King of the Hill/Trivia

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• Actor Allusion: In "Arlen City Bomber", Bobby says that his dream is to eat a corn chip right off the production line. Lucky tells him "I'm gonna help you run down that dream." Lucky's portrayer had a song called "Runnin' Down A Dream".
• Author Existence Failure: Brittany Murphy - who voiced Luanne - died in December 2009 before the last four episodes were projected to air on Adult Swim. Any hope for a revival after those episodes is almost certainly gone.
  • Victor Aaron, the original voice of John Redcorn, died in a road accident and was replaced by Jonathan Joss in the second season.
• Executive Meddling: FOX executives demanded the writers drop or at least scale back the recurring plotlines for syndication reasons, which accounts in part for the Negative Continuity in later episodes. It's also claimed that in later seasons, network executives interfered to the extent that they were demanding rewrites while episodes were being animated.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The DVDs only go up to Season 6, though the prospect of a DVD release is unnecessary as the series is easily and legally obtainable through the iTunes store. Netflix used to air the entire series (including the four leftover episodes), and Adult Swim has been airing all of the episodes (including the missing four from FOX) since the show was in its final seasons.
  • The DVDs will be coming out again now that Fox has licensed the DVD rights to Olive Films, and will most likely include Seasons Seven to 13.
• Name's the Same: Before Donna from accounting was introduced, there was an overweight background character with the same name, who was fired for stealing office supplies.
• The Other Darrin: In John Redcorn's first speaking appearance (on the Season 1 episode "Order of the Straight Arrow"), he was played by Victor Aaron. When Aaron died in a car accident, Jonathan Joss was hired to take over as the voice actor of John Redcorn for the rest of the series.
  • M.F. Thatherton was played by Burt Reynolds in his first appearance. In all other appearances, he was voiced by Toby Huss (whom many Pete & Pete fans will recognize as the guy who played Artie, The Strongest Man in the World).
  • Hank's mom, Tilly Hill, was played by three actresses: First by Tammy Wynette for two episodes in Season 2. When Tammy died, she was replaced by Beth Grant during Season 3 (plus one previously unaired episode "The Honeymooners"). Finally, K Callan voiced Tilly in two Season 5 episodes and one Season 8 episode.
  • Roger 'Booda' Sack was played by Chris Rock in his first appearance, and was played by Phil LaMarr doing a Chris Rock impression (the same one he did on a couple of episodes of MADtv) in subsequent appearances.
  • Debbie Grund was voiced by an unknown actress during her one talking scene in Season 3 (possibly Ashley Gardner). In her only other speaking appearance (the two-parter where she vows to kill Buck Strickland after he broke up with her and ends up dead in a Dumpster), she was voiced by Reese Witherspoon.
  • Special circumstances are behind this one, but it's worth noting that for the first four seasons (and a few episodes in Season 5) Joseph Gribble was played by Brittany Murphy. When Joseph hit puberty on the episode "I Don't Want to Wait for Our Lives to be Over", he was voiced by Breckin Meyer.
• Playing Against Type: Janeane Garofolo plays a sexy exterminator who tries to act as a Romantic False Lead to Dale. He doesn't bite.
  • Danny Trejo as Enrique in the later seasons, with him playing the role of a relatively normal guy for once.
• Post Script Season: Seasons 12 and 13. The Season 11 finale is explicitly designed as a series finale, with the Lucky-Luanne wedding, cameo appearances by everyone from Cotton and John Redcorn to Hank's half-brother Junichiro and Chuck Mangione, and the ending with Hank and the gang drinking beer in the alley. Then Fox decided to renew the show for two more years. YMMV whether or not this benefited the show.
• Screwed by the Network: King of the Hill was a huge hit in its first few seasons, but Fox damaged the show's ratings by constantly shuffling its time slot. Even during its last few seasons, when it returned to its original 8:30 Sunday slot, King of the Hill was pointedly treated as the lesser show of Fox's "Animation Domination" block due to the continued popularity of The Simpsons and FOX banking everything on Seth MacFarlane's shows (Family Guy, American Dad!, and The Cleveland Show).
• Uncancelled: After spending its last few seasons being constantly victimized by sports preemptions and schedule changes, Season 11 was finally announced as being the last, with Luanne's wedding being the series finale. It was unexpectedly picked up for two additional seasons, however, when Fox decided to revamp its animation lineup in the Fall of 2007, but was later canceled for good at the end of Season 13, leaving 4 unaired episodes to debut in syndication.
• Vindicated by Cable: FX, during the show's original run, and Cartoon Network's Adult Swim have arguably treated King of the Hill much better than Fox ever did (in terms of putting it in a consistent time-slot where people would actually be able to watch the show), with the show finding new fans through syndication years after it ended. When Adult Swim briefly removed King of the Hill from its lineup in fall of 2013, they encountered enough viewer backlash to not only bring it back, but place it in a more prominent time-slot. As of 2014, it's now the first cartoon that airs when Cartoon Network stops broadcasting for the day and Adult Swim starts (8:00pm Eastern Standard Time).
• What Could Have Been: The Spanish Soap Opera, Monsignor Martinez, was actually planned to be a live action spin-off, but it got killed mid-production when the crew couldn't find a network that would accept a show about a Catholic priest assassin.
  • According to the DVD commentary for the pilot episode, the show had a lot of titles before King of the Hill was chosen. Some examples include "Dale Gribble and the Other Guy", "I'm Gonna Kick Your Ass!", "Citizen Hank", "Propane Man", "The Hank Hill Family Hour", and "Hank Hill and His Clan".
  • The first episode was originally going to be "Westie Side Story" (the one where Kahn and his family move into the neighborhood). However, for reasons unknown, it was replaced with the episode where a social worker accuses Hank of beating Bobby.
• Write Who You Know: Mike Judge based Boomhauer's voice on a Motor Mouth phone call he received complaining about Beavis and Butt-head (which the caller referred to as "Porky's Bunghole").