Frog Baseball

Frog Baseball is the first appearance of Beavis and Butt-head, characters created by Mike Judge in 1992 for Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation and aired on MTV's Liquid Television. It is available on Disc 3 of Volume 3 of The Mike Judge Collection as a special feature.

Plot

The short starts out with a title card that says "Inbred Jed's Homemade Cartoons," with the character of Inbred Jed staring at camera giving a somewhat evil hillbilly cackle. Beavis and Butt-head are then shown switching channels on their TV, watching various TV commercials and laughing at a Suzanne Somers Thighmaster commercial. While messing around in a field, Beavis and Butt-head spot a frog and proceed to play baseball with it. When they kill the frog, they see a poodle and charge after it with a baseball bat. The credits roll as you hear the duo hit the poodle with a bat and the poodle yelping in pain (not seen). The screen then reads "To be continued...", the credits roll, and a disclaimer reads that no animals were harmed in the making of this film, except for Beavis.

Cultural references

The duo play Black Sabbath's Iron Man and Deep Purple's Smoke on the Water on air guitar.

The October 1974 issue of National Lampoon magazine carried an illustrated story called Frog Baseball.^[1] The story was later reprinted in "The Best of National Lampoon #6" (1976) and "National Lampoon Tenth Anniversary Anthology" (1979). The story is about two boys, Tom and Dean, describing their passion for playing the game. Says Tom: "The real fun's whacking the living shit out of these goddamn frogs and watching the poor bastards go flying through the air all busted up." It's unknown whether this piece may have influenced Mike Judge in his Beavis and Butt-head debut video of the same name, although Judge has remarked that he once entertained the idea of writing for National Lampoon magazine: "I was thinking of trying to write for National Lampoon, but I figured you had to have connections. So I never pursued it."^[2]

References