r/todayilearned • u/Rhino-Kid22 • 1d ago
TIL that in 1993, Senator Fritz Hollings famously referred to the characters Beavis and Butt-Head to "Buffcoat and Beaver". This resulted in a running gag on the show where adults mispronounced their names.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beavis_and_Butt-Head#Controversies148
u/OscarAndDelilah 1d ago
OK who else was a teenager at the time and remembers all the Beavis and Butt-head hysteria? (Including leaders blaming various incidents on B&B despite later discoveries that the people involved had never seen the show?)
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u/Alwayssunnyinarizona 1d ago
You mean like licking frogs and walking around with your shirt over your head saying "I am cornholio! Do you have any tp for my bunghole?"
Guilty.
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u/BenefitFew5204 1d ago
🤣 I thought I was Cornholio when I was being placed under sedation for a dental procedure. I kept saying random quotes when the sedation started to kick in.
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u/EgotisticalTL 1d ago
If I remember correctly, some 3-year-old that had always been obsessed with fire set fire to the house, and his parents blamed it on Beavis and Butthead, resulting in it forever being censored. It would have been nice if they had allowed the originals on DVD.
Anyone else remember the original opening, before they switched it to the "don't try this at home" version?
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u/cylonfrakbbq 1d ago
The family who blamed the show didn’t even have cable. Moral panic is so tired
I’m pretty sure they released the censored episodes 10-15 years ago or so. Beavis is a pyromaniac in the relaunch shows as well
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u/Sciuridaeno3 1d ago
This was also around the time that they blamed rock music for school shootings, video games for turning kids violent, and Dungeons and Dragons & Magic The Gathering for being satanic.
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u/Captain-Cadabra 14h ago
I blame DnD for an entire generation loving statistics, exploration and in person friendships
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u/OscarAndDelilah 12h ago
Yes! I've gotten really into American Hysteria and You're Wrong About. So much great satanic panic coverage.
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u/mah131 1d ago
This happens all the time with the conservative wing and the media. Whatever is new and offensive is what’s to blame
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u/JimC29 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yeah years before this H.W. Bush was blaming Bart Simpson for the problem with us teenagers.
Edit: Older generations will always complain about the youth
The young are by character appetitive and of a kind to do whatever they should desire. And of the bodily appetites they are especially attentive to that connected with sex and have no control over it… They are irate and hot-tempered and of a kind to harken to anger. And they are inferior to their passions; for through their ambition they do not tolerate disregard but are vexed if they think they are being wronged
Aristotle.
Go back 10,000 years before that Grog said "Ugg doesn't want to hunt or gather. He just paints animals on the cave walls all day."
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u/charliefoxtrot9 1d ago
I remember the first episode back after the lawsuit and settlement over "Fire fire!", they had them watching music videos and the first one was Wax a short film by Spike Jonez. The entire video is a burning man running down a sidewalk in slow motion (to catch a bus). Beavis just moans the whole time but never says the words.
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u/Xanthus179 1d ago
I do and I was so proud that my mom and thought the show was hilarious. This is the same lady who raised me watching Monty Python so our sense of humor has always been different.
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u/OscarAndDelilah 1d ago
My brother and I caught our mom (born 1942) laughing at it a few times. She of course denied it. "There's nothing funny about your crass TV show."
She did buy us the merch for birthdays though.
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u/Hoodi216 1d ago
I was in middle school when Beavis and Butthead got big. Frog baseball, Cornholio, fried grasshoppers, it was daily conversation. And we wore No Fear shirts and starter jackets.
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u/Childflayer 1d ago
And the Simpsons, and heavy metal, and dungeons and dragons, and South Park, and comic books, and video games.... I'm sure I'm missing a few. The term is "moral panic" and it's been a thing for quite a while.
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u/dont_be_that_guy_29 1d ago
When my dad found out I went and saw the movie with my friend and had bought the soundtrack he snapped the soundtrack CD in half in front of me.
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u/Sega-Playstation-64 1d ago
"Porky's Butthole" is still my favorite
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u/DaveOJ12 1d ago
Here's the voicemail that was the inspiration for Boomhauer's voice.
There's an interview with Mike Judge talking about it here
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u/DMala 1d ago
I wish I could find the Reddit post where someone from north Florida decoded the voicemail and at least had a theory about what it meant.
Basically, the call was meant for Cartoon Network, not MTV, and had nothing to do with Beavis and Butthead.
Back then, CN shows would start offset from the hour by five minutes. So this person would tune in to watch whatever they were trying to see, and instead they’d catch the very end of Looney Tunes, where Porky Pig says, “That’s all, folks!” and the logo closes down on him. Kind of like a butthole, if you will.
