Frog Baseball

Frog Baseball is the pilot episode of Beavis and Butt-head, created by Mike Judge in 1992 for Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation, which aired on MTV's Liquid Television. It marks the first appearance of the Beavis and Butt-head characters. It is available on Disc 3 of Volume 3 of The Mike Judge Collection as a special feature. It is also slightly edited from the original TV broadcast. The end title card that showed a still from the cartoon in which Butt-head's bat made contact with Beavis' head and reads "No animals were harmed in the making of this film...except for Beavis.", is removed from the DVD version.

Plot

The short starts out with a title card that says "Inbred Jed's Homemade Cartoons," with the character of Inbred Jed staring at the 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 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]

The short, along with the episode "Held Back", was also mentioned in the Beavis and Butt-head episode "Snitchers", the 20th episode in the 8th season. The way the duo scream "Frog Baseball" in the short was also used in one of the music video commentaries in the first canon episode.

References