COOL, DUDE

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

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."

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."

Judge has always performed the voices for both Beavis and Butt-head, and he is taking on Hank Hill and one of his sidekicks, Boomhauer. The latter character's purposely inscrutable speech was inspired by a voice-mail message Judge received a few years ago from a ranting Southerner who, Judge ultimately deciphered, was calling to complain that Beavis &Butt-head didn't start on time. Judge listened to the tape 40 times initially and now plays it repeatedly every time he records Boomhauer's dialogue.

"Mike has an unbelievable ear for normal conversation," notes Johnson. "He is obsessed with the details and nuances of the way people talk. If you go anywhere with Mike in his car in Austin, he'll pop in a tape of some recorded conversation, some prank phone call." Adds Judge's friend, movie director Richard Linklater (Slacker): "Mike just has that gift of being tapped in. He has all these great facial expressions and voices. Ask him to re-create a lunch he had with David Geffen."

By all accounts, a life of dining with casually chic moguls does not seem to be one Judge is avidly pursuing. He has made a choice to live away from the fray of show-business capitals. With the help of video-conferencing and other technology, he oversees both TV series--King is produced in Los Angeles and Beavis in New York City--from his office in Austin. His wife Francesca stays home with the couple's two daughters, one five and the other two, neither of whom gets to weigh in on their father's work because they aren't permitted to watch TV programs that have commercials.

Perhaps by the time Judge completes his next big project, the girls will be old enough to become fans. He is about to begin writing a script for a live-action comedy film he hopes to direct. Its subject? The eerie modern construct that is the suburban office park. Maybe someday Judge could do a catchy musical about aluminum siding.