We Nearly Got a Live-Action ‘Beavis and Butt-Head’ Movie in the ‘90s
Last year, Saturday Night Live aired a sketch in which Ryan Gosling and Mikey Day played two complete strangers who inexplicably resemble Beavis and Butt-Head. And since pretty much any SNL sketch that seems to work will be quickly repeated until the joke is no longer funny, the pair reprised their roles for the red carpet premiere of Gosling’s movie The Fall Guy.
If this sketch proved anything, it’s that Beavis and Butt-Head are creepy as hell when brought to life with human actors. They looked less like beloved cartoon characters, and more like nightmarish David Lynch creations going through a mid-life crisis.
But weirdly enough, we were almost subjected to live-action versions of the dim-witted duo nearly three decades ago.
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In 1996 Beavis and Butt-Head Do America brought the MTV characters to the big screen for the first time, with a cross-country animated adventure that featured the voices of stars like Demi Moore, Bruce Willis and, briefly, an uncredited David Letterman.
The movie wasn’t actually creator Mike Judge’s idea. According to The Los Angeles Times, shortly after the TV series premiered, producer David Geffen called up MTV Networks Chairman Tom Freston and declared, “This is going to be huge. Let’s make an album and a movie of this.” They “made a deal that day.”
But Geffen and the network had to convince Judge to make a movie. Making things even more complicated, they were pressuring him to make a live-action movie because it would be more “commercial.” Some have claimed that the possible list of actors to play Beavis and Butt-Head included Adam Sandler and David Spade. “Mike was resistant,” Freston said at the time. According to The L.A. Times, Judge was concerned that it “could hurt the franchise having live actors trying to capture the essence and physical likeness of the geeky, hormone-engorged teens.” In fact, ABC tried to do just that for one episode of the sitcom Step by Step, and it was deeply uncomfortable.
In a 1996 interview, Judge said that most of the movie offers he received when the show premiered involved live-action actors, because studios could only think of Beavis and Butt-Head in the context of other live-action movie duos that appealed to youngsters, such as Bill and Ted, or Wayne and Garth.
While Judge won out, and the Beavis and Butt-Head movie became an animated project, when the franchise was revived in the 2020s, again, the idea of a live-action adaptation was floated. This time, Judge was far more open to the concept, telling The New York Times that Paramount initially just wanted to make a Beavis and Butt-Head movie with human teenagers. They even went as far as holding a casting session to find the actors which, according to Judge, “didn’t go as well as I had hoped.”
Back in ‘96 Judge said, “I don’t see how live action could ever work, unless it’s something completely different from the show.” He then pointed out that he thought of Beavis and Butt-Head as being similar to the Peanuts characters. “And I don’t think you could do Charlie Brown live action, it wouldn’t be any good,” Judge argued.
Time, and the cast of The Today Show, has only confirmed that stance.
