Seeing Intelligent Signs of Life Beyond ‘Beavis’

Sometimes, gold mines aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

Mike Judge will tell you that. He’s made a mint, not to mention an entire career, out of two 14-year-old cartoon idiots named Beavis and Butt-head. But even as this animator meets his greatest success--breaking box-office records and getting unexpectedly good reviews for his December feature film debut “Beavis and Butt-head Do America”--he’s eager to leave the two controversial Texas twits behind for a while.

“I don’t know what else is left for Beavis and Butt-head,” Judge says with a tired Texas drawl across a long-distance phone line. “I need a long break from it, to tell you the truth.”

Not that he’s sitting around idly. Fox has ordered 13 prime-time episodes of his new animated half-hour comedy “King of the Hill,” which premiered Jan. 12 after “The Simpsons.”

“King of the Hill” also centers on a family--this one an everyday brood living on the fringes of some Texas urban center, where they try to maintain the good ol’ life of Little League, barbecues and Willie Nelson music amid modern society’s increasing sophistication. The Hills aren’t hicks, but they’re not movin’ on up either. And they’re not dumb.

“It’s nice to have characters that actually can comment on something, that actually can have motivations and figure things out,” says Judge, after five seasons of “B&B;” on MTV animating “two 14-year-old males trapped in a juvenile, vulgar state of mind. There’s just a lot of things you can’t do, just ‘cause they’re Beavis and Butt-head.”

If anything, “King of the Hill” looks like a tonic for those folks who either couldn’t cotton to the teen pair’s immature meanderings or who were actively offended by their disdain for adult propriety.

The Fox show centers on a hard-working heartland family man named Hank Hill (“I provide the people of this community with propane and propane accessories”) who liked the world just fine the way it used to be. Hank gripes about such societal changes as automotive “gender confusion” where “this truck don’t know if it’s a truck or a car, it’s got so many fancy add-ons,” and he just gets more worked up than ever when a social worker warns him about his “anger mind-set.”

“Hank is a kinda common-sense conservative character,” says Judge, 34. “He’s nostalgic for simpler times in America, and he reacts to the irritating aspects of life in America in the ‘90s, and it makes him wanna kick somebody’s [behind].”

“Not to get too philosophical,” adds Greg Daniels, the show’s co-creator and a veteran “Simpsons” writer, “but I think a lot of things are happening in America with the difference between the haves and the have-nots growing greater. There’s the sense that I think people on the coasts are spinning off into their own elite worlds and leaving a lot of people behind. I think there may be some resonance to Hank’s point of view in the country.”

The characters are distinct--from Hank’s bluster (Judge does the voice, as he does both Beavis’ and Butt-head’s) to the levelheaded smarts of his wife, Peggy (voiced by Kathy Najimy).

If Hank Hill seems a particularly sharp personality, maybe it’s because, “I guess I identify with him a bit,” Judge admits, especially “in the things we’ve done in the series where he gets kinda irritated with everyday, annoying things. I’ve always wanted to do something with that.”

* “King of the Hill” airs Sundays at 8:30 p.m. on Fox (Channel 11).