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Comment by dmitryminkovsky | Hacker News Reader

The tragedy of Beavis & Butt-Head is that you can't legally get the actual complete-with-music-videos episodes due to licensing issues. I thought maybe YouTube would make this possible given their deals with all the labels, but nothing to date.

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.

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> It's hard to believe that show was so controversial

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 am Cornholio…” still cracks me up all these years later.

Are you threading me? I want TP for my... Haha me too.

> It's hard to believe that show was so controversial.

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.

I heard about those (probably-not-so-alleged) incidents at the time. The overpass rock throwing was a particularly bad one, too. I have a friend, a person who's far from your typical "square" who's a bit older than me and absolutely hates B&B because he knew lots of kids who emulated them and did stupid things, and it really bothered him at the time. That would probably be me if that had been my experience.

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?

And yet, where I live, we had our own "overpass rock throwing" incident just a few years ago. No Bevis or Butt-Head involved.

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?

Could those recent rock throwers be dnd players? Maybe satanists too?

Stuff like that always happens. Remember all the outcry against the Grand Theft Auto video games inciting children to commit crimes? People still blame "The Warriors" for teaching teens to jump turnstiles in the subway and get involved in gangs. There is an entire chapter of Mein Kampf dedicated to how the youth play their music too loud and spend too much time partying. I'm sure vaudeville was the work of the devil before that.

Small nitpick - cable broadcasting isn't "licensed" by the FCC in terms of content. Now whether lawmakers would have passed explicit legislation regarding such content, is another story (the 90s was full of threatening to do just that, with video games getting some heat too thanks to Mortal Kombat and Night Trap).

B&B gave me some interesting ideas as a young boy. I distinctly remember watching it and my Grandma asking me if my mom approved that kind of show. I said yes with no hesitation as she turned it off. To make it better MTV spring break was happening near my family vacation house and they made a special appearance.

CKY, Tom Green, random Skater VHS interludes, and later Jackass sealed the deal on my juvenile delinquency.

I recall bum fights being shared in the same circle as the CKY videos...

Terrible how they got a few videos out before they went to jail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumfights

The DVDs were pretty widely available, sadly. I knew someone with one through the local university snowboard club. Not my favorite person to put it mildly.

I had the same problem with a show I liked from back in the day called Northern Exposure. Fortunately I got my hands on a very rare copy with the original music.

I had no idea Northern Exposure had a music thing like this. I'll have to look that up...

It might be because the radio DJ in the town and the songs he plays after waxing philosophic.

Ah yes, of course.

Here's some info: https://www.moosechick.com/SubMusic.html

If you look at the reviews on Amazon for the NE DVD's tons are music complaints.

That issue is the worst. Muppet Babies is similar. Even with Disney owning everything, it’s still not enough.

WKRP suffers from the same issue. And I can’t get no ROM: Spaceknight around here either, butthole.

Edit: I should probably mention the last little bit is a B&B reference for people who missed the show.

WKRP is a great show! Thanks for reminding me. Yep, we watched it on DVD and it was weird when they played generic musak instead of whatever sick jam you knew was actually in the show.

a cop/fire/ems show called "Third Watch" suffered the same problems. Couldn't move to DVD due to music licensing.

a shame, really, that something like that is preventing this.

Ah yes, the glorious "King Turd" collection. Where there's a will there's a way.

When I get my NAS set up that’s the first thing I’m transferring onto it. With RAID 1 of course! uhhhhh losing those files would suck uhuhuhhuhh

RAID5 will help quite a bit with large media collections.

Depends how large each disk is and how many you've got. At a certain point you're begging to have a disk fail during a week+ rebuild. With a 5 disk array of 8TB disks I wouldn't go fewer than 2 disk redundancy myself.

...oh of course the difficulty of replacing that data is also a factor.

It’s less of an issue with 5, than 1. With 1 you still have the issue of a disk failing and having to rebuild. But you just have to have more raw and less available.

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.

Amazing. Never knew it had a name. Thanks.

The interpolated music videos were extraneous to the episodes. There was an animated short and there was B&B watching videos and saying stuff and the two were completely unconnected. That they were spliced together the way they were was to the detriment of the show. I remember one episode about B&B being stranded on an island in a mall and mixed in with that was them at home watching videos.

I'm not sure everyone agrees that it hurt the show. I liked it, I thought it went with the cartoony, not-too-serious theme. Plus it exposed me to great music and weird music videos.

I don't object so much to the segments as the way they were edited into the episodes in nonsensical ways.

The music videos & commentary were the show. The animated short were just filler.

All these years later, the music videos are what I and folks I know of my age remember. Not the shorts themselves.

The commentary was really funny and provided absurd juxtaposition to the animated part of the show.

Many episodes, I liked the videos best. Especially the Crowbar videos, and when they would be negative and make fun.

It was still integral to the experience of the show, and some of the funniest stuff was in there. Consider their reaction to "If I Only Had a Brain" by MC 900 Ft. Jesus. It's just Beavis singing along with the bass line while Butt-head, his frustration mounting, tells Beavis to shut up and eventually smacks the shit out of him. But somehow it's one of the funniest bits on the show.

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