Man oh man, am I ever jealous of the dudes at Metal Injection. While Vince and I (and, of course, our friend Rodney Githens from Vertebrae 33 and Metal Band Art) were manning our booth at this past weekend’s New York Comic Con, Injection co-heads Rob and Frank were at a roundtable with Mike Judge, a.k.a. the creator of Beavis and Butt-Head, King of the Hill, Office Space, and a ton of other stuff that’s made you snarf over the past twenty years. And, of course, they asked all the best questions — which is to say, they got Judge to spill on whether or not there would be metal videos in the series’ upcoming re-launch, and to discuss his own metal fandom. Suh-weeeeeeeet. Click on the below screen cap of Judge talking about metal subgenres to watch the whole interview, which, needless to say, is pretty damned great.

Beavis and Butt-Head finally returns to MTV on October 27. Check out a trailer for the new season here.

-AR

San Diego Comic-Con, which is currently considered the nerd convention of the year, is now underway. That means that nearly every studio, network, video game publisher, comic book publisher, toy company, and who knows what else have a presence there right now, and are currently teasing fans with all their big upcoming products, from the new Spider-Man movie to Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel to friggin’ Twilight.

But who gives a hoot about any of that? Mike Judge showed up to preview the return of Beavis and Butt-Head, and that preview is now available for your viewing pleasure below. There are some slight differences to the old show — the animation seems a little cleaner, and Beavis’ voice sounds a teensy bit different than it did back in the day — but on the whole, it appears to be the same old idiocy with which we all fell in love so many years ago. Sigh.

The best part comes after the three-minute mark, when we get a taste of what B&B will be doing now instead of critiquing music videos — watching crap like Jersey Shore. Needless to say, their take on America’s most obnoxious reality show gets an A++++++ WDBWA.

Still no word yet on a premiere date for the new episodes, but it should be soonish. In the meantime, Collider has a detailed recap of Mike Judge’s entier panel at Comic-Con.

-AR

A couple of weeks ago, we posted news of the impending return of Beavis and Butt-Head, which is, obviously, terrific news. But reader Josh Kruk brought up a terrific point in the comments section when he wondered “How will they do video roasts since the music video is a dying (dead?) medium?” Now that MTV doesn’t really show music videos anymore, you had to wonder what B&B would be watching while engaging in their own unique brand of media criticism. (If you somehow have no idea what I’m talking about, please check out the above classic clip of Beavis and Butt-Head enjoying Pantera’s video for “This Love.”)

Well, now MTV president Van Toffler has provided an answer. Speaking to Rolling Drone, Toffler had this to say on the matter:

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I’m really over it with the cold, the dark, the snow, the ice, the sludge, the wind, and the retreating penis. It’s time for warm weather already. I know, I know, the groundhog didn’t see his shadow yesterday, spring is coming sooner rather than later, hoo-ray. But it needs to be sooner, and it needed to be sooner yesterday. Warm weather means long walks, outdoor beers, ladies in skimpy outfits, and, oh yeah — the return of two of metal’s greatest icons.

Yep yep yep — after telling the world this past summer that creator Mike Judge was working on new episodes of Beavis and Butt-Head, yesterday MTV announced at their upfronts (a presentation of upcoming programming for potential advertisers) that the animated series would return “this summer.” A more specific date was not provided.

The announcement was made by the cast of the controversial kiddie porn show Skins, and then, as part of what must be the ultimate media coup, tweeted by Justin Bieber:

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Vince and I are huge Beavis and Butt-Head fans, as any intelligent, self-respecting metalheads should be. The show was hilarious, deceptively intelligent, and a reflection of pretty much every great male friendship ever. (In our relationship, Vince and I are in agreement that he’s the Beavis and I’m the Butt-Head. Which one are you?) So this news from REVIEWniverse is potentially very exciting:

REVIEWniverse has exclusively learned from an anonymous source that Mike Judge is currently outlining 30 new episodes of his iconic animated comedy Beavis and Butt-Head for its native network.

