Mike Judge’s Warning to America: The Story of “Beavis and Butt-Head”

00:00:10
Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. From 1993 to 1997, Mike Judge captured the spirit of American adolescents, epitomized by two cheap and crummy animated cartoons. Here’s Greg Hengler with the story of the highly popular television show Beavis and Butt-Head.

00:00:36
Speaker 2: Stupid and ugly have one advantage in life. Teachers expect nothing from them, so they can fly under the usual indoctrination that accompanies education.

00:00:47
Speaker 3: What’s this crap?

00:00:48
Speaker 2: Thus, the stupid and ugly, if they aren’t entirely stupid, have a greater chance of being original. They are allowed to speak the truth because no one cares what they say. Because they are stupid. They are free. Beavis and Butt-Head, two supremely stupid and excruciatingly ugly pubescent males who lived somewhere in the Southwest, were the biggest phenomenon on MTV since the heyday of Michael Jackson. Their laugh, low in breath. The variations of superseded Wayne and Garth’s not as the comic catchphrase. An album and a blockbuster movie were made, and their merchandising campaign swept across American malls.

00:01:39
Speaker 4: For, like, share. So, like, what, is that true that he used to be like, uh, married to that Bono?

00:01:47
Speaker 2: Dude, Sonny Bono? Is that that dude that’s like a cop in San Diego?

00:01:56
Speaker 5: No?

00:01:57
Speaker 2: No, it was a Marapom Springs.

00:02:00
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, yeah, well, kinda, yeah.

00:02:05
Speaker 2: Mike Judge is the creator of the television series Beavis and Butt-Head and co-creator of the television series King of the Hill. He also wrote and directed Office Space, the now cult film about IT workers. The premiered in 1999. Here’s Mike Judge.

00:02:23
Speaker 4: I’d been interested in animation since I was a kid. I took a cartoon class at the YMCA. At the time, I didn’t know what the signs of a junkie were, but now looking back, I’m pretty sure that my cartoon teacher was a junkie. Beavis and Butt-Head I had drawn in a sketchbook and I kind of had them lying around. And there was this sick and twisted festival that Spike and Mike were doing, and I thought, I don’t know if I’m going to have a career, but I may never have a chance like this again. To just do whatever I want, get us out there as I want. Sometime after I’d done the first two shorts, I thought, “Okay, what sho— I should animate something with these guys,” and I just went for a walk and came up with the whole idea for the short and the names and everything.

00:03:03
Speaker 6: I don’t know, in probably like two or three minutes.

00:03:06
Speaker 4: I guess I was thinking about these just out of control 14-year-olds.

00:03:10
Speaker 6: But now I’m growing up. That would be cool.

00:03:14
Speaker 2: Beavis and Butt-Head was tested in front of a focus group in 1992. Here’s executive producer Abby Terkuhle.

00:03:22
Speaker 5: We wanted to develop it as a series. We tested it. It tested through the roof. I didn’t even know what a focus group was.

00:03:30
Speaker 4: I remember Abby Terkuhle calling me and saying, “You know, we showed it to a focus group up in Chicago, and I’ve never seen a reaction like this, best reaction I’ve ever seen.” It was just funny to see because I’m hearing my voice going, you know, and then seeing these kids going, “Hood!”

00:03:46
Speaker 3: Continued. Would you like to see more? Yeah?

00:03:49
Speaker 5: In fact, one kid stayed after and said, “Can I buy? Can I buy this?”

00:03:54
Speaker 6: Out of the tape machine.

00:03:56
Speaker 7: Could you like to record the tape for— do you want to copy it?

00:03:59
Speaker 2: Okay, here’s Judy McGrath, former president of MTV Networks, turned member of Amazon’s board of directors.

00:04:07
Speaker 8: And I thought, “Okay, I’ve been watching focus groups for, you know, ten years. I’ve never heard anyone say, ‘Can I buy the tape?’”

00:04:14
Speaker 5: We tested it with women as well as separate groups, and I think the women were cooler.

00:04:19
Speaker 6: At first. Hated it. And.

