How Beavis, Butt-Head and Daria disrupted cable
npr.org
npr.org
Fortunately you can torrent pretty solid TV rips. I was both too young to watch as a kid and didn't have cable, but I watched the whole series with my wife almost 10 years ago now and it was so good. It's hard to believe that show was so controversial. In many ways it was one of the friendliest, nicest shows. I wonder if younger generations would appreciate it.
It was controversial because of the potty-humour and the chaotic puerile antics of the characters. They had a certain irreverence for authority and many conservative do-gooder types didn't like that.
I guess you don't know about the kids who set their houses on fire (allegedly) because Beavis was burning stuff and saying "Fire!, Fire!" on air, or the accompanying congressional hearings on the state of the media. The show was on at 7pm when it first came out I think; after that shit it went to a 11pm "adult-only" show with lots of disclaimers about how you shouldn't do what the characters do. No more fire references, no huffing glue, etc. MTV was seriously worried they'd lose their license I think.
That said, I don't think it's fair to judge something by how some tiny cohort responds to it, especially when we're dealing with extremes like setting your house on fire or throwing rocks from an overpass. There may be an argument to be made that if you're setting your house on fire, maybe a television show wasn't the root problem?
Who's to say the people who do these things wouldn't have found another equally horrifying outlet for their frustrations if Bevis and Butt-Head weren't a thing?
CKY, Tom Green, random Skater VHS interludes, and later Jackass sealed the deal on my juvenile delinquency.
Terrible how they got a few videos out before they went to jail.
If you look at the reviews on Amazon for the NE DVD's tons are music complaints.
Edit: I should probably mention the last little bit is a B&B reference for people who missed the show.
a shame, really, that something like that is preventing this.
...oh of course the difficulty of replacing that data is also a factor.
If you have 4 8TB disks set up as a volume in RAID1 or 5, you have the same risk of disk failure affecting the entire volume. But you have 16TB available in RAID1 and 24 in RAID5.
You could create two volumes with RAID1 but then data management is more of a hassle, and you could just bump it to 6 drives and have two RAID5 volumes.
All these years later, the music videos are what I and folks I know of my age remember. Not the shorts themselves.
Many episodes, I liked the videos best. Especially the Crowbar videos, and when they would be negative and make fun.
More recently SyFy brought us Happy!, which started good and weird, and got more good and more weird...
But then they did "Alexander" in the same style and it was awesome I cannot believe that show is not more popular.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign:_The_Conqueror
I wouldn't say the animation style is the same, necessarily, but you are correct in noting the similarities, as Peter Chung provided the character designs.
(Also, remember that headlines often get changed after publication; the headline as I'm writing this actually says "Here's How Beavis, Butt-Head And Daria Upended TV Animation". Due to the quirks of many CMSes, the `<title>` tags often retain the original headline.)
> For animators who wanted to work outside of TV conventions at the time, MTV became a destination and a laboratory. According to Maureen Furniss, who is an animation historian at the California Institute of the Arts, "[MTV] showed people in the public things they had never seen before in animation and gave opportunities to a lot of independent animators and experimental animators."
> "MTV animation was truly an outgrowth and extension of MTV on-air promotion and MTV on-air promotion was incredible. It was a creative laboratory, " Terkuhle says. "We were not only allowed to take risks, but encouraged to take risks and the executives had our back."
> That ethos of a creative laboratory that took risks drew show creators to pitch and push for ideas that wouldn't end up elsewhere on television.
They subverted the tropes everyone had taken for granted since the 50's or so that TV was expected to have. They outraged parents and the extreme conservative groups that wielded fairly significant power at the time.
Shortly before that we had 'the Dungeons and Dragons' scares and it was the time of the violent video game and explicit music crackdowns. Those cartoons became targets for those same kinds of people.
Without those shows, we probably wouldn't have the kinds of cartoons we have today.
I would definitely include more than just the two cartoons in the article and MTV as the sole disruptors of cable.
But, the cartoons of that era were definitely disruptive in a way that's hard to appreciate without experiencing.
And it spawned a whole genre of similar shows in the 90s/early 2000s that formed most of the original Adult Swim lineup.
You're talking about shows up to twenty years removed from Bakshi cartoons like Fritz the Cat or his eighties Mighty Mouse show. The Simpsons and such definitely popularized the medium, but it didn't create it.
>Shortly before that we had 'the Dungeons and Dragons' scares and it was the time of the violent video game and explicit music crackdowns.
There is always content that is slightly edgier that conservatives freak out over. Some outraged people didn't disrupt cable, cable embraced the cartoons and pushed things further with things like the creation of Adult Swim.
There was a bit of separation between TV cartoons and feature length ones back then. You're correct, the precedent for adult oriented animation had been set years before, but I wouldn't really compare movies like that, or even the more adult oriented anime shows and films in Japan at the time to that era of western TV cartoons.
As far as western TV cartoons went, prior to those late 80's, early 90's shows, there wasn't really any like them.
Virtually all those shows creators credit Bakshi as an influence though. Hell, the asshole co-creator of Ren and Stimpy worked with him on Mighty Mouse.
They likely needed cable to be able to successfully move to television, but I don't see how they disrupted cable.
edit they changed the title to "upended animation." While I stil think it's a slight overstatement, that title at least represents what the article is about.
