The Two Routes, 1987–1997

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The Master Tape

In November 1993, MTV’s own engineers went into the network’s tape library and cut references to fire out of episodes of Beavis and Butt-Head that had already finished airing months earlier — not the four episodes pulled from the schedule going forward, but the archival masters themselves, so that the copies the network held on file no longer matched what viewers had actually watched when the episodes first went out.¹ The occasion was a house fire that October in a mobile home in Ohio, in which a toddler died; the boy’s mother told reporters that her older son, who had set the fire, had been watching the show.¹ Whether the boy had ever seen the cartoon was disputed at the time and afterward — neighbors said the family had no cable — but the causation was beside the institutional point. MTV also pulled several episodes outright and moved the program from an early-evening hour to ten-thirty at night, describing the shift as a matter of aiming at an older audience.¹ A crude, wildly popular thing made by an untrained outsider drew a kind of scrutiny a literate parody rarely attracted, and the network absorbed the complaint not by defending the work but by rewriting its own archive of it.

The Forced Marriage of 90s Animation

The man who had made the thing had no precedent a career counselor could have drawn on. Mike Judge took a degree in physics from the University of California, San Diego, and spent the back half of the 1980s as an engineer — first writing software for a defense contractor, then for a company in Santa Clara that built video-graphics hardware.² He had been born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and raised in Albuquerque, in a family with no connection to the entertainment business and no comic pedigree of any kind. He grew bored with the engineering, and came to animation the way a hobbyist comes to a garage project, teaching himself the craft on borrowed equipment, cutting a few short cartoons with no employer waiting for them and no training in the form beyond what he could reverse-engineer from watching it.² One of those shorts, a two-minute piece called Frog Baseball, traveled the circuit of Spike and Mike’s Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation and then, in 1992, aired on Liquid Television, an MTV showcase built to run unsolicited animation from artists nobody had heard of.³ Its two characters — a pair of snickering teenagers who set a frog on a batting tee and swung — became a half-hour series that premiered on the same channel on March 8, 1993, and grew into the highest-rated program the network had ever aired.⁴

A physics graduate who had written flight software and rendering code reached a national cable hit without a day of training in comedy, without an agent, without a single prior credit, on the strength of a homemade cartoon submitted into a slot that existed to receive homemade cartoons. Nothing about the path was repeatable, and nothing about it was disqualifying either. The medium at that moment had a way in that asked only for the work and nothing about where the person who made it had gone to school.

The Credential

The other route into the same medium ran through a college humor magazine. A cluster of the decade’s most visible television comedy writers had come out of the Harvard Lampoon — George Meyer, Al Jean, Mike Reiss, Jon Vitti, Conan O’Brien, and others who moved from Cambridge into network writers’ rooms and, in particular, onto the early staff of The Simpsons, carrying with them a sensibility formed on the printed page.⁶ Their common training was writing, not drawing: the parody, the referential joke, the paragraph reworked until it held up on a twentieth reading. Their comedy was made collectively, at a table where a script was revised line by line — a rewrite room in which Meyer, whom the critic A. O. Scott called the “guru” of that room, worked as its most valued reviser.⁷ The industry that hired them recognized the pedigree on contact, because a magazine masthead and a comedy writers’ room shared a vocabulary, a stock of references, and often enough an alumni network that ran back to the same handful of undergraduate institutions.

Two doors, then, opened onto the same medium at the same moment, and the people coming through them had almost nothing in common. One route certified its arrivals in advance: a humor magazine, a degree, a body of published parody a hiring producer could read before making an offer. The other certified nothing and asked for a finished cartoon. The window that ran through the first half of the 1990s — the stretch in which creator-driven animation on television could be both ambitious and commercially alive — was staffed from both routes at once, by people the credentialed side of the business could place instantly and by people it could not place at all.

Drawing First

John Kricfalusi came in through the second door, though by a different path than Judge. Born in 1955, raised partly in Europe before his family returned to Canada, he was largely self-taught, having spent barely a year at an Ontario animation college and attended little of it, learning instead by copying comic strips as a boy and studying the cartoon-studio methods of the 1940s — Bob Clampett above all.⁸ His apprenticeship was the low end of the trade: Saturday-morning production through the 1980s, a revival of The Jetsons, a stint on Fat Albert, the assembly-line cartoons a young animator took to pay rent while learning the craft on someone else’s dime.⁸ He reached prime notice only in 1991, with The Ren & Stimpy Show for Nickelodeon; his contract there ended the following year, in a break the network framed as a matter of missed deadlines and standards disputes.⁹ The show outlasted him — its visual style shaped a generation of animators who came up watching it — but the voice that had made it was gone once his contract was.

His route was the older one, and it made the contrast with the credentialed side sharper rather than softer. The Lampoon writers had trained on the sentence; Kricfalusi had trained on the drawing — on the physical craft of making a figure move, learned from a generation that had done it in the studios before television existed. Bob Clampett, his chief model, had directed at Warner Bros. in the 1930s and 1940s, where the house comedy ran on extremes of squash and stretch, a face distorting past anatomy for a held beat and snapping back. He wrote by drawing. His comedy lived in the elasticity of a face and the timing of a pose rather than in a line of dialogue a fact-checker could quote, and it descended straight from that studio tradition, which had built its own gags the same way half a century earlier. The skill was real and hard-won and almost entirely illegible to an industry that measured a comedy writer by a script. A drawing reached a room with no name attached; a script reached it with one. The hand that drew had come up through a trade the credentialed side of the business had never learned to count as authorship at all.

