Vulgar and spam-brained as they may be, Beavis and Butt-head need no spin doctors--they were born to win the world over all on their own. The crudely drawn pubescents were first unleashed on the public in a 1992 focus group session MTV held in Teaneck, New Jersey, during which the audience was given a peek at Frog Baseball, a short film by a then 30-year-old novice animator named Mike Judge. The group's response to the film, in which the boys take turns whacking a bat at a harmless amphibian, went way beyond a few thumbs up. "People asked to buy the tape right out of the machine," recalls Abby Terkuhle, then an MTV producer to whom Judge had submitted the film. "One guy wouldn't leave until he had a copy. It was then that we thought, Hey, maybe we're on to something."
And, of course, they were. Launched in 1993, Beavis & Butt-head, Judge's nihilist satire of a teenage wasteland, went on to become MTV's highest-rated series, despite loud put-downs from some critics who often took the pair's debased antics too literally. The wide-screen adaptation of the show, Beavis and Butt-head Do America, was the surprise winner of the holiday season, taking in $20 million in its opening weekend to finish No. 1 at the box office and going on to gross more than $56 million. Now Judge is bringing his lean, subversive vision of ranch-house America to prime-time network television with King of the Hill, an animated series that debuted last Sunday on Fox in the golden 8:30 p.m. time slot between The Simpsons and The X-Files.
The show, co-created by Simpsons writer Glen Daniels, came about when Peter Roth, then president of 20th Century Fox Television, approached the animator about coming up with "a Mike Judge equivalent to Homer Simpson," as part of a production deal Judge had signed with the network's parent company. "I went back to my sketchbooks," recalls Judge, who has lived in Austin, Texas, since 1993, "and I found all these bubba types. I wanted to do something about four or five guys who were really into their power tools."
The patriarch of a small family in the fictitious town of Arlen, Texas, Hank Hill--Judge's new Everyman--is the show's articulate voice and conscience. Unlike Homer, he is no bumbling dreamer but rather a man who takes earnest pride in his life as a father and propane salesman. If the Simpson family remains on a jaunty, fruitless ride to escape the banalities and inconveniences of middle-class life, the Hills--Hank, his wife Peggy and son Bobby--are a grimmer, reality-based lot, who doggedly accept the burdens of their position. The show is languidly paced and less wide reaching than the Simpsons in its comedy; absent is the nonstop barrage of cultural references ranging from Buckminster Fuller to Sammy Davis Jr. King of the Hill mines its humor instead from the narrow but brilliantly honed universe of Hank's no-nonsense populism and his coterie of dim-witted pals who fixate on cars and conspiracy theories and refer to the recently deposed U.N. Secretary General as "Boutros Boutros-Ghali Ghali."