Bubbling Under: Cher with Beavis & Butthead- "I Got You Babe"

An unlikely 90's team up

Welcome to Bubbling Under. Each edition I cover a song or artist that just missed charting on the Hot 100. This week: Cher’s one-off collaboration with 90’s cartoon characters Beavis & Butthead.

If you enjoyed this post, please be sure to like, comment, share, or hit subscribe. Thank You!

Like a lot of the legacy artists who pop up here, Cher’s career has had highs and lows. The pop culture legend had reached a career resurgence in the 1980s. Initially, it was as an actress. By 1988, she’d become an Academy Award winner for her turn in Norman Jewison’s Moonstruck. Around this time, her musical career had also made a comeback. During the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, Cher had a string of hits, most notably “If I Could Turn Back Time” which was possibly even bigger than her 1970’s era hits.

By 1993, the mononymous legend had reached another dry spell. Cher’s last Top 20 hit on the Billboard charts had been 1991’s overlooked “Love And Understanding”. Cher was battling chronic fatigue syndrome at the time and received a public beating after appearing in infomercials with her friend Lori Davis as a way to continue earning money.

Cher still had some UK hits in the interim and there were a pair of collaborations. She teamed up with Chrissie Hynde, Neneh Cherry, and Eric Clapton on a #1 hit cover of the Judds’ “Love Can Build A Bridge” for the UK charity Comic Relief.

Before this, there was a team-up with another unlikely duo. Beavis and Butthead had made their television debut earlier in 1993 and were all over the place. I remember moral panic about the show after a five-year-old named Austin Messner set fire to his mother’s mobile home killing his two-year-old sister. His mom alleged that her son had watched an episode of the show involving a fire-themed segment. Other neighbours claimed that the family didn’t have cable and had no way to view the program.

The show had to run a disclaimer telling kids not to imitate Beavis and Butthead. References to and including the word “fire” were pulled from subsequent episodes. To this day, Messner claims he never watched the show and never had. (For more on this, read here and here).

Beavis and Butthead was the biggest animated cultural phenomenon since The Simpsons a few years earlier. I wasn’t a big fan of the show as a kid, to be honest, I’m still not. Occasionally, one of their music video roasts will make me chuckle a bit. Their roasting of Nina Hagen’s “Hermann Heiss Er” is a classic. I was, however, and still am, a huge fan of the spin-off series Daria.

Interestingly, Daria was a complete 180 shift from Beavis and Butthead’s more silly antics. Series creator Mike Judge didn’t have any involvement, likely due to MTV having control over the spin-off and Judge being busy with King Of The Hill by that point.

Beavis and Butthead caught on quickly and an album was recorded featuring the characters. This had been done a few years previously with The Simpsons. I haven’t heard “Do The Bart Man” in years, but it was all over TV and radio in Canada in the early 90’s. Someone at MTV had likely hoped Beavis and Butthead would have a similar success of their own.

As with The Simpsons Sing The Blues Album, The Beavis and Butthead Experience was also released on Geffen Records. Both albums were reasonably successful upon release, but I also recall both being cutout bin staples in my younger years.

For the big single, the duo teamed up with Cher for a cover of her signature “I Got You Babe”.

Cher’s cover with Beavis and Butthead featured a clip with the duo in a VR booth creating a dream girl. They end up making Cher and sing a duet with her while making fun of Sonny Bono and other aspects of Cher’s career.

It’s an amusing clip, but one of those songs that works better as a video than as a recording. This did get lots of play on TV in the 90s, but I get why that didn’t translate into a hit single. Novelty records from cartoons doing well on the charts were generally a UK phenomenon. Sure enough, it peaked at #35 over there.

Cher would have one more minor hit in 1996 with “One By One” but it wasn’t until 1998’s surprise hit “Believe” that she climbed her way back to the top.

As for Beavis and Butthead, they recently had a comeback of their own when MTV revived the series in 2022.

Next Week: TBA