Mike Judge

Michael Craig Judge (born October 17, 1962) is an American actor, animator, writer, producer, director, and musician.

Michael Craig Judge was born on October 17, 1962, in Guayaquil, Ecuador.

He is the middle of three children born to Margaret Yvonne (née Blue), a librarian, and William James Judge, an archaeologist.

At the time of his birth, his father was working for a nonprofit organization in Guayaquil and other parts of Ecuador, promoting agricultural development.

Judge was raised from age three in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he spent a small portion of his life working on a chicken farm.

He attended St. Pius X High School and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in physics from the University of California, San Diego, (UCSD) in 1985.

After graduating from the University of California, San Diego, in 1985, he held several brief jobs in physics and mechanical engineering, but found himself growing bored with science.

In 1987, he moved to Silicon Valley to join Parallax Graphics, a startup video card company with about 40 employees based in Santa Clara, California.

Disliking the company's culture and his colleagues, Judge quit after less than three months, describing it as, "The people I met were like Stepford Wives. They were true believers in something, and I don't know what it was".

Shortly after quitting his job, he became a bass player with a touring blues band.

In 1989, after seeing animation cels on display in a movie theater, Judge purchased a Bolex 16 mm film camera and began creating his own animated shorts in his home in Richardson, Texas.

He was a part of Anson Funderburgh's band for two years, playing on their 1990 Black Top Records release Rack 'Em Up, while taking graduate math classes at the University of Texas at Dallas.

He was planning to earn a master's degree as "a back-up plan" to become a community college math teacher after relocating to the north Dallas area for his then-wife's new job.

In the early 1990s, he was playing blues bass with Doyle Bramhall.

In 1991, his short film Office Space (also known as the Milton series of shorts) was acquired by Comedy Central, following an animation festival in Dallas.

Shortly thereafter, he dropped out of school to focus on his career.

In 1992, he developed Frog Baseball, a short film featuring the characters Beavis and Butt-Head, which was to be featured on Liquid Television, a 1990s animation showcase that appeared on MTV.

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 and wrote and directed the majority of the episodes.

The show centers on two socially incompetent, heavy metal-loving teenage wannabe delinquents, Beavis and Butt-Head, who live in the fictional town of Highland, Texas.

The two have no adult supervision, are dim-witted, sex-obsessed, uneducated, barely literate, and lack any empathy or moral scruples, even regarding each other.

Over its run, Beavis and Butt-Head drew a notable amount of both positive and negative reaction from the public with its combination of lewd humor and implied criticism of society.

Judge himself is highly critical of the animation and quality of earlier episodes, in particular the first two – Blood Drive/Give Blood and Door to Door – which he described as "awful, I don't know why anybody liked it ... I was burying my head in the sand."

The series spawned the feature-length film Beavis and Butt-Head Do America and the spin-off show Daria.

He is the creator of the animated television series Beavis and Butt-Head (1993–1997, 2011, 2022–present), and the co-creator of the television series King of the Hill (1997–2010), The Goode Family (2009), Silicon Valley (2014–2019), and Mike Judge Presents: Tales from the Tour Bus (2017–2018).

In 1995, Judge and the former Simpsons writer Greg Daniels developed King of the Hill, which debuted on Fox in 1997 and quickly became popular with both critics and audiences.

Running for 13 seasons, it became one of the longest-running American animated series.

During the run of the show, Judge took time off to write and direct Office Space, Idiocracy and Extract.

As King of the Hill was coming to an end, Judge created his third show, ABC's The Goode Family, which received mixed reviews and was cancelled after 13 episodes.

After a four-year hiatus, he created his fourth show, the live-action Silicon Valley for HBO, which has received critical acclaim.

In early 1995, after the successful first run of Beavis and Butt-Head, Judge decided to create another animated series, King of the Hill.

He wrote and directed the films Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (1996), Office Space (1999), Idiocracy (2006), and Extract (2009), and co-wrote the screenplay to Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe (2022).

Judge was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

He graduated from the University of California, San Diego, where he studied physics.

After losing interest in a career in science, Judge focused on animation and short films.

His animated short Frog Baseball was developed into the successful MTV series Beavis and Butt-Head, and the spin-off series Daria (with which Judge had no involvement).

After two decades, the series aired its new season on October 27, 2011.

The premiere was a ratings hit, with an audience of 3.3 million total viewers.

On January 10, 2014, Judge announced that there is still a chance to pitch Beavis and Butt-Head to another network and that he wouldn't mind making more episodes.

In 2017, Judge's fourth animated series, the music-themed Tales from the Tour Bus, premiered on Cinemax, to acclaim.

Judge has won a Primetime Emmy Award and two Annie Awards for King of the Hill and two Critics' Choice Television Awards and Satellite Awards for Silicon Valley.