Mike Judge – The Ultimate Animator from Ecuador
Only few people will recognize the name ‘Mike Judge’ when they hear it. However, they will certainly recognize names like ‘Beavis and Butthead’ and ‘Spy Kids 3D’. That is because Mike Judge’s role with the entertainment industry has always tended to take him behind the camera rather than in front of it. He has served as an animator, a director, a producer, a crewmember, a composer and soundtrack maker and has even spent time as an actor.
Michael Craig Judge was born on 17 October 1962 in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Shortly after his birth his family moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico where he was raised and taught to speak fluent Spanish. As a boy he participated in the Boy Scouts and as a young adult he graduated from the University of California with a BSc in physics. In 1989, Judge married Francesca Morocco with whom he later had two children.
Despite his degree in physics and his many other accomplishments, Mike Judge continued to be a lover of comedy. In 1991 he created the popular ‘adult’ cartoon ‘Office Space’ which was later overshadowed by the success he enjoyed with the cartoon ‘Beavis and Butthead’ that he created for MTV in 1993. The offbeat show was an immediate hit and it continued to be a regular feature on MTV for four years. In 1997 he created the hit TV show ‘King of the Hill’ for Fox television and slowly started to bring the Beavis and Butthead era to an end.
More recent years have seen him acting as a writer, mainly working on scripts and plots for movies and episodes for his own cartoons. In the late 1900s he created the movie scripts for “Beavis and Butthead do America”, “Beavis and Butthead do Christmas”, “Saturday Night Live”, “Inbred Jed”, “Office Space” and “King of the Hill”.
The early 2000’s saw Judge engaging in more work as a somewhat unrecognized actor, playing minor roles in movies and TV series such as “Spy Kids 3-D”, “Serving Sara”, “Frasier” and “Austin Powers”. He has produced voice-overs for several of the cartoon characters in the movies he created as well as in the famous animated series, “The Simpsons”.
Judge is one of the most well recognized and famous Ecuadorians to have ever succeeded in Hollywood – albeit that many fans of his work would not even recognize him by name. Next time you hear about this creative animator, or watch one of his legendary cartoons, try remembering that Mike Judge was born in Ecuador.
