THE SHOCK OF THE BLUE

Beavis and Butt-head, Ted and Whoopi, Howard Stern and his Private Parts: Whatever happened to political correctness -- and good manners?

For Beavis and Butt-Head there was only one way to describe last week, the most difficult of their young lives: it sucked. MTV's animated teenage miscreants had an unfortunate run-in with real life. An Ohio mother charged that episodes of Beavis and Butt-Head, in which they gleefully plan pranks with fire, incited her five-year-old son to set their mobile home ablaze, killing his two-year-old sister. MTV responded to the tragedy with careful public statements, vowing to remove all references to fire from future shows and reiterating that the characters' antics are ''obviously unacceptable and not to be emulated in real life.''...

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