If loosed upon the real world, one is tempted to believe, Beavis and Butt-head would not live to see age 20 - given their abrasive anti-personalities and their shared appetite for destruction.
Got news for you: Beavis and Butt-head are the real world, and a great many of their flesh-and-blood counterparts have grown up to become productive citizens. 'Course, a great many other B&B; life-models have graduated to the gutters and graveyards.
No telling where these timeless adolescent antagonists will end up by the final reel of "Beavis and Butt-head Do America," a surprisingly effective leap into feature-length animation for the MTV characters. (Series creator Mike Judge, the Austin-based cartoonist, directs.)
Judge's original story (with co-writer Joe Stillman) lifts these pathetic little louts from the small arena of neighborhood mayhem and plunks them smack into the high life of Las Vegas - and then on a perilous cross-country trek complete with vindictive FBI deadeyes and gawking senior-citizen tourists.
Seems the boys' unsupervised existence is disrupted by the theft of their television set - source of their chief sustenance, rock-music videos. Their search to reclaim it leads to a sleazy fellow who hires them to "do," as he puts it, his former wife. He means "murder," but these hormonal little twirps interpret it otherwise.
The yarn that follows is conventional road-movie formula, rendered distinctive by Judge's savvy grasp of the drooling punk mentality and its fundamental estrangement from reality. There is a genuine affection on Judge's part for these miscreants, whose chief charm is that they will say things (largely unprintable here) that most of us would never be stupid enough to utter.
The animation, keeping the faith with Judge's "primitive realism" style, moves briskly across the big screen; it's hardly of Disney caliber, but this Geffen/Paramount/MTV production still looks like more than a blown-up TV 'toon. The musical score is compatible enough, featuring Isaac Hayes' "Shaft"-like rearrangement of the "Beavis and Butt-head" theme and bands ranging from AC/DC to Southern Culture on the Skids. Even Engelbert Humperdinck gets a showcase (not to be outdone by Tom Jones in "Mars Attacks!").
