Home Video: 'Beavis & Butthead: The Complete Collection'

Mike Judge deserves some respect. He made both Office Space and Idiocracy, a pair of movies that flopped in theaters that became cult classics on home video. King of the Hill, which ran for more than a decade on Fox, was funny throughout its entire run but never got the attention showered on The Simpsons and Family Guy. Silicon Valley, his current series on HBO, brutally skewers tech billionaires without getting the awards attention handed to Girls or VEEP. And, most importantly, Mike got his start with Beavis and Butt-head, the brilliantly stupid characters who dominated MTV in the mid-1990s.

Beavis and Butt-head: The Complete Collection is out now on DVD for the bargain price of $25. The 12-DVD set features all four of the previously-released episode collections (including shows from the show's 2011 revival) plus the Special Collector’s Edition of the Beavis and Butt-Head Do America movie. There's a ton of bonus material including “Taint of Greatness: The Journey of Beavis and Butt-Head” Parts 1-3, Video Music Awards appearances, a Thanksgiving Special with Kurt Loder, the 1994-1996 Butt-Bowls, MTV 20^th Anniversary Special, the original, un-cut “Frog Baseball,” a 2011 Comic-Con panel featuring Mike Judge and moderator Johnny Knoxville, promos, montages, and a lot more.

We Are the Mighty founder David Gale was an MTV executive during the Beavis and Butt-head heyday and he's a big contributor to the "Taint of Greatness" documentaries.

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You either get it or you don't.

Unfortunately, music licensing issues are going to prevent any DVD release from accurately recreating the full stoner experience of watching the show back in the day. The (always funny) animated stories were the breaks between the scenes that were the heart of the show: the boys sat on the couch and offered running commentary as they watched videos on MTV. Those segments took equal aim at the musicians whose videos were then the backbone of MTV programming and the stupid and horny teenage boys who made up the majority of the channel's viewers. The show was popular with kids (and adults) who were in on the joke and with a lot of the kids who didn't understand that Mike Judge was making fun of them. Adults who didn't get the joke decried Beavis and Butt-head as lewd and moronic symbols of everything that's wrong with America's young people.

Fortunately, each set includes a handful of videos with the commentary that originally aired on the show so that kids today can get an idea of what the big deal was back then. It doesn't have the same rhythm that an all-night marathon of the show had twenty years ago, but it's good to be reminded of how much the boys loved to bang their heads.

These shows aren't streaming anywhere (aside from a handful on later episodes in the MTV app) and buying digital copies online would cost well over $100. This set is worth your money.