Mike Judge has found inspiration in some pretty odd places. For example, Dale Gribble’s unhinged King of the Hill conspiracy theories were partly informed by real-life unhinged conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. And Judge got the idea for Dale’s buddy Boomhauer from an answering machine recording of a “deranged hillbilly guy” who was pissed off that Beavis and Butt-Head (or “Porky’s Butthole” as he called it) was “on too often” and didn’t “start right on the hour.”
What about Beavis and Butt-head? Well, Judge once told Howard Stern that the Beavis voice was inspired by a kid from his high school calculus class, who got all hot and bothered when their new teacher turned out to be a “former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader.”
But as Judge once told David Letterman, he also has a noisy neighbor to thank. “Something that I realized almost a year after I started doing Beavis and Butt-Head. I had a next-door neighbor at a studio apartment I was living at,” Judge explained during a 1994 appearance on The Late Show. “And you could hear everything through the walls.”
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“The guy next door to me was a little nuts,” the animator continued. “And if he was on this medication that, when he stopped taking it, he would get really happy. He’d get happy by not doing drugs. So he stopped taking it. And for, I guess it was about a week, he was just laughing, it seemed like 24 hours a day. He was watching TV the entire time, so he’d be going, ‘Huh-huh, Charlie the Tuna Man.’ I would hear it all night long.”
If that doesn’t sound familiar, we should note that Judge used the Butt-Head voice while doing the impression of his old neighbor.
He also recalled that he later saw the same guy “carefully removing the back windshield out of a really nice ‘78 Nova.” When Judge asked why he was doing that, the proto-Butt-Head responded, “Now it’s like a truck.”
So the next time you’re annoyed by a neighbor, remember that it could be the beginning of a multimillion dollar cartoon franchise.
