Interestingly, it’s the real-life Whataburger franchise, a beloved Texas staple, that the Hill family eats out at on occasion. Judge’s post- Beavis and Butt-Head animated series on Fox, King of the Hill, also featured a fast-food restaurant several times throughout its run. The latter is a show that many believe as an accurate piss take on the absurd world where new billionaires are made and broken all the time. The show’s creator, Mike Judge, would go on to explore the idea of whether it was the workplace or the workers: His 1999 film Office Space was a hilarious look at the day-to-day drudgery of working in offices and chain restaurants, while his current HBO show Silicon Valley dives into the world of lowly startups and tech behemoths. ![]() Is Burger World bad because of Beavis and Butt-Head, or was the place already terrible? Is it the franchise that’s trash, or this specific location? In this greasy, fried ouroboros, where does the grime end, and where did it begin? What do they do with the little money they make? They never have enough to buy nachos or other junk food. ![]() There are also the questions of why, exactly, these two work there, or how they got hired in the first place. A health inspector once counted 37 violations in just one visit. Butt-Head is somehow an assistant manager. The drive-thru menu has been tampered with, now advertising items like “Butt Nuggets” ($2.69) and a “Hurl Burger,” that costs five bucks. And with only two guys working at a time, pulling register, cooking, and drive-thru duties, one is led to believe Burger World has a shit reputation in a shit town. With no heat lamp or warming cabinets, it can’t accommodate many customers at once. Burger World’s darkness is telegraphed through upside-down Golden Arches and what looks like a pretty sparse kitchen, devoid of stainless steel prep tables or state-of-the-art cooking equipment nothing to ensure red-grey burger patties are cooked all the way through. Even by early-1990s standards, it looks like a throwback second-rate franchise a notch below Carl’s Jr., just off a nondescript suburb’s main drag. To be fair, Burger World is a horrible fast-food restaurant. Yet nobody justified our often-irrational fears of the nightmarish behind-the-scenes action of your local Burger King or Wendy’s quite like the controversial cartoon. Judge Reinhold’s character in Fast Times at Ridgemont High had to deal with crabby customers, and Roseanne Barr suffered an annoying teenage manager on a power trip in one 1990 episode of Roseanne, long before this dumbass duo were tossing dead rats and grasshoppers into the fryer. Of course, they didn’t hold the first crappy fast-food job in pop culture history. Beavis and Butt-Head were health violations serving customers at Burger World. They were crude, nihilistic, dumb, and gross. For three years in the Clinton ’90s, these two dumbasses were the controversy du jour, and their influence stretched into many areas of pop culture, including the fast-food world. The cause, according to parents and fire officials, was Beavis yelling, “Fire! Fire! Fire!” A year later, conservative watchdog groups blamed the death of a baby in New Jersey, who was struck by a bowling ball thrown off of an overpass by an 18-year-old, on the show. This came after a number of other young, would-be suburban arsonists were caught setting fire to things. In 1993, a 2-year-old Ohio girl died in a fire caused by her 5-year-old brother. That’s your life.īeavis and Butt-Head, which ended its run on MTV 20 years ago this November (22 new episodes aired in 2011), landed in the news on several occasions for bringing out the worst in the kids who watched the show. All you can do is suck at your job, suck at school, and then go home and watch TV. Then you’re stuck in some middle-of-nowhere town in the Southwest, and you’re not going anywhere. That is, unless you’re Beavis and Butt-Head, and you work at Burger World. A job in fast food is the beginning of greatness. At least that’s what the training video tells you. Heroes are made on the line, and the future leaders of America are developed from ground chuck to double patty with cheese. Teenage burger employees are part of a different kind of team, one without real athletic requirements. They are replaced by a uniform and the uniformly grim act of flipping burgers or taking customer orders. Labels like geek, jock, weirdo, or preppy are shed at the door. There may be more or less freedom from the high school hub for those within, relative to the location. Depending on the context, its affordances differ. ![]() The suburban fast-food franchise may be an adjacent teenage ecosystem to the local high school.
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