00:04:23
Speaker 2: It was irritating and adulating to look at. I just thought it was awful.

00:04:28
Speaker 4: The first season, they were supposed to have 22 episodes on Mark Shape, and they had two, so we went on the air with two episodes. It was a show that was every day, and they were horrible. I mean, the first two episodes were awful. I don’t know why anybody liked it. We cobbled together an episode out of two of my shorts and a bunch of videos. It’s not just about writing, it’s about writing stupid.

00:04:52
Speaker 6: But I thought I felt it was a hard thing to do.

00:04:54
Speaker 9: Really. It’s like you have to go back to the place where thinking begins and stay there.

00:05:00
Speaker 10: Do you think that’s funny, Butt-Head?

00:05:02
Speaker 4: Remember after the first episode aired and I thought it was awful, and I was like to bury my head in the sand. And Abby called and said, “We got a one last night.” “What’s a one mean?”

00:05:15
Speaker 3: You know?

00:05:17
Speaker 4: They said, “Well, usually, you know, that timeslot is like a 0.6, 0.7.”

00:05:21
Speaker 6: We had a one.

00:05:23
Speaker 4: Oh, good. Then the next night it was 1.2. The next night it’s the same episode airing over and over again, and by Friday it was like 1.8.

00:05:34
Speaker 8: The first week it went on the air, probably the third night, we got phone calls from five or six movie studios saying, “You know, let’s go right into production and make a movie.” We heard from everybody. Retailers wanted to sell the clothes. Winger was going to reunite and go on the road. Warner Brothers wanted to make a live-action Wayne’s World type movie. You know, right away it was, “Can you give me a Beavis and Butt-Head?” So we literally put the brakes on everything for a while.

00:06:00
Speaker 4: First, I was thinking of just there’re these two guys who are just around each other all the time. They don’t have a lot of other friends or any other friends, and so there’s just these inside jokes that just keep on going.

00:06:12
Speaker 6: To the point where they’re just kind of laughing all the time.

00:06:14
Speaker 11: “Okay, Armstrong, here are mih faka, yeah, Butt-Kiss? What’s wrong with you two? We’ve been in school over seven months now, and every single day when I call Daniel Butt-Kiss his name, you guys have… Is it really still that funny? Doesn’t it ever get old? Are you gonna laugh for the rest of your lives every time someone says the name Butt-Kiss?”

00:06:46
Speaker 2: Principal’s office! Now here’s head writer producer for Beavis and Butt-Head, Christopher Brown.

00:06:53
Speaker 9: They were clearly self-destructive.

00:06:54
Speaker 12: You’ve had destructive impulses, right? Uh, no.

00:06:59
Speaker 9: But no matter how miserable their existence were. Let’s face it, they weren’t living a great life. They didn’t have a nice home, they didn’t have a lot of money, money, money, money. Girls didn’t respond to them, “Hey, baby!” Other kids made fun of them and beat them up, like Todd. But they always managed to enjoy themselves. I mean, their laughter came through everything. Even when Todd kicks there and they’re going, you know, “Oh, this sucks.”

00:07:34
Speaker 6: They follow it up with a laugh. “Todd’s cool, yeah.”

00:07:42
Speaker 4: They are trying to figure things out, and they sort of, in their own way, philosophize about things, which is what’s really great to write like that.

00:07:49
Speaker 3: I bet they put all the stuff that sucks on in the morning just to like get us to go to school.

00:07:54
Speaker 12: Yeah, I think it’s working.

00:07:58
Speaker 4: Usually I would start with thee and then do the drawing. This one, I started with a drawing and I didn’t know what they would sound like, and I just drawn on there. I started doing that laugh and I was kind of like going, like, “This is reminding me of something.” Didn’t think about it until probably two years into the show that there was a guy at my high school. He was really smart, stoned all the time, but he would just— you’d see him in the hallway, and I would always see him when the hallway was empty, and he’d just start, like, “It’s one of these guys that he started going, ‘Hey, Mike.’” And so when I was— when I would do the voice, I would just kind of do the… and I would get— I would be doing it sort of to get into character, to get the voice sounding right, and then I’d go, “Well, that kind of sounds funny that he’s just laughing all the time.”

