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Beavis & Butt-Head Do The Universe Perfectly Insults Every Modern Reboot
Beavis & Butt-Head Do The Universe perfectly insults the current Hollywood trend by doing the opposite of most modern reboots and is all the better for it. Mike Judge’s dimwitted teenage, no-so-dynamic duo lead Beavis & Butt-Head Do The Universe's voice cast in the pair's wildest adventure yet, which can be streamed on Paramount+. In the film, Beavis and Butt-Head are shot into 2022 after a journey to space sends them through a black hole, but for as much of a change as that might seem for the two of them, Do The Universe in many ways is just another Beavis & Butt-Head story.
In Beavis & Butt-Head Do The Universe, Beavis and Butt-Head have no higher goal beyond their usual mission to “score,” in this case with astronaut Serena Ryan (Andrea Savage). This establishes that despite the pair’s outlandish space and time-travel journey, Do The Universe really only re-invents Beavis & Butt-Head 's low-brow nature on a minimal cosmetic level. In this respect, Beavis & Butt-Head Do The Universe thumbs its nose at how modern reboots tend to work.
The basic idea of a reboot in cinematic terms is hitting the reset button on a given franchise to give it a fresh start. Batman Begins was effectively the modern-day starting point of what is now thought of as a reboot, though the idea has also evolved into legacy sequels picking up from an initial entry, such as Halloween Kills, or those that continue the story but merge new and old elements, such as 2022’s Scream. Beavis & Butt-Head Do The Universe makes no effort at either one, and just offers more of the same. While it seems contradictory to not even attempt to do something new, that's exactly what makes Beavis & Butt-Head Do The Universe so effective. The key is that, unlike other modern reboots that have to update themselves to fit with modern times, Beavis and Butt-Head remain the same while times have changed around them.
With the Beavis & Butt-Head movie's release on Paramount+, its humor remains predicated on its two incredibly dense protagonists, slow-witted buffoons drifting in and out of new situations they have little understanding of. Even with the sci-fi plot elements of Do The Universe, the movie offers up the usual Beavis & Butt-Head experience, and proudly so. That also makes it surprisingly subversive in how it presents Beavis & Butt-Head to a new generation of viewers, fully aware that its stock and trade is the juvenile humor and perpetual snickering of its two would-be heroes. There really is nothing to reinvent with Beavis & Butt-Head, so Do The Universe simply slaps on a space-time continuum gimmick and calls it a reboot. In doing so, Do The Universe spoofs the hoops that reboots like Star Trek and others often jump through to get a popular franchise going again.
The idea of a Beavis & Butt-Head reboot isn’t one with much of a bar to clear, and Do The Universe trolls reboots themselves with how it goes about it. Beavis and Butt-Head might have become time-travelers, but that doesn't change their simplistic, low-brow essence that's both tired and weirdly refreshing. Beavis & Butt-Head Do The Universe knows that it’s exactly the kind of reboot it can aspire to be, and has some fun with how little it effort it has to exert compared to its reboot contemporaries.
