DATE: Tuesday, August 5, 1997               TAG: 9708040273

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B8   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Editorial 

                                            LENGTH:   44 lines

SIGNING OFF: BYE-BYE, BEAVIS BEAVIS AND BUTT-HEAD ARE HOPELESS LOSERS, AND THE KIDS GOT THE JOKE, EVEN IF THEIR PARENTS DIDN'T.

MTV, the globally pervasive hypnotist of teen-culture tube zombies, announced last week that it is pulling the plug on ``Beavis and Butt-head,'' ending a four-year run of the most controversial television program since ``All in the Family.''

The show's cartoon protagonists are a pair of addled, illiterate and relentlessly annoying couch potatoes whose lives extend little beyond rock'n'roll videos, crude scatalogical wisecracks and a desperate search for an outlet for their raging hormones. Oh, yeah. And nachos. Heh-heh-heh.

Beavis and Butt-head quickly became the most vilified duo in American cultural history since Sacco and Vanzetti. Parents' groups protested. Wheezing congressional subcommittee chairmen railed at the show as a certain epitaph to the concepts of decency and civility - usually after admitting to never actually having seen it.

All of which, of course, made the cartoon pair instant heroes among many teen-agers, who, more culturally attuned than grown-ups, recognized the whole premise as one grand, sharp-edged send-up of the very adult mind-set that could be so readily horrified by the antics of a pair of pen-and-ink pubescents. Beavis and Butt-head are hopeless losers, and the kids got the joke, even if their parents didn't.

Subsophomoric and grating, the program also was a keen-eyed critic of middle-American values and mores in the 1990s - second in this regard only to its distant cartoon cousin, ``The Simpsons.'' Fast-food culture, political correctness, radical feminism, ex-Marine gym teachers, Boomers, aging hippies, gaseous retiree neighbors, the stupefying megamall sameness of the suburbs - all got a splendid send-up.

But an overriding theme - and a dark one - was that Beavis and Butt-head were products of broken homes, where parents were little more than a wispy concept, never seen, never around, seldom mentioned. Beavis and Butt-head had been parked in front of a television set at an early age, and grew to become whatever they'd been exposed to.

It is not a stretch to imagine that it was this all-too-realistic portrayal, as much as the crassness and nihilism, that made adults so nervous about Beavis and Butt-head.

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