Mike Judge



Mike Judge is the creator of ''Beavis and Butt-head and one of the people behind Daria Morgendorffer.

He got started in 1991 when his short "Office Space" was picked up by Comedy Central following a Dallas animation festival. Then, in 1992 he developed "Frog Baseball", a short featuring the characters Beavis and Butt-head, which featured on Liquid Television and led to his big hit. After that, he created the Office Space movie, King of the Hill, and Idiocracy, as well as lesser successes like The Goode Family and a revived Beavis and Butt-head.

According to Judge in the Mike Judge Collection DVD's Taint of Greatness feature, MTV sent him a development note early in Beavis and Butt-head "[that] it'd be a good idea to have a female character who didn't necessarily like [Beavis and Butt-head] but kinda tolerated them". He agreed and credits David Felton for coming up with her look ("like Lynda Barry") and with the character, with producer John Andrews creating the original design. Judge got the name Daria from a girl in his youth, who was also nicknamed "Diarrhea" by her fellows.

In an interview with The AV Club, Judge said that he cut out of the Daria spinoff: "Next thing I knew, they were just doing it, and I wasn't crazy about some of the people they hired. I think they were trying to show that they could do something without me. A normal network would never do that kind of stuff, unless you were a real asshole to them. I feel like Beavis And Butt-Head helped a lot of these people's careers, then they do this series without even consulting me on it. But I heard the show is pretty good. I think Glenn Eichler was a good choice to write on it. I've honestly never seen more than two or three minutes of it."

During the revival of Beavis and Butt-head in 2011, Judge was asked by press, fans, and Quentin Tarantino if Daria would appear in the show. "I should do more Daria, I guess," he told New York Magazine in October 2011. Sadly the show was cancelled before she could appear, though she was referenced during a music video segment in "Drones" (where Beavis thinks Daria killed herself and has to be reminded "she just moved").