Mike Judge Details Pre-Lockdown Lunch That Led to Deal for ‘Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe’

Just after 7 p.m. inside Neuehouse Hollywood on Tuesday, Mike Judge took the microphone and started offering a series of thank you’s to the team that helped him bring knuckleheads Beavis and Butt-Head back to the screen in the pair’s first movie since 1996.

He took a brief detour after mentioning the first two names on his list — MTV Entertainment Group president and CEO Chris McCarthy and ViacomCBS chief operating officer of entertainment and youth group Keyes Hill-Edgar — to detail a key lunch meeting they had right before the pandemic struck that led to this installment, Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe.

“They were the guys who took the risk and funded this whole thing. I’ll never forget, we had lunch in March 2020, on Friday the 13th, literally the day before the lockdown happened,” Judge recalled. “I think Michael Rotenberg [Judge’s 3 Arts Entertainment manager] said, ‘They just want to know that you’re not crazy,’ and I don’t think I was. We sealed the deal literally the next day and the whole world, or most of it, and the country locked down. We proceeded to make this entire movie without ever being in a room with one another, only on Zoom, until tonight. We’re finding out how tall everyone is.”

The punchline landed well in a room filled with comedy and animation insiders, Judge superfans like Eric Andre, Luka Sabbat, Chris Kattan and Kate Flannery, and two members of the film’s voice cast, Nat Faxon and Brian Huskey. The judge then rolled through the rest of his gratitude session before the film blasted off for the first time in front of an audience.

Before his introduction, however, Judge spent some time walking the red carpet to talk to press for the first time about bringing Beavis and Butt-Head back for Paramount+. Created and voiced by the writer, producer and director, Beavis and Butt-Head originated in Judge’s 1992 short film Frog Baseball, which debuted on MTV’s animation showcase Liquid Television. MTV then ordered a full series and it ran for seven seasons from March 8, 1993, to Nov. 28, 1997, as it followed the title characters, best friends and metal heads decked out in AC/DC and Metallica t-shirts, on a series of adventures during which most things are cool or totally suck.

The teens became pop culture icons with their catchphrases adopted by legions of young adult fans. It was revived in 2011 with an eighth season that aired on MTV, in addition to spawning various related media, including the 1996 theatrical film Beavis and Butt-Head Do America. The first film opened at No. 1 in 1996 and went on to become a hit by grossing north of $60 million.

Unsurprisingly, Judge was approached for sequels and spin-offs and, reportedly at one point, was pitched by Paramount on a live-action version. Asked why it took so long, Judge told The Hollywood Reporter, “There were a lot of reasons. They did some stuff that violated agreements with me and things like that but [a sequel] almost happened a few times. We did the new episodes in 2011 and it almost came back several times. About every three years they wanted to do it again.”

He’s currently prepping a new Beavis and Butt-Head series and he seems happy that his creation continues to be in such high demand. “It’s really fun to do,” said Judge, who, in addition to writing, directing and producing, also voices the duo. “I hadn’t done it in so long. It’s not like I sit around and do the voices in my spare time or anything but the band Portugal. The Man asked me to do an intro thing for them at Coachella. We used a song or two of theirs for Silicon Valley and so I did it and thought it sounded like Beavis and Butt-Head.”

The experience reminded Judge how much he still liked voicing the characters. “Paramount wanted to do it so I thought why not,” he explained. “It has been a long time. There are people working on the [new] show that weren’t born when it first started.”

Without giving too much away, Judge teased that fans of the Beavis and Butt-Head universe will find some surprises in this new film. “There’s a [scene] where every version of you exists in an infinite universe and the smartest version of [Beavis and Butt-Head] comes into play and that was really fun to do, so was the middle-aged versions of them,” he explained.

But no matter where they go, how much they age or what trouble they get into, they remain the same at their core. “It’s still Beavis and Butt-Head and they’re pretty positive characters, generally speaking,” he noted. “You maybe don’t really think of that when you hear their names but they usually think everything’s pretty cool. Or, in one way or another, everything sucks.”