Misfit Robot Daydream: Beavis and Butt-Head Christmas (Part 2)

CREEPY CHRISTMAS

I'm right in the middle of a Beavis and Butt-Head Christmas here at Misfit Robot Daydream. Yesterday, I reviewed "A Very Special Christmas With Beavis and Butt-Head," from 1993. Today, I'll be reviewing Beavis and Butt-Head's second Christmas special, 1995's "Beavis and Butt-Head Do Christmas." Then, on Wednesday, I'll be reviewing the Beavis and Butt-Head vinyl toys from Funko.

Beavis and Butt-Head Do Christmas

Beavis and Butt-Head Do Christmas (1995) - TV review and screencaps:

Santa Butt-Head

Beavis and Butt-Head's first Christmas special, "A Very Special Christmas With Beavis and Butt-Head," was nothing but Beavis and Butt-Head commenting on Christmas videos for half an hour. It was funny, but it felt like something thrown together at the last minute. Two years later, Beavis and Butt-Head returned with a proper hour long Christmas special, "Beavis and Butt-Head Do Christmas." This episode featured two animated shorts that parodied A Christmas Carol and It's a Wonderful Life, and some "Letters to Santa Butt-Head" segments, in which Butt-Head answered the show's fan mail. They also added a few of the music video segments from the previous Christmas special to round out the show's running time.

Ebenezer Screw

Huh-Huh-Humbug

The first animated short is "Huh-Huh-Humbug," a parody of "A Christmas Carol," with Beavis in the place of Ebenezer Scrooge. During the short, Beavis dreams he is in the future, where he is now the manager of BurgerWorld. It's Christmas Eve, and all he wants to do is relax on his couch and watch a porno tape of "Ebenezer Screw" on his VCR. Unfortunately, the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future keep appearing on the screen every time a girl is about to show her boobs, frustrating Beavis to no end. The ghosts try to teach Beavis the error of his ways, and it seems like they might have succeeded, as the dream ends with Beavis seeming to be on the cusp of some great revelation about his life. But in the end, this is Beavis we're talking about, and great revelations are a bit beyond his abilities. So he ends up thinking that the future will be cool, because he has a VCR and a porno tape. For Beavis, that's "living the dream."

A World Without Butt-Head

It's a Miserable Life

The second short is "It's a Miserable Life," a parody of that musty old Jimmy Stewart chestnut, "It's a Wonderful Life." In It's a Wonderful Life, Jimmy Stewart plays a man who is contemplating suicide. Then his guardian angel appears, and shows him how much worse the world would be without him, and convinces him to choose life. In it's a Miserable life, Beavis and Butthead's guardian angel tries to do the opposite. He tries to convince the boys to kill themselves, because the world would be so much better off without them. Beavis is willing to do it if the angel pays him (the fact that he won't be able to spend the money when he is dead is a little to complicated for him to grasp), but Butt-Head needs some convincing. So the guardian angel takes Butt-Head on a tour of an alternate reality where Butt-Head was never born. It's a clean, happy, unspoiled world... but Butt-Head thinks it "sucks."

In both shorts, Beavis and Butt-Head are shown alternate realities by ghosts or angels, and asked to draw conclusions about them that they can apply to the real world. In both cases, though, the ghosts and angels fail, because they give far too much credit to Beavis and Butt-Head's abilities to draw any conclusions beyond , "that's cool," or "that sucks."

Here Lies Beavis - He Never Scored

The episode also has two "Dear Santa Butt-Head" segments, in which Butt-Head, in a Santa Claus costume, reads fan letters, while Beavis stands by in a reindeer costume and is occasionally whipped by Butt-Head. Butt-Head says, "these are, like, letters from real people and stuff," and I don't know if that's true, but they seem real. As the segments go on, they focus more and more on women writing love-letters to Beavis, much to Butt-Head's frustration. Both of these segments are followed by a few music videos from the 1993 Christmas special.

Porno Mags

This Christmas special is great, it's much more of a proper Beavis Butthead episode than the 1993 special, with the animated shorts in addition to the videos. I thought the 1993 special was very funny, but "Beavis and Butt-Head Do Christmas" is a much more satisfying holiday special over all. I think my ultimate Beavis and Butt-Head Christmas special would have been if they had incorporated ALL of the videos from the 1993 special, instead of just some of them. In fact, I may just have to edit a copy together for my personal use. But even without all of the music videos, I still recommend this episode to anyone looking for something funny, weird, and in questionable taste for the holidays.