Mugge attended John F. Kennedy High School in Silver Spring during its progressive period of the mid-1960s where he was encouraged to write poetry, perform in rock bands, compose a musical comedy, and publish an underground newspaper and yearbook. During a two-year stint at Frostburg State University, he wrote short plays, practiced photography, and staged large scale multimedia events before transferring to the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) to study filmmaking. At UMBC, he designed his own academic major titled Film and Associated Art Media and received one of the first “Youthgrants in the Humanities” from the National Endowment for the Humanities to direct a long form documentary titled “Frostburg” which focused on the Appalachian mining town where he had lived previously. He then spent one year as a grad assistant and MFA candidate in Temple University's Documentary Filmmaking program but left without finishing in order to pursue his career. As an aspiring filmmaker, he was perhaps most influenced by a course in film theory given by the late Serbian-American filmmaker and educator Slavko Vorkapich at the AFI Theatre at the Kennedy Center. Other influences on his work (whether evident or not) included Ken Russell's passionate portraits of artists, dancers, and composers for the BBC, the surreal animation of Max and Dave Fleischer, the kaleidoscopic choreography of Busby Berkeley, the intimate documentaries of D.A. Pennebaker and Les Blank, the sprawling historical documentaries of Marcel Ophuls and Louis Malle, and the films of such international auteurs as Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller, Nicholas Ray, Yasujiro Ozu, Nicolas Roeg, Ernst Lubitsch, and Max Ophuls.