The source conceded that plans for actual broadcast are not yet cemented, or even a given, but confirmed that the King of the Hill/Office Space/Idiocracy maestro is definitely in the midst of writing new B and B material with the hopes of a full-throttle return.

Even better news for fans is that, should this come to pass, Judge plans on retaining the show’s original ghetto-tech aesthetic, right down to the faded color palatte. The source also reveals that the Extract director intends on keeping B and B‘s format identical to its original sketch-videos-sketch incarnation, but with more contemporary music clips for the cartoon slacker-duo to skewer.

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I know that this is only peripherally related to metal, but the response to that new Beavis & Butt-Head short the other day was so overwhelmingly positive that I thought you’d all like to know about this.

Cinema Blend recently conducted an interview with B&B creator Mike Judge in which they asked him if we’d ever get to see an actual re-visitation of his most famous creation. His answer?

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Please allow me to get all Jonathan Schwartz-y for a moment.

Do people who were only just learning to go poopy in the potty in the early 90s even get Beavis & Butt-Head? I don’t mean that the humor is too sophisticated for some kids (although that could be the case) – I mean, I think it could be entirely possible that they just write it off as stupid low-brow humor that dudes like Vince and myself only enjoy for the sake of nostalgia. And there might be a little bit of truth in that.

But not much.

Besides the excellent commentary on the media and society that Beavis & Butt-Head provided, I think that the show resonated for this reason: every great male friendship (first person to say “bro-mance” gets a kick in the nards), and possibly even some female friendships, has a Beavis & Butt-Head dynamic to it. Vince and I discussed it once, and I think we agreed fairly quickly that he was the Beavis. And I am very comfortable being a Butt-Head.

So. Mike Judge, the brilliant man who created Beavis & Butt-Head, King of the Hill, Office Space and Idiocracy has a new (live-action) movie coming out this week, called Extract. (I’ve heard some people really dig it and some people really dislike it. I want to like it but it has Gene Simmons in it, so that’s one strike against it.) And he created this video of Beavis & Butt-Head introducing some clips.

A cheap promotional ploy? Sure. But as soon as Butt-Head said “Bateman is pissed off ’cause his wife has been doing it with the pool cleaner” and Beavis agreed, “Uh-huh,” it was 1993 for me all over again.

If you’re not familiar with Continuum’s 33 1/3 book series, you should be. Each entry is written by a different music critic and/or journalist, and each one is devoted to the study of a single, seminal album. There’s a wide range of types of music covered by the series – everything from the Beastie Boys to The Velvet Underground – but metal hass, up ’til now, been criminally unrepresented. There are entries for albums by Guns N’ Roses and Nine Inch Nails, but those aren’t metal bands in the strictest sense and, obviously, both groups have been wholly accepted by the mainstream; there was a book covering Sabbath’s Master of Reality recently, but, weird though it may be, at this point Sabbath are pretty much as accepted and unrebellious a metal band as we’re likely to get.

So D.X. Ferris’ recently release tome on Slayer’s Reign in Blood is the series’ first honest to God (or honest to Satan?) book covering a metal album. And it’s an AWESOME read – fascinating, intelligent, informative and insightful, you’re likely to blow through it record time, and then feel depressed as you realize you’ve reached the last page. Ferris not only takes a critical look at the album, making astute observations and pointing out little musical nooks and crannies you might have never noticed even after your gazillionth spin of the classic record, but he also managed to interview everyone and anyone who was involved with the album – from the band members themselves to producer Rick Rubin to engineer Andy Wallace to cover artist Larry Carroll and a few hundred other people I’m forgetting about – as well as loads and loads of musicians and artists who are fans of the album (Henry Rollins, Tori Amos, Gary Holt, and Paul Romano among them).

After I wrote this blog about Slayer and their continuing relevance in the metal world back in June, Ferris actually e-mailed me basically just to say “thanks” for the shout-out to his book. I asked him if I could shoot him some interview questions, and luckily for us, he agreed. After the jump, read what Ferris had to say about the process of putting the book together, things he learned about both Slayer and Reign in Blood while working on the book, and the state of Slayer today.

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