Once upon a time I was 21 and working at The Boston Phoenix fresh of college. It was the alternative paper dissed by Mark Ruffalo in Spotlight, and it's also where I met my awesome wife. My job was to type in concert listings, a task for which I was paid the tidy sum of $6.50/hour -- and I had to compete for a month to land the gig. Anything I wrote for the paper paid extra, so soon I was reviewing the Barney the Dinosaur movie for $60, doing comedy bits for $40 a pop. The holy grail was a real-live article.
I was young and hungry, and when the voice of my generation found itself at a series finale, I saw an opportunity. I pitched an article mourning the loss of Beavis and Butt-Head, and they realized this was the reason they'd hired a 21 year-old. Which meant my first big article included words like "fart," "fart-knocker," "turd-burglar," and "nihilism." Reading it now, I'm struck by how heavily my editor put his fingerprints on it, as well as my gross factual errors (this was pre-Youtube). But because this was years before an endless slew of blogs and webzines would cover every story to death, I was the only game in town. (A recurring theme for me.) And so I'm quoted on the wikipedia page.
From the show's page:
In 1997, Dan Tobin of The Boston Phoenix commented on the series' humor, stating that it transformed "stupidity into a crusade, forcing us to acknowledge how little it really takes to make us laugh."From Butt-Head:
Dan Tobin of The Boston Phoenix described Butt-head as "ringleader, the devious visionary."From Beavis:
Dan Tobin of The Boston Phoenix described Beavis as "the sidekick and follower" who developed into "more of a loose cannon".I know that anyone can edit Wikipedia, but I swear it wasn't me who added these. Still, very neat.
And I can't find it now, but years ago I stumbled across a lawsuit about fire which blamed the show, and lawyers had twisted my descriptions so it sounded like I was criticizing them (when in reality, mine was a love letter). But that seems to have disappeared off the interwebs. Wikipedia, however, lives on. And my connection to the turd-burglars in question is etched in stone... until one of your logs into Wikipedia and deletes it.