LOS ANGELES -- Anatomy of a plot: Mike Judge has an overblown concern about his testicles, a fixation he traces to a science project back in Albuquerque, N.M.

"For my high school science fair, I actually made an X-ray generator with an old TV tube and a Tesla coil," says the man behind Beavis and Butt-head, King of the Hill and the feature comedy Extract.

"And then I read that X-rays can make you sterile, and I immediately built this lead box and was scared. I was 15 and I started thinking, 'Man, did I just ruin my testicles, and I'll never have kids?'

"And then when I was first married I had this premonition that my testicles would get knocked off in a car wreck. And then I got into a pretty bad freeway wreck. And I remember thinking, 'Thank God, my testicles are still here! My back hurts and my neck hurts, but ...'"

Plot twist 2: "There was also a girl I knew peripherally who was very shady, and she had read about a construction accident in a nearby town and a guy who was going to get a big settlement. And she disappeared for a month and came back with this guy as her boyfriend."

Such was the inspiration for Extract, a boss'-eye-view of life in a flavour-extract factory, where a freak accident causes a foreman named Step (Clifton Collins Jr.) to lose a testicle. The injury is bad news for factory owner Joel (Jason Bateman), who is trying to sell to General Mills. Meanwhile, one of his temps, played by Mila Kunis, schemes to seduce Step and badger him into suing for millions.

But getting back to testicles ...

"I was always trying to figure out why getting hit in the nuts always gets a laugh," Judge says. "And when I was making (his previous feature) Idiocracy, I was lucky enough to meet with Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and I discussed it with him. Y'know, why would something so important be hanging in such a vulnerable place?

"It turns out there are things in evolution that run counter to what you'd think. Like a peacock with flashy feathers that make it harder to escape predators. But what happens is the female goes for that guy that has those flashy feathers and is still alive."

"So it's good for the species that testicles are hangin' there. The female is checkin' them out."

Diamond offered his genital wisdom for free. Seems his children were fans of Beavis and Butthead and Judge's previous workplace comedy, Office Space. Like his other post-Beavis and Butt-head attempts to conquer the big screen, Office Space was a box-office bomb.

But on DVD, it turned into a cult hit, selling more than 2.5 million copies.

"On Office Space, they didn't want that cast, or that music. They'd look at the dailies and didn't know what was going on. I fought hard, and it comes out and doesn't do well. So they're like, 'Yeah, he didn't know what he was doing.'

"And to have it end up making a lot of money, I don't get tired of hearing that. A guy at Fox told me it was like Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. It just stayed on the charts a long time."

Testicle-trauma jokes aside, Mike Judge has staked his turf in the realm of ordinary people -- from lumpening slackerdom of Beavis and Butt-head to the heartland Americana of King of the Hill to the cubicle world of Office Space. (Interestingly, this season's Goode Family, about a politically correct clan of tree-huggers, was a rare TV failure for Judge).

"I've got to say, a lot of (studio execs) tend to come from upper-class backgrounds and they tend to be out of touch with ordinary people.

"The stupid or the banal or the trivial ... just some story about that guy on the loading dock. There's something funny about putting a microscope on something like that."

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