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Like Beavis & Butt-head, King of the Hill is a manifestation of Judge's longtime obsession with an America of tract homes and monster truck shows, Dairy Queens and Wal-Marts. "Mike has surrounded himself in Texas with great raconteurs," notes Sam Johnson, a former Beavis writer who is now executive story editor on NBC's NewsRadio. "They regale him with tales of misfit friends and trailer-park relatives. Mike is repelled by this world and also incredibly attracted to it."
With King of the Hill, Judge's affinity has won out. Here he depicts low-rent suburbia far less brutally than he has with Beavis & Butt-head, a show set in a vast nowhere starring two cretins who do nothing, absorb nothing and stand for even less. No one on King of the Hill is skewered as savagely as educated elitists, whom Judge characterizes as blind bubbleheads incapable of seeing the world beyond their screen savers.
"I worked all kinds of horrible jobs before I went to school in San Diego," says Judge, 34, who graduated from the University of California branch there in 1985 with a degree in physics. "For the first time, I met a lot of people who came from wealthy backgrounds. The colliding of those two worlds has always fascinated me. I've met so many people who work in the movies and in TV who come from upper-middle-class New England families, and they're really out of touch with what the rest of the country is thinking. Whenever I see a fast-food place in a movie, it's always some '50s-looking thing or a building with a giant chicken on it. It's so over the top."
The son of an archaeology professor father and school-librarian mother, Judge grew up amid the grim sprawl of '70s Albuquerque, New Mexico. After college he sampled and ultimately rejected a number of jobs as an electrical engineer before devoting his energies to playing bass in various blues-rock bands. Comedy was his deepest passion, however. "I always wanted to be in Second City," he says, referring to the renowned Chicago-based comedy troupe. "But growing up in Albuquerque I thought, How the hell do you get to be one of those guys?" It wasn't until 1991 that Judge, already married and living in Dallas, decided to express his inner funnyman through animation. With the help of a few library books, he taught himself the craft, which quickly led to the making of Frog Baseball.
Although he never had a career in physics or engineering, Judge's training serves him well, for it left him with a scientist's sense of the exact. If Beavis and Butt-head seem unwavering in their testosterone-fueled stupidity, it is because their creator has been meticulous in executing his vision for them. Animators who first come to work on the show are given a long list of dos and don'ts. Judge insists that none of the characters move in any manner suggesting the effete. After rendering the image of a peripheral character shutting a car trunk, one former B&B storyboard artist was asked by Judge to try it again, this time with "no sissy wrists."