Film

Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe

A feature-length return for the dim-witted duo twenty years on: Beavis and Butt-Head travel through a black hole from 1998 to 2022, bewildered by smartphones and modern culture. It's faithful to the show's crude observational comedy—harsh, stupid, affectionate—but with a movie budget and genuine heart underneath the chaos. Exactly for people who grew up with them.

TMDb rating3.5

If you liked this

King of the Hill1997

Boomtown satire from the same creator, with Mike Judge's gift for capturing small-town American life through a fundamentalist lens. Oddly warm beneath the ridicule, and Hank Hill might be television's most likeable dupe.

But It's slower and more sentimental than you'd expect from Judge. If you wanted unrelenting cruelty, the gentle melancholy here will deflate you.

King of the Hill poster

Idiocracy2006

Judge's bleakest comedy: a man wakes in 2505 to find humanity catastrophically stupid. It's darkly funny and disturbingly prescient, with genuine despair wrapped in crude humour. Angry in a way that matters.

But The satire lands harder than the jokes. It's bleak enough to stick with you in ways that aren't always fun, and the film doesn't pretend otherwise.

Idiocracy poster

Silicon Valley2014

Judge's other masterpiece: TJ Miller and the cast demolish startup culture with surgical precision. It's mean-spirited in the best way, technically sharp, and every character is despicable and recognisable.

But It gets darker and crueller as it goes. The later seasons are less about laughs and more about watching awful people fail in awful ways.

Silicon Valley poster

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The wildcard

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Cyberpunk: Edgerunners2022

Both works are about young men failing to navigate systems designed to crush them, but where Beavis and Butt-Head find humour in that failure, Edgerunners finds tragedy. Same observation, opposite register.

A ten-episode anime about a teenage mercenary in a neon dystopia, made by Trigger. It's gorgeous, violent, and genuinely moving despite its cyberpunk window-dressing. The story hits harder than anime usually allows itself to.

But It's visually dense and mythologically heavy. If you're expecting Beavis and Butt-Head's simple pleasures, you'll be reading subtitles and following corporate power structures.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners poster
More like this (6)

Office Space1999

Judge's comedy goldmine about corporate soul-death. It's sharply written, perfectly cast, and has become more relevant every year. Quotable without being precious about it.

But The plot is thin and the film knows it. If you need narrative momentum, you'll spend the runtime frustrated by the sketch-comedy structure.

Office Space poster

South Park1997

Stone and Parker's show works the same muscle Beavis and Butt-Head does: contempt for the audience's intelligence mixed with genuine care about the world. Latest seasons have found new energy, but the early runs are irreplaceable.

But It's been on for twenty-seven seasons. The lows are genuinely low, and the reference density can feel impenetrable. Starting from the middle is bewildering.

South Park poster

Daria1997

A spinoff from Beavis and Butt-Head that's smarter and kinder. Jane and Daria's dry observations about high school feel timeless and the show trusts its audience's intelligence entirely.

But It's quieter and more interested in character than in spectacle. If you want chaos, this will feel restrained and almost precious.

Daria poster

A Crude Awakening2006

A documentary about oil dependence narrated with dark comedic sensibility. It's funny without being glib about something genuinely apocalyptic, and uses humour to make the unbearable visible.

But It's a documentary about petrochemical infrastructure, which is not inherently exciting. The comedy is a delivery mechanism for dread.

A Crude Awakening poster

Clone High2002

A high-school comedy where the students are clones of historical figures, made by MTV and Phil Lord & Christopher Miller before they became blockbuster architects. Ridiculous and inventive, with genuine affection for the idiots on screen.

But It's high-concept in a way that requires buy-in from frame one. If the premise doesn't grab you, nothing else will.

Clone High poster

Rejected2000

Both use crude, cheap animation to explore the gap between what people want and what they get. Beavis and Butt-Head make you laugh first; Hertzfeldt makes you laugh and then pulls the rug away.

Don Hertzfeldt's animated short series is abstract stick-figure comedy about failure, bodily humiliation, and existential dread. Each piece is two minutes of genius. It's how you make the audience laugh and then immediately make them uncomfortable.

But It's experimental animation with no plot. Some of it is genuinely hard to watch, and the humour is as likely to disturb as delight. It's not comfortable.

Rejected poster

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Beavis and Butt-Head Do America