The Door

What made both outsiders possible was a change in the shape of the entrance, not in the taste of the people guarding it. Network television and the magazines had long hired through pipelines that ran to specific schools and specific prior jobs; a fresh name arrived vouched for or did not arrive. Cable, still assembling itself in the early 1990s and desperate for cheap programming that felt unlike the networks’, built entry points those older institutions had never needed. Liquid Television took unsolicited shorts. Nickelodeon and, from 1992, Cartoon Network needed volume and were willing to gamble a slot on a voice with no track record, because a cable channel reaching a fraction of the country could justify a show’s budget on numbers a broadcast network would have called a failure. The open submission, the low bar to a first airing, the willingness to run a two-minute cartoon by a stranger — these were features of a medium building its audience from nothing, and they let a physicist and a self-taught draftsman reach the air without first passing through a room that would have asked them where they had trained. The door did not stay open. It stayed open only while cable was still assembling its audience out of nothing, which was for about as long as the window itself lasted.

The Graft

The two routes met, and merged, on a single show. Fox, uncertain whether Judge’s idea for an animated comedy set in small-town Texas and played mostly straight could work at all, paired him with a writer from the other route: Greg Daniels, who had gone to Phillips Exeter and then to Harvard, written for the Lampoon alongside O’Brien, and joined The Simpsons in its fifth season.¹⁰ Daniels rewrote the pilot script and built out characters Judge’s first draft had not carried — among them the niece Luanne and the hard, one-legged father, Cotton — and shared the created-by credit when King of the Hill premiered in January 1997.¹¹ The outsider had the world and the voice; the network trusted the show to air only once it had grafted a credentialed writer onto the concept to make it legible to itself.

The graft held. King of the Hill ran for thirteen seasons, the most durable and the most critically respectable thing Judge made in the period, and the one built by fusing the two routes rather than choosing between them.¹¹ The pattern underneath the credit line was steadier than the credit line showed. The referential, writing-first sensibility drew the prestige — the reviews that treated animation as authorship, the profiles, the growing sense that a cartoon could be read as literature. Judge’s purest outsider work drew the opposite: a large audience and a running current of adult alarm, the scrutiny reserved for a thing that succeeds without the credentials its success was supposed to require. The culture paid both routes across the decade. It did not rank them the same, and the show that lasted longest was the one where an outsider’s world had been run through a credentialed writer’s hands before a network put it on the air.

Two Routes into the Window

Figure	Training	Way in	Signature work
George Meyer, Al Jean, Mike Reiss	Harvard Lampoon, writing	Alumni network into network writers’ rooms	The Simpsons
Greg Daniels	Phillips Exeter, Harvard, Lampoon	Simpsons staff, then network development	King of the Hill (co-creator)
John Kricfalusi	Self-taught; animation trade ladder	Saturday-morning production, then Nickelodeon	The Ren & Stimpy Show
Mike Judge	Physics degree; engineering	Unsolicited short on a cable showcase	Beavis and Butt-Head, King of the Hill

Thesis

Seen from a distance, the window looked like a single movement — a few years in which television animation turned ambitious and funny and worth an adult’s attention all at once, as though one kind of person had walked in and changed the medium. It was two kinds of person, arriving by routes that shared no map. One came certified by a college and a humor magazine, fluent in the parody and the printed joke, and the business knew what it was looking at the moment the résumé crossed the desk. The other taught himself to draw, or taught himself to animate after a decade spent doing something else, and got in because a slot existed that would take a finished cartoon from a stranger and put it on the air. They wanted the same thing, and for a few years they got it in the same place, and the work that lasted longest turned out to be the show where the two routes were made to run together instead of apart. What the medium had in those years, that the older and prouder crafts around it did not, was a door that opened on the strength of the thing made rather than the standing of the person who made it — and for as long as it stood open, both kinds of person walked through.

At the Magazine

A profile of the college-humor-magazine writers who had colonized network animation would have found a home without much argument, and The Feature Well would have carried it in the March 1997 issue, timed to the animated family comedy that had premiered out of Texas that January. The subject would have read to the floor as a version of itself — the same schools, the same references, a masthead of humor-sheet alumni the editors could vouch for over lunch without a single call to check them. The piece would have made the credential its through-line: a parody sharpened at an undergraduate table, carried whole into a network room where a script got revised sentence by sentence.

A companion piece, on the physics graduate who had taught himself to animate and reached a cable audience with no prior credit at all, would have been raised at a meeting of its own, four years earlier, and set down unassigned. No one who raised it would have had a way to him — no shared school, no agent, no acquaintance in common who could place the call — and the checking desk would have had nothing against which to verify a fact he gave them. The piece would have died there, not on its merits but on the want of an introduction, and it would have gone uncovered for the same reason it had reached the room unassigned: nobody on the floor would have known anyone who knew him.