Between Showers

Mike Judge turns 45

In 1991, Judge’s short “Office Space” (also known as the Milton series of shorts) was picked up by Comedy Central following a Dallas animation festival.

In 1992, Judge developed “Frog Baseball”, a short featuring the characters Beavis and Butt-head, to be featured on Liquid Television. The short led to the creation of the Beavis and Butt-head series on MTV, in which Judge voiced both title characters as well as the majority of supporting characters. Beavis and Butt-head attended Highland High School in their series, which is the name of a high school in Albuquerque, New Mexico (USA), the city in which Judge grew up. The show ran from 1993 to 1997 and spawned a feature-length film, Beavis and Butt-head Do America, released in 1996. To this day they are still arguably Judge’s most popular characters.

In 1997, Judge left MTV to create King of the Hill for Fox. Many of the show’s characters were based on people he had known while living in Texas. Judge continued his voice acting, playing both Hank Hill and Boomhauer.

In 1999, Judge wrote and directed the live-action comedy film Office Space, which was based in part on the Milton series of cartoons he had created for Saturday Night Live. In the film, he made a cameo appearance as Stan, the manager of Chotchkie’s (complete with hairpiece and fake mustache). The film, for which the budget was approximately US$10 million, grossed only $10.8 million in initial release. However, as of mid-2006, Office Space had sold nearly six million video and DVD copies.

Since fall 2003, Judge has run a very successful animation festival, together with animator Don Hertzfeldt, called “The Animation Show”. He even created an appearance for Beavis and Butt-head featured in The Animation Show 2007. “The Animation Show” tours the country every year, screening animated shorts from mostly independent animators.