I'd bet a lot of early punk rockers credit the Beatles as an influence, doesn't mean they invented punk rock.
For comparison a list of pre-edgy 1980's cartoons recommended for adults
https://www.animationforadults.com/2015/05/afas-top-20-carto...
vs a 90's era list of cartoons recommended for adults. I think you'll find a very huge difference in the types of shows being recommended.
https://www.ranker.com/list/90s-adult-cartoons/ranker-tv
>Hell, the asshole co-creator of Ren and Stimpy worked with him on Mighty Mouse.
But it was him not Bakshi that pushed that adult style onto mainstream television. Don't get me wrong. I really enjoy Bakshi's work but he isn't really the one responsible for bringing edgy cartoons to home television.
We have vastly different memories of Mighty Mouse. Ren and Stimpy definitely took it a few steps further, but it's not like the asshole suddenly started making weird shit after working on Mighty Mouse.
And I've admitted several times that the nineties were more influential for adult cartoons on TV. I just think that has more to do with the growth in cable and the rise of outsourcing animation than any pioneers suddenly wanting to make adult cartoons.
At that same time the most immoral live action show was married with children, magnitudes less immoral than some of these cartoons. These animated shows really did open the door for making television something that didn’t always have to be family friendly.
Ren & Stimpy, Powerpuff Girls, Pinky & the Brain, Magic School Bus, Johnny Bravo, I Am Weasel, Freakazoid!, Eek! the Cat, Earthworm Jim, Dexter's Lab, Courage the Cowardly Dog, Captain Planet, Rocko's Modern Life, Talespin, Tiny Toon Adventures, VeggieTales, Captain Planet, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, Bonkers, Animaniacs.
When you say "edgy", do you mean "novel/creative"? That would explain the confusion. Definitions 3, 7, and/or 8 at Wiktionary are what we're using: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/edgy You seem to be using definition 2, which is not the common meaning today.
The only shows on that list that are "edgy" by the everyday definition are Ren and Stimpy, I Am Weasel (a spinoff of Cow and Chicken, which was a straight ripoff of Ren and Stimpy's visual and writing style), and sometimes Animaniacs. The rest may have slipped an off-color joke under the radar from time to time, but it wasn't their main thing.
There's a lot of good shows on that list, yes, and they broke plenty of ground in terms of kids' animation quality, but only a few of them were pushing the envelope of "what you can get away with on TV."
The 90s "weird" (grunge? punk?) doesn't seem to be there anymore.
I mean, Christ, look at a still from Courage: http://mobiletvshows.net/imdb_epimages/242235.jpg
Plus, like half of those have had/will have reboots.
But then again, I'm not sure our current times even allow that kind of humor anymore.
AF was very influential on me. We did not have cable when I was a kid, but my grandparents did.
I saw aeon flux there and I think it sent me toward sci-fi / horror. Many of the shirts had frightening or bad endings for the hero.
Beavis and Butthead got cut down some when Beavis was no longer allowed to say “Fire!”
I also think Beavis and Butthead paved the way for Ren and Stimpy.
The original "Aeon Flux" shorts on Liquid Television had an aesthetic that was just creepy to me. Definitely a horror aspect.
The B&B shorts on Liquid television were the first I’d seen of that show (“fro-o-o-o-g baseba-a-a-all!”).
The aeon flux stuff seemed to portray a dystopia. It seemed like the hero would falter. I don’t remember anything like it in animation.
Expanding the boundaries of acceptable taste in broadcasting wasn't a disruption, it was the linear continuation of a trend, following the footsteps of All in the Family, Married With Children, the Simpsons, and dozens of other shows that slightly broadened the goalposts for acceptable themes in broadcast comedy.
So I was Butt-Head incarnate, apparently. Explains some things...
I didn’t really watch it on MTV - just an episode here and there, but ended up sitting through all the DVD’s one summer.
It’s a really great show, and I don’t understand why people get their panties in a twist over the original music being cut out of the DVDs. It was never a part of the story (except for the R:E:M song, but I think they kept it in), which together with its characters can more than stand on their own.
I'm guessing that's because you didn't watch the show while it was airing. The music in Daria originally came from what was new and popular at the time episodes aired. The show's soundtrack was essentially the same as the viewer's day to day soundtrack. You could hear a new song on MTV, maybe spending hours watching MTV just waiting for the song to come back on, and then suddenly the song you've been listening to and listening for all week would turn up in an episode. It wasn't that the songs they used were directly relevant to the story in the episode, rather that the songs were directly relevant to the lives of the viewers. It was something that didn't (and really couldn't) happen anywhere else but because MTV had the access to the music they could pull it off.
Also, if you've mostly only seen the DVDs with generic music you might not realize how good the original soundtrack was. Many many songs used in the show are simply amazing. If you were an avid MTV watcher at the time, watching the show years later with the original soundtrack would bring back many old favorites. You can still find playlists of the original soundtrack at least so if you haven't had the pleasure I'd recommend checking them out.
Regarding Beavis and Butt-Head, I made a script in the early 1990's that produced randomized B&B laughter, using samples.
hhehhh hehh huh .. hhe eheh ...
I’m not trying to imply anything, but why do you think you’re uncomfortable?