Early life and education

Michael Craig Judge is the second of three children born to archaeologist Jim Judge and librarian Margaret Blue. He was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, where his father worked for a nonprofit organization promoting agricultural development. Judge was raised from age 7 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Judge attended St. Pius X High School before graduating with a Bachelor of Science in physics in 1986 from the University of California, San Diego.

Career

After graduating in 1986 from UCSD with a bachelor of science in physics, Judge's first job was as a programmer for the F-18 fighter at Support Systems Associates, Inc.

In 1987 he moved to Silicon Valley to join Parallax Graphics, a startup video card company with about 40 employees based in Santa Clara. Disliking the company's culture and his colleagues ("The people I met were like Stepford Wives. They were true believers in something, and I don't know what it was"), Judge quit after less than three months and became a bass player with a touring blues band.

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.

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 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.

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

In 1992, he developed Frog Baseball, a short film featuring the characters Beavis and Butt-head, 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. Beavis and Butt-head visited Wilson Middle School and attended Highland High School in their series, which are the names of schools in Albuquerque, Judge's hometown. The series ran from 1993 to 1997 and 2011, and also spawned the feature-length film Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (1996).

In 1997, Judge created King of the Hill for the Fox Network. Many of the show's characters were based on people he had known while living in Texas. Judge voiced characters Hank Hill and Boomhauer. The show centers on the Hills, a middle-class Methodist family in the small suburban town of Arlen, Texas. It attempts to retain a naturalistic approach, seeking humor in the conventional and mundane aspects of everyday life while dealing with issues comically. The series ran from January 12, 1997 to May 6, 2010 with a total of 259 episodes aired. The show is the fourth longest-running prime time animated series behind Family Guy,The Simpsons and South Park.

In 1999, Judge had a voice cameo in South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, the feature-length film adaptation of the popular Comedy Central series; he voiced Kenny McCormick when he was unhooded towards the end of the film. That same year, he wrote and directed the live-action comedy film Office Space, which was based in part on the Milton series of cartoons he had created for NBC's Saturday Night Live. In the film, he made a cameo appearance as Stan (complete with hairpiece and fake mustache), the manager of Chotchkie's, a fictionalized parody of chain restaurants like Chili's, Applebee's and TGI Friday's. As of mid-2006, Office Space had sold nearly six million home-video copies.

Since fall 2003, Judge and fellow animator Don Hertzfeldt have run an animation festival, "The Animation Show". "The Animation Show" tours the country every year, screening animated shorts.

In 2005, Mike Judge was presented with the Austin Film Festival's Outstanding Television Writer Award by Johnny Hardwick.

Judge's film Idiocracy (2006), a dystopian comedy starring Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph, was given a limited release theatrically by 20th Century Fox in September 2006, two years after production. The film was released without a trailer or substantial marketing campaign. In the U.S., the film was released to DVD in January 2007 and later aired on premium-television, multiplex channels: Cinemax in September 2007 and HBO in January 2008. Since then, it has gained a cult following.

He has made cameo appearances in numerous films, including the comedy Jackass Number Two (2006), in which he can be seen during the closing credits. An extended version can be seen in Jackass 2.5 (2007) which was a direct-to-video release. Judge also created a video clip of Beavis and Butt-Head ripping into Steve-O for his video Poke the Puss, where the two try imagining if they would like the video better if they were black. The clip aired as a part of Jackassworld.com: 24-Hour Takeover, a February 23, 2008 television special on MTV to coincide with the official launch of jackassworld.com. The characters appeared again in the third sequel to Jackass: Number Two, titled Jackass 3D at the beginning of the film, telling viewers to put on their 3D glasses for the film.

Judge's comedy film Extract, in which he makes an uncredited appearance as Jim, a union organizer, was released on September 4, 2009.

His newest animated series, The Goode Family, debuted on ABC and was cancelled after one season. It was confirmed on The Goode Family Facebook page that Comedy Central had picked up the reruns of the series, and was to be evaluated for a chance of being renewed for a second season. Comedy Central first aired the series on January 4, 2010. However, the series was pulled off of the schedule shortly thereafter. It was officially confirmed by the production team on The Goode Family Facebook page that the show would not continue on Comedy Central. It was later announced that Judge had begun outlining new episodes of Beavis and Butt-Head for MTV's revival of the show.

In 2012, Judge directed the music video (animation by Titmouse) for country music group Zac Brown Band's "The Wind".

Judge also created Silicon Valley with King of the Hill executive producers John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky. The HBO comedy is a single-camera live-action sitcom set in Northern California. One of its main themes is the idea that "the people most qualified to succeed are the least capable of handling success". The first season of the Silicon Valley is 8 episodes long, and has received critical and public acclaim. (Silicon Valley would be renewed for a second season on April 21, 2014, and a third HBO season begin airing in April 2016.)

In 2013, Judge collaborated with Seth MacFarlane on a mashup episode of Family Guy. In this episode, complete with a Hill-themed opening, Judge reprises his role as Hank Hill. Earlier in 2010 and 2012, Judge played cameos as Hill on two episodes of MacFarlane's The Cleveland Show.

Political views

Despite his King of the Hill protagonist Hank Hill being identifiable as a conservative and his The Goode Family being essentially a satire of many liberal precepts, Judge avoids discussing his political leanings. The Goode Family has been described as a conservative show.

In reviewing Idiocracy, Salon stated, "Judge's gimlet eye is so ruthless that at times his politics seem to border on South Park libertarianism." A writer for the libertarian magazine Reason seems to agree, comparing King of the Hill to the anti-authoritarian point of view of South Park and The Simpsons, though he calls the show more populist, noting the disdain King of the Hill seems to have for bureaucrats, professionals, and big-box chains.

Still, Judge denies having political messages in his shows, saying in an IGN interview about King of the Hill:

I try to not let the show get too political. To me, it's more social than political I guess you'd say, because that's funnier. I don't really like political reference humor that much. Although I liked the episode "Hank's Bully" where Hank's talking to the mailman and he says, 'Why would anyone want to lick a stamp that has Bill Clinton on it?' To me that's just like more of a character thing about Hank than it is a political joke or anything. I don't want to do a bunch of stuff about the war, particularly.

In 2013, Judge told Alex Jones that he is against gun control because he feels it is ineffective, but would be "all for it" if he learned otherwise.

Filmography

Awards and nominations

[ Source: Wikipedia ]