Hellbent on "scoring," the lewd animated duo Beavis and Butt-Head have
equally amused and disgusted audiences since the early 1990s, when we first
heard their nasal laughs and immature jokes on MTV. At the height of their
fame, these witless pop culture icons even presented at the 1997 Academy
Awards, just months after their first big-screen outing, "Beavis and Butt-
Head Do America," opened in theaters.

More than a decade after a short revival in 2011, the beloved dimwits,
created and voiced by multifaceted storyteller Mike Judge, are back -- this
time on streaming service Paramount+. Earlier this summer a new full-length
film, "Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe," premiered on the platform,
joined Thursday by the latest iteration of the TV series. Bringing the pair's
hilariously reprehensible antics fully into the 21st century, this "Beavis
and Butt-Head" confronts the sex-obsessed teenage metalheads with escape
rooms and farmers markets, both concepts that grew in mainstream popularity
since the last time the pair was onscreen. It also touches upon subjects,
Judge suggests, that the original might not have.

One upcoming episode shows Butt-Head under the effects of medication for his
aggressive behavior. (His transformation into an affable guy upsets Beavis.)
Another follows the duo as they're diagnosed with depression -- because they
believe girls prefer downhearted guys. And the segments where they used to
critique music videos now feature TikTok trends, ASMR and appreciation for
K-pop superstars BTS.

Although Judge has found remarkable success elsewhere as the director of cult
films such as "Office Space" and "Idiocracy," as well as the co-creator of
the TV series "Silicon Valley" and "King of the Hill," these two grotesquely
shaped juveniles keep beckoning him back. And he has no plans to stop anytime
soon.

"At some point, if my voice doesn't sound right, and the show is still going,
I would think about that," he says of delegating creative decisionmaking on
"Beavis and Butt-Head." "But I change so much of it as I go that I would
probably want to be there anyway, if someone else was doing it. I never
really thought about it."

Judge spoke to The Times via video call about this new chapter in the storied
life of his most resilient and timeless characters, who may finally grow old
but will never mature.

Did you have any concerns about how Beavis and Butt-Head were going to fit in
today's world?

It's a very different world than when I did the long run of the show in the
'90s. When it started to click for me was with the movie, the idea of
actually having them travel through time from the '90s and just be these
characters from the '90s interacting with the modern world. In the new series
there are going to be episodes where they're middle-aged. I liked doing
those. There were a lot of ideas that we never did because they didn't have a
car and they were 15 or however old back in the day. We can do some of those
now.

When you first conceived them back in the '90s, did you imagine them ever
getting old onscreen?

We did have some flash-forwards where they were old. I could always see them
being middle-aged, over the hill, or the age that they are normally, 15 or
14, but not in between. I couldn't really imagine them in their 20s. It
didn't seem like something I'd even want to see. It just seems like it would
maybe be too sad. It raises more questions than funny answers, and also
drawing them at that age isn't as fun as just seeing them completely blown
out and old.

Do you feel society has changed much since 2011, when the previous revival of
the show aired? How would you describe your approach to the show a little
more than a decade ago?

For the ones 10 years ago, we probably didn't change it around enough. I
suppose it hasn't changed quite as much, but there weren't TikTok videos.
Social media was still in its infancy. Now there's a lot weirder stuff for
them to watch. Now when Beavis and Butt-Head are watching videos, they have a
remote with the voice button and they just tell it what they want all day
long. I suppose it hasn't changed all that much since 2011 relative to the
'90s to now, or the '90s to 2011.

Is it easy for you to tap back into the voices of Beavis and Butt-Head even
after not doing them for many years, or do they live in your mind all the
time?

I don't ever do the voices when I'm not doing the show. But around 2018 the
band Portugal. The Man asked me to do Beavis and Butt-Head introducing them
at Coachella. We had used some of their music in "Silicon Valley" and I had
met them, so I thought, "OK, I'll give this a try." I hadn't done the voices
in many years at that point. I recorded a thing and listened to it back and I
thought, "Oh, that still sounds like them." And when I started animating it
and seeing it coming out of them, I thought, "This still seems like Beavis
and Butt-Head."

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Do you record each character separately or are you able to go back and forth
between the two during the same recording session?

Very early on, when I was making my animated shorts in my house, I would
record Butt-Head first and leave spaces and then go back on another track and
listen and do Beavis. I did that on the first couple episodes at the
beginning of the first series, then quickly switched to going back and forth,
like I'm doing some weird puppet show.

Since watching music videos was a crucial part of the original series, did
you feel it was a natural transition to now have them watch TikToks and
YouTube content?

It seems like something they would do, just watching mindless stuff on
TikTok. That seemed to fit right in. For the 2011 episodes, we had them watch
"Jersey Shore," which was a really good fit too. We're having them watch one
or two actual shows in this new series, but they'll mostly be watching music
videos and YouTube and TikTok videos.

How difficult is it to get the rights to use those videos with the express
intention of satirizing them?

It's harder than I thought. [Laughs]. In general, YouTubers will say, "How
much can you pay?" And it's a fraction of what they get just by being a
YouTube star. But a lot of times they think it would be fun to see their
stuff on the show. That's usually what it is, because the amount of money
that the company can offer doesn't usually mean that much to them. If they
are already YouTube stars, they don't need to be on some other show.

Do you recall the origin of the idea for the new movie that takes Beavis and
Butt-Head into space and across time and space?

I think it was John Frizzell, the music composer, who said, "You should have
them travel through time." And then I thought, "That's the way to do it:
Start it in '98 when the original show was around and pretend the 2011 ones
weren't there." That's how it started. I like when you take a really dumb
premise and take it really far, like in "The Beverly Hillbillies," one of my
favorite shows of all time. I worked with some writers, kicked it around, and
it kept evolving. At one point Paramount Pictures really wanted it as a
live-action movie. I was open to it. We did some casting sessions, and it
didn't seem right for this. So I said, "Let's just do this animated and have
it kick off the series. If there's an idea for a live-action one later, we
could try that."

Do you still believe that "Beavis and Butt-Head" can work in live-action?

It might. It's hard to say. You just have to find the right people. Maybe
it'll be a middle-aged Beavis and Butt-Head. We didn't do a very extensive
casting search. My movie "Office Space" originally started as animated shorts
I had done. It didn't really click for me as live-action until we started
casting. When Gary Cole read for the character of [Bill] Lumbergh and then
Steven Root as Milton, I just thought, "Wow, this could really work."

How has the animation of the show changed since the original series? Did the
technological advancements in the medium transform how "Beavis and Butt-Head"
is made?

Not as much as people think. ... Maybe there are more shortcuts, and you can
make changes easier now than you used to, but it still comes down to building
the timing and the lip-sync one frame at a time. The process doesn't seem
faster, but I guess it is. I try to keep Beavis and Butt-Head themselves
looking the way they did then and just improve things around them. I don't
draw that well to begin with, but when I first animated them, I wanted them
to look like they were drawn by a 14-year-old in his high school notebook. I
almost wanted it to look like it was animated by a deranged person. Anytime
that we've tried to improve them, it stops being as funny or doesn't look
like them. I figure, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.