King of the Hill

In 1995, Mike Judge wrote a pilot episode for an animated series centered around Hank Hill, a common sense, all-American propane salesman in Arlen, Texas. Hank was loosely based on a neighbor character in Judge’s hit MTV series, Beavis and Butt-head . Fox Broadcasting Company brought in The Simpsons writer Greg Daniels to collaborate with Judge on the pilot, and the series debuted in January 1997, with Judge and Daniels as co-creators.

The show remains true to Judge’s original concept and depicts the suburban Hills and their neighbors on Rainey Lane. The patriarch of the Hill family is Hank, a salesman of propane and propane accessories with a narrow urethra and an obsession with his lawn and the Dallas Cowboys. Hank is married to Peggy, a substitute Spanish middle school teacher with an inflated sense of her own intelligence. She writes “musings” for the Arlen Spectator and is a champion Boggle player. Hank and Peggy’s only son is Bobby, an overweight, under-achieving eight-grader with the dream of becoming a prop comic. Many storylines deal with Hank’s concern for Bobby, and an early catch-phrase from the show is “the Boy Ain’t Right.” Despite not understanding Bobby, Hank clearly loves his son and struggles to be a better father than his own, WWII veteran Cotton, who “killed fifty men” and lost both his shins in the war. Also living with the Hills is Peggy’s niece Luanne, a slightly dim-witted beauty-school drop-out who is able to find her voice through a Christian puppet show.

Hank’s best friends are also his neighbors: Bill, Boomhauer, and Dale. The four were on the Arlen football team together in high school (with Dale as towel boy). Now adults and living on the same block, Bill Dauterive is an unhappily divorced barber for the United States Army and Boomhauer is an unintelligible ladies’ man (voiced by Judge). Dale Gribble is a conspiracy-theory plagued bug exterminator unable to recognize that his wife, weather reporter Nancy, is having an affair with Native American masseuse, John Redcorn. Dale’s son Joseph, who looks remarkably like Redcorn, is Bobby’s best friend.

The show maintains Judge’s signature simple animation style and sense of realism. Unique for an animation series, the show depicts the Hills’ every-day life, exploring themes ranging from parent-child relationships, to friendship and loyalty, to justice, and patriotism. Although Arlen is a fictional Texas town, the locale, characters, and culture are easily recognizable, thanks in part to annual research trips that the writers would make to Texas. The characters and storylines of King of the Hill clearly resonate with viewers. During the tenth season in 2005, the show was slated to be cancelled, but high ratings for the remainder of the season gave it a second life. Fox renewed it for seasons eleven and twelve, making it the second longest-running animated televisions series after The Simpsons .

The King of the Hill archives came to the Southwestern Writers Collection through the efforts of writer and Executive Producer, Jim Dauterive. Jim joined the writing staff of King of the Hill in its first season, and he began donating his own writing archives to the Collections in 1999. In addition to documenting his earlier career in advertising and his various screenwriting projects, much of his collection documents his role as writer on King of the Hill . In 2005, Jim was instrumental in arranging for over ten seasons of the show’s production materials to make its way to the Southwestern Writers Collection.

From the guide to the King of the Hill, Archives, 1995-2007, (Southwestern Writers Collection, Special Collections, Alkek Library, Texas State University-San Marcos)