The Brothers Grunt
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The Brothers Grunt is an animated TV series first broadcast in August 1994 on MTV. The series was created by Danny Antonucci (of Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy fame). It had a short-but-notorious life on MTV, which played the same few episodes repeatedly for a couple of months, then cancelled the series.
The Show
The series centered around an ensemble cast of pale, rubbery humanoids distantly related to human beings. They are cast out of a monastery (comprised of most survivors of their species) in a quest to bring back one of their kind, Perry, who has abandoned his involuntary position of "Chosen One" (leader of their order) and is now living the High Life among human beings (who seem to deal with the bizarre nature of the grunts by ignoring them and pretending everything is normal, a la muggles).
The main characters were named after members of the famous Rat Pack and their peers: Frank, Tony, Dean, Bing, Sammy, and Perry.
The characters that would become The Brothers Grunt were first seen in one of MTV's numerous 30-second promos. This particular promo consisted of close-up shots of the at-the-time-unnamed character's faces who seemed to be straining to do something (veins in their heads would bulge, the characters would squint and grunt) until the scene cut to the MTV logo landing in a pool of sludge followed by a satisfied "Ahhhhh" (suggesting that the characters were suffering from constipation and the MTV logo was the 'turd' as it were). It is unclear when this promo aired if the storyline and characters for The Brothers Grunt had been developed already or if it was developed into its own show after the success of the promo in the wake of Beavis and Butthead.
It was perhaps the climax of the trend toward genre-breaking, taboo-violating animated media, following in the footsteps of (sequentially) The Simpsons, Ren & Stimpy, and Beavis & Butt-head, and also including the later South Park. Typically these are shows which appear on the surface to simply be toilet humor descendants of The Three Stooges and The Benny Hill Show, but upon closer examination tend to have an agenda of exploring the arbitrary nature of taboos, social mores, stereotypes and the like. The Brothers Grunt did this to such an extent that it quickly alienated its own network and vanished from even rerun status, to be compiled on videotape by its cult following and exchanged in a sort of free bootleg system ignored even by its original makers.
Controversy
The show rose to fame in a controversial manner by replacing a timeslot previously occupied by the popular show [Beavis and Butthead]. This caused a backlash among fans of Beavis and Butthead, many of whom saw The Brothers Grunt as an attempt to cash in on "gross humor" and felt that MTV missed the point of what the audience wanted.Episodes
Season 1
- The Ceremony
- Make mine a grunt
- The
Season 2
- The Detective
- If I Could Grunt To The Animals
- Paging Dr. Grunt
- Perry's Appliance Repairs
- Timmy's Best Friend
- No Quest Today
Season 3
- Grunt Moments In History
- Perry Molo
- Tony and Salsa
- A Call To Grunts
- Clean Up In Aisle Grunt
- Land of the Midnight Grunt
- Close Encounters of the Grunt Kind
- The Scent of Grunts (hi.)
External links
- [The Brothers Grunt Monestary] Images, info, and possibly video, from The Brothers Grunt
- [The Brothers Grunt] at the Big Cartoon DataBase
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