00:08:44
Speaker 1: Anyway. And you’ve been listening to the story of Beavis and Butt-Head, with much of the storytelling coming from their creator, Mike Judge, and he was interested in animation as a kid. We learned, and he drawn these two characters in a sketchbook and the first two shorts. So, he came up with the names and ideas to those shorts when he was on a walk. Tested in front of focus groups. It tested through the roof. When we come back, more of the story of Beavis and Butt-Head here on Our American Stories. And we returned to Our American Stories and to Greg Hengler and the story of Beavis and Butt-Head and its creator, Mike Judge. Here’s Judge.

00:09:51
Speaker 6: The Beavis laughter was a guy who was…

00:09:55
Speaker 4: It’s actually calculus class, and it was a really smart guy.

00:09:58
Speaker 6: He’s now nuclear engineer.

00:10:01
Speaker 4: I hope he doesn’t figure out who he is that I’m talking about him. But we had a hot teacher, which was unheard of back then.

00:10:09
Speaker 6: She was a former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader.

00:10:11
Speaker 4: Anyway, he would get really excited, and he just, like, he was biting his lip all the time and just kind of going, like, like laughing at everything she said. So I started out with that laugh, and then I just kind of made his voice sound like the laugh, just like raspy. You know.

00:10:29
Speaker 11: “That’s right, everyone, if we all work together and respect one another’s space, we’ll get through this crisis with a newfound sense of community.”

00:10:38
Speaker 2: Street along there, Penny Waste.

00:10:40
Speaker 4: Mr. Van Dreesen, that was probably— that’s probably my favorite character other than Beavis, to do the voice for. When I started doing that voice, I wasn’t quite sure where I was getting it from, and then I remembered I used to be a musician and I played with Sam Myers. And there’s this guy from the Santa Barbara Blues Society there, and he was interviewing Sam. He just had this way of talking, he said. I remember him saying something like:

00:11:03
Speaker 12: “Sam, it must have been really wonderful for you, having grown up in the Deep South to be able to travel to Europe and experience some of their culture and share some of your culture as well.”

00:11:15
Speaker 4: I wanted to have this, this hippie teacher who just believes that teaching can solve any problem. That the only— the problem with teenager, it’s all education.

00:11:24
Speaker 6: So, it’s always…

00:11:24
Speaker 4: Funny for me to see Mr. Van Dreesen just try so hard and believe that they can be changed, and that not only do they not learn from his lessons, they usually learn the wrong lesson from what he’s saying.

00:11:37
Speaker 10: “Ooh, boy, what I wouldn’t give for five minutes alone with those little stards that took mym over.”

00:11:43
Speaker 6: Whoa, it’s Todd. I know, I know.

00:11:48
Speaker 4: Actually, I think Sam and Chris first suggested the idea of a guy who beats the crap out of him, but they think he’s really cool.

00:12:05
Speaker 6: To me, Todd reminds me of this.

00:12:09
Speaker 4: We had a family down at the end of the— of our block when I was a kid, and the dad was a truck driver, and a couple of the kids had gone to jail, and they were teenagers while we were 10 and 11, and the middle one would just terrorize us. He’d come by on his motorcycle, ride on our lawn, patch the lawn, just scare the shit out of us whenever he could.

00:13:19
Speaker 10: “I would like nothing more than to kill you both with my bare hands.”

00:13:24
Speaker 6: There was a band director in ninth grade.

00:13:27
Speaker 4: I’m pretty sure he was an alcoholic, and he would just— he smelled like liquor in the morning, and he was just always— there was this— he was kind of shaking, always angry, always wound up.

00:13:37
Speaker 6: There’s just this noise coming out of him. He’s, “Ooh, oh, what are you doing?”

00:13:43
Speaker 2: “Watch your— my mouth, you little sons.”

00:13:46
Speaker 6: Of Trey and Matt.

