Mike Judge Still Sees Beavis And Butt-Head As His Career's Magnum Opus

Mike Judge belongs to that cohort of late-era baby boomers who captured the Gen X zeitgeist. Much like Quentin Tarantino and Richard Linklater, Judge had a head start on the next-gen filmmakers. He turned 10 in 1972 and came of age during the advent of the couch-potato age. Reruns of network shows had been syndicated since the late 1950s, but it took a decade or so for the boob tube to wear down parents' defenses. By the early '70s, television had become an after-school babysitter. "Leave It to Beaver," "Mr. Ed," and "The Dick Van Dyke Show" were in heavy daily rotation. Better to have your kids held captive by the cathode ray glow than out cavorting with pot-smoking burnouts.

When Judge's "Beavis and Butt-Head" debuted on MTV via the short "Frog Baseball," it was a crudely animated goof on garden variety juvenile delinquency. You probably grew up with kids who viewed the discovery of a frog in the backyard as an opportunity for animal cruelty. They might've strapped a bottle rocket to the creature's back or blew them to bits with a cherry bomb. Or, if they were low on ordnance, they treated them as an improvised baseball and beat them to death. This was savage and cruel and so very American in the basest sense. If Judge had kept his sights aimed this low, we wouldn't be watching "Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe" in 2022. But we are, and this is because he got his mouth-breathing teenagers out of the backyard and onto the couch, in front of the television, where they belonged. In doing so, he made his own television history.