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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...
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...
There are the requisite inside jokes involving butt kissing (Daffy plants a smooch on his own ducktail, to which the WB logo has been affixed) and Disney dissing (when Daffy suggests that the good guys' squad should be called the Ducks, Bugs ripostes, "What kind of a Mickey Mouse organization would name their team the Ducks?"). Bill Murray is on hand for a brief master display of slapdash comedy. But director Joe Pytka, who also did the McDonald's TV spot that cued the film, too often stands slack-jawed before the wonder, the grace, the supernal niceness...
Perhaps the most curious Titanic project is a Broadway musical planned for this spring and titled, inevitably, Titanic (no exclamation point). "This isn't going to be The Love Boat," insists composer and lyricist Maury Yeston. The show has been the butt of Broadway jokes, but Yeston contends that the Titanic lends itself perfectly to musical theater. "Part of the story is hubris, part is profoundly human," he explains. "This is the stuff of musical theater: people are so moved they can no longer speak. They are forced to sing." Or sink...