Mike Judge is having quite a year.
“I’ve been feeling real good lately,” the usually self-effacing writer/producer/animator says over an exceptionally mediocre phone connection. He does not say this with audible enthusiasm; he says it in the way one might order a second cup of coffee.
Nevertheless, you can’t blame him. In January, Bandera Entertainment, the animation production company he founded six years ago with sitcom savant and King of the Hill co-creator Greg Daniels, scored its first hit with Common Side Effects, a mildly psychedelic animated thriller about a miracle drug and the evils of Big Pharma. It was renewed for a second season in March.
Then in August came season 14 of King of the Hill, perhaps the most anticipated animated revival since the start of the streaming era, greeted by dozens of thinkpieces about how well the original has aged. Set eight or so years after the original left off, it begins with Hank and Peggy Hill returning from a stint in the Middle East to a polarized America (where, among other things, Dale Gribble’s ’90s conspiracy-theory lunacy is now a mainstream GOP-voter point of view.)
The season is mostly about Bobby, once a rotund middle-schooler obsessed with prop comedy, now a fine-dining chef and restaurant owner in Dallas—a brilliant evolution for a character who’s always loved attention. (A friend of mine once theorized that Bobby was perpetually six months away from discovering traditional hardcore punk—Minor Threat, Circle Jerks, early Black Flag—so it’s a delight in season 14 seeing Bobby dressed like every 20-something ex-punk: black t-shirt, dark pants, Dickies work shirt, short haircut. Perfection.)
This week, Judge launches a third season of perhaps his most improbable success: a full-throated revival of iconic ‘90s idiots Beavis and Butthead. The revival, which airs on Comedy Central, has embraced multiverse storytelling—the boys exist as Old Beavis and Butthead (possibly roommates—old-guy sideburns for Beavis, Rascal scooter for Mr. Head) and Smart Beavis and Butthead (two guys who look like Marvel Comics’ Watcher.) And having outlived the age of music television, they’re now free to comment on the whole bloody corpus of Internet content.
Judge, who splits his time between Los Angeles and Austin, stepped away briefly from editing Beavis and Butthead episodes to talk to GQ about animation, making shows and movies about idiots, and how Do the Right Thing inspired King of the Hill.
Mike Judge: [laughs] That’s really nice to hear.
So where are you, physically, right now and what are you working on?
In L.A. for another week, then back to Austin and working on a few things in development. We’re doing another season of Common Side Effects so I’m working on a couple scripts for that.
You were raised in New Mexico and lived in Silicon Valley but have a place in Austin. What’s it been like to see the paradigmatic weird Texas city reshaped by transplants from Silicon Valley and problematic comedians?
I’m torn. I know it’s a gradual thing but it really did seem to get suddenly dramatically different around 2013. It’s a very different city and it’s kind of a bummer to see a lot of these old restaurants I used to go to gone, but there’s still a little bit of the old Austin left in there somewhere.
You are now about to launch the third season of the revived Beavis and Butthead. Have we devolved that far that you thought, Yeah, it’s time for these guys to come back?
Before the pandemic—2018, in fact—the band Portugal, the Man asked me to do a thing where Beavis and Butthead introduce them during their tour. I recorded it and thought, ‘Oh, I can still do the voices. It still sounds right.’ And it was fun to do. And when you have stuff in development you’re always trying to come up with characters, and I thought, ‘I got a couple of pretty good characters right here.’
Music is also a radically different place. People no longer watch MTV for hours on end the way Beavis and Butthead did—at least not for music videos.
Yes and once we realized they don’t have to watch music anymore and they can just be looking at all stuff on the internet, that puts them in front of the whole new world of weirdness. In the 2022 movie [Beavis and Butthead Do the Universe], we got the idea of having kind of a split universe where they can be old or smart, and that has been really fun to do. But in general, I never, ever thought I would still be doing these guys 30 years later.
They are still a cultural presence. Just the Saturday Night Live sketch alone…
That was really cool. I was so pleased to see what a great reaction that got. I had no idea that was coming and I found out later that it was something they wanted to do for a long time and none of the hosts wanted to do it until [Ryan] Gosling came along.
What is your reaction to the reception the new King of the Hill season received? Did you launch thinking, “OK, we nailed this?”
Absolutely not. It’s been completely overwhelming. You hope it goes okay and you’re trying to make it as good as you can. But when you’re in the middle, you start to second-guess everything and start to worry about this and that and that maybe maybe no one wants to see it anymore.
People absolutely wanted to see it.
Yeah! But it’s been really positive and has great ratings so I’ve been feeling real good lately. You go from being relieved that it wasn’t a disaster to being really pleased how well it’s doing. We spent a long time on it, and it’s a lot of choices to make and the biggest one was probably what Bobby’s going to be like when he’s older. We just kind of went with our instincts and it’s just nice to know that our instincts were correct.
How did you settle on chef for Bobby? The more one thinks about it, the better a fit it is.
When we hit on the idea that Bobby had inherited his dad’s work ethic, which is unusual for a guy his age, then it started to click. We talked about being a sushi chef as a kind of performing aspect to it. People thought he would go off to New York and become a comic, but a lot of the time, when you’re a kid, you have those dreams, but this is just a little bit more realistic.