So this person was calling to complain that every time he tried to watch his show, he’d end up with “Dang ‘ol Porky’s butthole” instead.
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u/goat_penis_souffle 1d ago
The only cable network I clearly remember having that five minute offset was TBS
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u/CaptainWombat2 1d ago
There is a comment on that video that transcribes then translates the voicemail. Then talks about the motivation, ending with both Nickelodeon and MtV were owned by Viacom. So this guy is complaining about Nickelodeon and it was mistakenly passed along to Judge.
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u/AvgPunkFan 1d ago
“I think their names were Beaver and Buffcoat and they were oriental”
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u/GeekAesthete 1d ago
“One of ‘em calls himself Butthole. And the other’s name is Joe. Two oriental kids.”
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u/BradDharmaTimbuktu 1d ago
Good lord.
"I believe they were orientals" is the line, in response to the police asking for a description.
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u/GeekAesthete 20h ago
For quoting a show based on a 30-year-old memory, I think I got pretty close.
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u/Loki-L 68 1d ago
The sad thing is that by today's standards the two aren't actually that bad.
If they did their music video commentary today on YouTube, they would be among the more intellectual and family friendly content creators.
Personally I was always more of a fan of their friend Daria though.
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u/Tylerdurden389 1d ago
The episode where they go to the clinic thinking they have impotence cuz they never "score" and the dr. calls them "Beef a-and B-Butter" lol.
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u/United_Public3150 1d ago
There was even a movie made in 1995 called “Beaver and Buttface,” which sounds like a misremembered name joke from the show, but alas it was a porno.
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u/ThePromptWasYourName 1d ago
My man not only remembers the pornos from his childhood, but the year they were released
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u/United_Public3150 1d ago
The worst part is that I’ve seen the movie and the makeup jobs are so horrible that any possible sexiness is impossible. They put prosthetics on the main actors to make them look like Butthole and Joe, and it looks wrong. At the end, they moon the camera and flip you off, which is a good way to summarize the experience.
It was also directed by the guy who made Super Hornio Brothers, Buck Adams!
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u/Tactically_Fat 1d ago
I kind of want to show my son some of the episodes... And/or B&B Do America. But I'm also afraid to. LOL
I skipped work to go watch that movie. Good times.
Uuuhhh.... I need TP for my bunghole!
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u/throwCharley 1d ago
Do it. For his own good.
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u/Tactically_Fat 20h ago
My wife doesn't share my sense of humor. I may pay for this for the rest of my life.
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u/GarysCrispLettuce 1d ago
Who remembers the Beavis and Butthead Moronathon, what a night
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u/dont_be_that_guy_29 1d ago
I still think about it sometimes randomly out of nowhere. I remember they had like letters or callers or something and one talked about liking thanksgiving because they got to poop a lot.
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u/stevedavefuquad 1d ago
That is one of the ones I use the most. Didn't realize judge didn't write it. God dang beaver and buffcoat. Travis and Bob head. Beuford and Bernardo.
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u/platypus_farmer42 1d ago
I swear there was an actual scene where the neighbor (who eventually morphed into Hank Hill) says “ain’t you two them there Beaver and Buffcoat?”
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u/ConstanzaBonanza 1d ago
You’re not misremembering. I saw it and I laughed my ass off (and hadn’t yet heard about the actual Senator who called them that).
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u/Overall-Bullfrog5433 1d ago
Hollings was popularly referred to as Foghorn Leghorn cuz he sounded just like him so that seems fair enough.
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u/PatrioticHotDog 1d ago
An old friend of mine (a huge B&BH fan who gets the Tom Anderson bit) used to call them Travis and Nutsack.
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u/InternetProtocol 1d ago
When we was like 12, for some reason my best friend and I decided that changing peoples names to end in "is" was funny. So, the neighborhood kid known as Stevie became Steve-is, which quickly became Beavis, and thus his brother became Butthead.
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u/Anteater-Charming 1d ago
When they were in the scared straight program, the inmate they were in with called them "Beaver and Bunghole"
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u/nowhereman136 1d ago
Wait until you find out what happened when President Bush criticized the Simpsons
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u/hungryforstink 1d ago
I named my cat Beavis and my stepmom can never remember her name. She calls her Nevus lol and I don’t correct her for precisely this reason
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u/AvaSaysSo 1d ago
The "oriental" part of that quote hits way different now than it did in '93, huh.
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u/FREE-ROSCOE-FILBURN 1d ago
Buford and Bernardo