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Keller @ Large: Beavis And Butt-Head Are Back

BOSTON (CBS) - Remember Beavis and Butt-Head, the two cartoon teenagers on MTV in the mid-1990s who sat around on the couch, snickering at everything they saw and wondering why they had no girlfriends?

Listen to Jon's commentary:

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If you had a life that precluded watching much MTV back then, you may well have missed the entire phenomenon, which I'm pretty sure was intended to be a parody of dumbed-down couch-potato pop-culture-obsessed teen culture – "weirdos" is what they were called by their creator, Mike Judge, the man behind the TV series "King of the Hill" and the 2006 movie "Idiocracy."

After 14 years of generally unlamented retirement, Beavis and Butt-Head are returning to MTV Thursday night at 10, the brainstorm of an executive who says, according to USA Today: "I was up in the middle of the night, and I saw a Gaga video and some 'Jersey Shore' footage and some mixed martial arts, and it kind of hit me that the culture was missing Beavis and Butt-Head and their comment on everything that was going on."

I'm not so sure about that, but I am interested in seeing if as many people find Beavis and Butt-Head quite so amusing this time around.

I can't prove it, but it's my sense that there's a bit of a backlash going on against the degraded culture they personify.

After all, as we see on shows like 'Jersey Shore,' trashy behavior has become so commonplace that it has lost its shock value.

Vulgarity is, all too often, the norm.

Narcissism and nihilism are a way of life for an alarmingly large percent of the population of all ages and classes.

In that Mike Judge movie, "Idiocracy," the America of the future has become a place where stupidity reigns, the lowest-common-denominator rules, and everything is coming apart at the seams.

It's as if Beavis and Butt-Head were all grown up and running the show.

It was a comedy, but it was also a horror movie.

And I suspect the Beavis and Butt-Head encore may run up against mounting uneasiness with the extent to which their parody has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

You can listen to Keller At Large on WBZ News Radio every weekday at 7:55 a.m. and 12:25 p.m. You can also watch Jon on WBZ-TV News.

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