post-plague years will soon begin and all those quilt panels and ribbons and T shirts will become relics or even flea...
Elsewhere in television the question was raised as to whether linear structure itself mattered. A much sought-after consultant, Douglas Rushkoff, advised television executives that the programming of the future would consist of "predeconstructed" shows like Beavis and Butt-head, in which the principals are intentionally distanced from their own programs. The ideal would be to remove oneself from experience while engaging in experience and to make experience deliberately fleeting. The structure of the sitcom Seinfeld continued to depend on dozens of fast-moving, bite-size scenes that simulate the effect of surfing while remaining within a single coherent situation...