 Being a night-owl, I was up late one evening when MTV2 ran an infomercial for this DVD set. Remembering all the laughs I got from this series when it originally aired, I decided to buy the DVDs. The best price I found at the time was on DeepDiscountDVD.com. Now that it's been out for a little while, you can probably do better through Amazon.com's Marketplace (click the picture of the set at the left to visit their site and look at the pricing).
Today I sat through the entire 3-DVD set. Many of the episodes I remember are here. Some are not. For instance, I thought "Frog Baseball" would be here. It isn't. That's the film that actually convinced MTV to do Beavis and Butt-head in the first place. You'd have thought it would be on the first set.
Speaking of this being the "first DVD set", I think I'm a little annoyed by that. (Rant mode on.) If I understood what I heard in the "infomercial" with Billy Dee Williams (Lando Calrissian of Star Wars fame), this is one of three DVD sets Mike Judge plans to put out. Even if you purchase all 3 sets, you will not have ALL of Beavis and Butt-head. You WILL have the episodes Mike Judge thinks are the best. While he might be right and the remaining episodes might indeed suck (huh-huh-huh), you can pretty much bet that they're going to end up releasing the entire set on DVD eventually (if these sell well). So if I do end up buying this entire "set of sets" I may find that there are episodes I personally enjoyed which aren't part of it... and then might want that other set. Typical Hollywood. Convince the customer to buy something less than 100%. Then release the full set and get him to buy it again. Then release the full set with commentary and a few extras. And so on until people stop buying. (Then, of course, it's time for a new video format like HD-DVD or Blue-Ray or UMD and the cycle repeats. (Rant mode off.)
As for the set itself, you'll find 3 discs. The first two contain episodes of the show, commercial-free, music video-free. The lack of videos takes away a little of the original fun of the show, but the fact that you can access individual episodes on the disc (where each episode is a single segment of what you used to see aired on MTV in 2+ segments) makes up for that a little. Here's a list of the 40 episodes you'll find on the discs:
- No Laughing
- Home Improvement
- Lawn and Garden
- Washing the Dog
- The Crush
- Plate Frisbee
- Most Wanted
- They're Coming to Take Me Away, Huh-Huh
- Patients, Patients
- Blackout!
- Rabies Scare
- 1-900-BEAVIS
- Madame Blavatsky
- Late Night with Butt-Head
- Pool Toys
- The Final Judgement of Beavis
- Right On
- Date Bait
- Butt Is It Art?
- Figure Drawing
- Mr. Anderson's Balls
- Teen Talk
- Manners Suck
- The Pipe of Doom
- Safe Driving
- Liar! Liar!
- Generation in Crisis
- Beavis and Butt-Head vs. the Vending Machine
- Radio Sweethearts
- The Great Cornholio
- Held Back
- Choke
- Killing Time
- Safe House
- Dude, A Reward
- Walkathon
- Temporary Insanity
- Tainted Meat
- Dream On
- Beaverly Hillbillies
The third disc doesn't contain episodes of the show. It contains additional material. First, there are music videos from Matthew Sweet, Pantera, Moist, Deus, Grim Reaper, Monster Magnet, Korn, Catherine Wheel, Beastie Boys, Wilco, and Hum.
Next, there is a featurette called "Taint of Greatness: The Journey of Beavis and Butt-Head, Part 1". This film tells a little of the story of the series, from Mike Judge coming up with the idea of the duo for an animation festival through MTV picking it up and it becoming something of a national phenomenon.
The third disc also contains the 1997 MTV Thanksgiving special with Kurt Loder, Beavis, and Butt-Head. This places the guys in live action scenes with Loder and in front of a sex shop somewhere in NYC. This special is pretty lame and I didn't see any real laughs in it.
Along with the Thanksgiving special are some clips from the 1994 Video Music Awards, including one featuring David Letterman whacking Beavis up-side the head. There are also a few promos used to advertise episodes of the show on MTV at the time. (Kind of a snoozer if you ask me.) Lastly there are two montages. One is entitled "Terms of Endearment" and features clips of the boys calling each other, and other people, various names. The other is "Greatest Hits" and shows the boys hitting, kicking, and fighting each other. (Rant mode on again.) There is one thing about this set as-is that really pisses me off, and I don't mean just a little bit. It's enough that I'm considering selling it on Amazon.com already. When you first put disc 1 in, you are forced to sit through some kind of MTV logo animation. Then you have promos for at least 3 other DVDs or DVD sets on the disc before you get to the main menu. I dislike this, but have come to accept it, from rental discs. But I really, really despise it on a disc I've actually gone out and paid for. In addition to these opening annoying ads, there are also "promos' on the third disc for the Aeon Fluxx movie and various other things. I didn't mind the promo for Mike Judge's "The Animation Show" since it relates to Beavis and Butt-Head (who were created by Mike Judge). But I didn't need to other crap. My final rating will include a heavy "hit" for this unwanted and very obtrusive advertising. They don't do this with music CDs (Thank God! And don't get any ideas, RIAA.) I don't know why Hollywood thinks it's OK with DVDs... (Rant mode off.) Overall, there is a good selection of episodes here, as you see above. The design of the disc is such that you can play the episodes through in one long blast from beginning to end, or watch any one episode by itself. (And if you do watch 1 episode, it goes back to the menu and DOESN'T start playing the next episode automatically like some other series sets I own. I like that. Sometimes all I want is to see "that episode where X happens..." and I don't care to watch the rest of the series from that point on. The episodes have aged pretty well, minus references to the Clinton Administration, Rush Limbaugh, and the like. Compared to some modern animation comedy like South Park, Drawn Together, or Robot Chicken, it seems relatively tame (though it certainly raised a fuss in its day). If you were a regular watcher of Beavis and Butt-Head back when it was originally airing, you'll enjoy this set for the memories it brings back and the opportunity to watch some episodes you might have missed at the time. The video quality and sound quality is as good as you would expect it to be. The menus are easy to understand and navigate, and the set played flawlessly in a $15 DVD player I picked up at CompUSA on Thanksgiving weekend. For a street price in the $21 range, you can't go wrong if you enjoy the series, since this works out to about 50 cents per episode (with an episode being something like 5 minutes long). On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being excellent, what would I give this set? The episodes get about an 8 overall. The extra materials get about a 4. The assault of ads and promotional crap counta against it also. Thus I'm only giving it about a 6.5 overall. If the ads were eliminated, I'd raise it to a 7.5. If the extras were less snooze-inducing, it might even earn an 8. But they are pretty lame, so my 6.5 holds.
This page contains a review of the Beavis and Butt-head DVD collection from Mike Judge, Volume 1. It lists the contents of the Mike Judge Beavis and Butt-head DVD collection. This paragraph is not intended for human consumption but for that of web spiders. Mike Judge Beavis and Butt-head DVD collection review, review of Mike Judge collection. Mike Salsbury reviews the Mike Judge DVD collection for the television series Beavis and Butt-head. Butthead, Beavis, Mike Judge, DVD, DVD set, set of Beavis and Butthead, DVD boxed set from Mike Judge for Beavis, Beavis and Butt-head.
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