By Dorothy Parvaz
Arizona Daily Wildcat
January 16, 1997

Judge This

Unlike his spastic characters, Judge has a relaxed way about him, and doesn't seem to mind answering the same questions over and over again at the first round of press junkets promoting his movie. Once in while, though, when he laughs or says "uh," you catch a brief glimpse of Butt-head.

You know Beavis. You know Butt-head. You probably knew two guys just like them in junior high. They're probably still there. Judge refers to the two as "an embarrassment to the culture," which is what their fans seem to love most about them. You see, you're not meant to laugh at the inane jokes the moronic duo toss back and forth. The key to understanding the humor behind the show is to laugh at the fact that Beavis and Butt-head find things like butt-holes endlessly entertaining.

You either love 'em or you hate 'em.

The plot to "Beavis and Butt-head Do America" is simple. Butt-head's television is stolen, and since the two do nothing but sit on Butt-head's couch and watch music videos, they are forced to get up from the couch and leave Butt-head's house in search of a new television. By the end of the movie they're in the White House with a test-tube containing a deadly virus tucked into Beavis' underwear. Go figure.

Judge grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and attended a Catholic school, and his brush with Catholicism influences his work: He puts Beavis and Butt-head on a tour bus filled with Catholic nuns. The usual in-poor-taste-and-in-your-face madcap antics ensue, but at a price to the two brats: they are struck by lightening. Yup, Judge goes after church and state in this one. There is a little something to offend everyone in the family. But Judge shrugs off the controversy his work brings on.

"To me it's not about pushing an envelope, it's about trying to make it funny and sometimes there' s things that are really funny that also happen to be a little offensive," he said, adding that his main goal is "to try to get laughs in ways that people haven't laughed before."

Judge found writing a script for the full-length movie a bit of a challenge, especially with two characters like Beavis and Butt-head whose singular goal in life is to "score."

"It's very different. Beavis and Butt-head, they're not afraid for their lives, they're dumb. Plot points just kind of happen around them," he explained. Due to the time element, Judge actually had to draw a Bob Dole and Ross Perot ending to the movie (since the Beavis and Butt-head end up in the White House), just in case the election went another way.

Although he's a father of two and very much rooted in the adult world, Judge has a way of keeping in touch with that crusty adolescent humor that most of us can identify with, if only painfully so. Remembering the awkwardness of those times is what inspires Judge. That, and an awful lot of coffee and Mountain Dew.

"I remember being 14, 13, because it was the worst time in my life. It's fresh in my memory," he said.

"But you know what's kind of funny is that I was talking to this old college roommate of mine, and he was saying that he was reading in all these interviews (with Judge) that I was nothing like my characters and he was like 'man, you used to be just like Butt-head," and well, I was a physics student, and you get all burned-out. Most kids go through a phase when they become obsessed with butts, and mine hit right around the end of my sophomore year in college," he admitted.

Beavis' alter-ego, Cornholio, is a strong presence in the movie, and is by far the weirdest of Judge's characters. The idea for Cornholio came to Judge just before he fell asleep one night.

"I was lying in bed one night...and it just hit me like a ton of bricks, 'boy, Beavis should pull his T-shirt over his head and start babbling.' But then I was also thinking, what would happen to Beavis if Butt-head was gone for a while? Like, without Butt-head to reel him in. Would he just go off the deep end?"

To remain true to his imagination, Judge sticks to some advice a friend once gave him.

"He told me to go to a place in your mind where the thoughts begin and then just stay there. Don't let them evolve. It's stripping away the part of your brain that thinks twice," he said.

Judge stays away from the corporate end of things at MTV. Sure, they occasionally veto a story idea or two, like one where Beavis and Butt-head see an ad for sponsoring a third-world child for 25 cents a week and think that it means that they could purchase the child for that amount.

"They pretty much gave a flat-out 'no' to that one," he chuckled. But then again, Judge is the first one to tell you that he isn't any good at pitching story ideas.

"Whenever I go to pitch an idea, it just dies. It's like 'um, yeah, so then Beavis pulls his T-shirt over his head and says "tee-pee for my bung-hole."'" Judge laughed.

The future of "Beavis and Butt-head" on MTV is uncertain. With almost 200 episodes under his belt and "King of the Hill," a new weekly animated show on the Fox network this season, Judge seems poised to leave his two malevolent imps behind.

"There's one more season on my contract, and if the movie does well, I don't know what's going to happen with the show. It's been a pretty long run, I can't see it being on longer than 'Gun Smoke,'"he quipped.

Who knows, Beavis and Butt-head may finally "score" in the final episode.