00:13:49
Speaker 4: The South Park guys, I remember them saying that Beavis and Butt-Head to them was like the blues, which was a really high compliment to me because it’s that kind of thing where it’s just, it’s the same thing over and over, but it’s good.

00:14:01
Speaker 2: Here’s South Park co-creator Trey Parker.

00:14:05
Speaker 13: I remember right before South Park went on the air, actually, Mike took us out to give us advice because he’s just that cool of a guy, and he was sitting there going, “Well, you know, don’t let people take advantage of you because they’re dumb.”

00:14:20
Speaker 2: Here’s writer Larry Doyle.

00:14:22
Speaker 14: Mike can make almost anything sound funny. That’s a very hard quality to do. I thought that Mike could make even the lamest line sound funny. He could say Butt-Head saying, “Make it snappy,” and there’s just something about the way he said it, and you know, it helped a little bit that Butt-Head is a little bit of a lisp.

00:14:40
Speaker 3: “You men want to date?” “Uh, yeah, we want two of them, and make it snappy.”

00:14:50
Speaker 6: “Get the kite, Beavis. Cool?”

00:14:55
Speaker 14: When I was doing this profile for Rolling Stone, I remember that Patrick’s Jean-Luc Picard was a giant fan of the— of the show, and he happily talked to me not only for the article, but I’d say for about half an hour afterwards about what episodes I had written and what his favorite episodes were.

00:15:15
Speaker 6: Oh no, we kind of allow ourselves to think that.

00:15:19
Speaker 2: Here again, it’s Trey Parker.

00:15:21
Speaker 13: The point of the show, you know, it was the great satirical look at sort of where a lot of teenagers in America were at the time. And it really was, I think, very scathing, very harsh, and almost a very open-your-eyes, people. And you know, now I know Mike enough to know that there was a lot more behind it, you know, and Mike is a very good guy and a very cool guy, and he actually, you know, was trying to say something, you know, that— that this— this is starting to be our youth, and if we’re not careful, this is going to be our youth.

00:15:55
Speaker 3: “Start feeling, you know, us. It doesn’t get any better than this.”

00:16:01
Speaker 13: Something that’s good. It doesn’t matter how great, it doesn’t matter how slick it is. You don’t need Disney, you don’t need these sweet graphics. If something’s funny and something’s good, you can have it look that crappy. And it inspired us in that way, just to go, “Let’s just do it ourselves.”

00:16:14
Speaker 6: We’ll do it a construction paper if we have to.

00:16:16
Speaker 13: It really got us into this conversation about satire and how there was no good satire out there, and we wanted to do the same thing.

00:16:22
Speaker 4: Mike, I always reference TV I grew up on, because that’s still— I guess it’s whatever age you are, you’re gonna, you know, the thing that really cements itself in your head is the first stuff you liked on television.

00:16:35
Speaker 6: And I loved The Beverly Hillbillies, Leave It to Beaver, Andy Griffith’s Show.

00:16:42
Speaker 14: There’s actually a line you could draw between Beavis and Butt-Head and Andy Griffith in terms of the style of the way the comedy worked. Even though the topics were very different, the character comedy was very much the same.

00:16:55
Speaker 5: “I are Master Claver, aren’t you supposed to be in school?” “Well?”

00:17:00
Speaker 1: “Gift though. But all I know is I’m plus to come in here and buy some cigarettes.”

00:17:04
Speaker 5: “Hey, you wouldn’t be buying these for Eddie, now, would you?”

00:17:07
Speaker 2: “Ke, how’d you know?”

00:17:10
Speaker 14: You know, if you look at it from a comedy math point of view, it’s really very old-fashioned kind of humor, even though at the time it was upsetting people with the topics.

00:17:19
Speaker 6: That it was.

00:17:21
Speaker 14: I mean, they were just dumb guys, and that’s a real— there’s a real long condition of dumb guy comedies.

00:17:30
Speaker 9: You guys aren’t drunk, you’re just stupid.

00:17:33
Speaker 2: Here’s former president of Viacom, Van Toffler.

00:17:36
Speaker 7: I think it’s really about being true to wha—