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King of the Hill
1997 · TV series · 22 min episodes · 15 seasons
Created by Greg Daniels, Mike Judge
Set in Texas, this animated series follows the life of propane salesman Hank Hill, who lives with his overly confident substitute Spanish teacher wife Peggy, wannabe comedian son Bobby, and naive niece Luanne. Hank has conservative views about God, family, and country, but his values and ethics are often challenged by the situations he, his family, and his beer-drinking neighbors/buddies find themselves in.
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61 comments on Hacker News
Most broadcast TV shows, with the commercials removed, are about 21-22 minutes long. Those are usually my go-to for lunch. I tend to re-watch series as well, so I don’t have to pay too close attention.
I’m currently re-watching Schitt’s Creek, but others I’ve enjoyed are Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Office, Parks and Recreation, 30 Rock, King of the Hill, The League, Scrubs, Workaholics.
You clearly have not seen the King of the Hill episode where Hank tries to tackle his anger
The guy who created SV actually WAS a software dev in SV back in the late 80s though (albeit briefly). And obviously had a career of fairly subversive, out there humor (Beavis and Butthead, Office Space, King of The Hill, Idiocracy).
BBT was created by someone who just did a bunch of other sitcoms.
I couldn't stand BBT either, but I knew by default that Silicon Valley was going to be good.
I wondered about a situation similar to this for the King of the Hill reboot. Seemingly almost every episode contains exuberant praise for Saudi Arabia. Hank would mention how it felt more America than Texas, and how much he loved Saudi Arabia over and over. I haven't seen any public information about Saudi funding being involved, so maybe this is all baseless.
"Any portrayal of a husband" on TV?
Comedies often have some mockery built in, and comedies aimed at kids in particular like to take shots at authority, but there are a lot of examples I can think of in just the general-TV-millenial-vibe-y things I've watched over the past couple of decades. More than the "bumbling dad" type, I'd say, from things I've seen in the zeitgeist (I guess one recent super typical example is Rick and Morty, though everyone sucks there):
* Arrested Development: Michael is the most competent of the bunch. His father was also quite competent, if an asshole and eventual criminal. But, you know, that put the "sit" in sitcom...
* Luke from Gilmore Girls is pretty consistently more sane than Lorelai, turns out to be a good dad too IIRC; other fathers include a loser and a number of very successful businessmen, teachers, etc.
* King of the Hill: doing his best, often the most sane of the bunch
* Bob's Burgers: haven't watched a ton of this but from what I've seen Bob is a goofball but respectable and wholesome, kinda a Hank Hill. Not a lazy Homer
* Parks and Rec: Ben Wyatt is a pretty positive character
* Brooklyn 99: Terry is practically a superman of competence and seems to hold is own with his wife and kids. Holt is a supremely competent husband. Boyle is a goofball generally and in dating, but that does not really extend to his eventual marriage and child, where he seems to be doing quite well.
* Schitt's Creek: Johnny is the competent center of the family surrounded by comically exaggerated crazy wife + kids
Dramas seem even further away. Where do Breaking Bad or the Sopranos land?
There are consumer grade systems that will safely electrolyze.[0] Though I do love a good King of the Hill episode every once in a while.
[0] https://www.forceofnatureclean.com/
I'm reminded of the King of the Hill episode where Peggy publishes advice in her newspaper column telling her readers to mix ammonia and bleach for better cleaning, not realizing it creates toxic chloramine gas.
> The staff didn't know what to do and closed the store early.
This was literally a bit in the Y2K episode of King of the Hill. Hank goes to buy a new "Y2K compliant" computer. The cashier couldn't ring him up and freaks out.
This was the same problem low-flow had in the 90s or early 2000s (so common it even made a full episode of King of the Hill), they didn't redesign the bowls very well to handle it.
I am amazed they didn't seem to talk to any 3D animators before writing this. Because this is just plain wrong:
> The hand-drawn images are usually faithful representations of the world, but only in a qualitative sense, since it is difficult for humans to draw multiple perspectives of an object or scene 3D consistently. Nevertheless, people can easily perceive 3D scenes from inconsistent inputs!
It is difficult for human artists to maintain perfect geometrical consistency. But that is NOT why 2D animation of 3D scenes is geometrically inconsistent! The reason is that artists stylize 3D scenes to emphasize things for specific artistic reasons. This is especially true for something surreal like SpongeBob. But even King of the Hill has stylized "living room perspectives," "kitchen perspectives," etc. The artists are trying to make things look good, not realistic. And they aren't trying to make humans reconstruct a perfect 3D image - they are trying to evoke our 3D imaginations. It's a very different thing.
Pixar and other high-quality 3D animation studios intentionally distort the real geometry of their scenes for cinematic effect: a small child viewed from an adult's perspective might be rendered with a freakishly long neck and stubby little torso, because the animators are intentionally exaggerating visual foreshortening to emphasize the emotional effect of a wee little child. A realistic perspective would be simply boring. These techniques are all over the place in Pixar movies - it's why their films look so good compared to cheaper studios, who really are just moving a virtual camera around a Euclidean 3D space.
I don't want to comment on the technical details. But it really seems like the authors missed the artistic mark.
The newer ADHD meds are not stimulants and are not addictive.
Maybe ADHD has "boomed" in """popularity""" because a disorder that used to be diagnosed as hyperactivity and a deficit of attention actually turned out to be a quantifiable problem with executive function which exists in a known part of the brain, can be quantifiably treated with medication and therapy, and if untreated results in very confusing problems with emotions and motivation for as long as you live.
It's not as if ADHD doesn't exist. I'm speaking off of what was apparently state of the art 10 years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSfCdBBqNXY
I'm hoping today, in a matter of hours, to get prescribed one of these new non-stim drugs, because the stuff described in that video very much matches my experience.
Maybe thinking that ADHD is made up has boomed in popularity because of the South Park and King of the Hill episodes that downplay it. Imagine learning medicine from cartoons.
That’s virtually every sitcom and children’s cartoon, the father is a bumbling idiot. Talk about “toxic masculinity” …
On the other had, I wonder if that is why I gravitated towards King of the Hill in my early years. Generally a positive male role model, competent, trying to do the right thing by his family and community.
Great advice.
The firm I was referring to above was sold to a private equity firm and they lost all their good, longstanding talent in the process, myself included.
Take care of your good employees and the rest follows. There is a King of the Hill episode about it. Mr Strickland calls Hank his "golden goose".
Agreed, that's an issue.
The same issue applies to many other works of art over time. The Simpsons and king of the hill most recently.
To he fair, I did say it's a great robot movie, not a great example of thoughtful casting.
I remember this joke from King of The Hill's pilot episode. For those unacquainted:
https://archive.org/details/king-of-the-hill13seasons/King+of+the+Hill+S01E01+Pilot.mp4
Also see King of the Hill Season 7, episode 6 "The Son also Roses"
I disagree. There is an episode of King of The Hill that mocks the KKK. You know what the KKK did? NOTHING. They didn't say a word. They didn't say a word because their numbers are very weak. It is a joke at this point. The episode actually used the KKK as actual jokes in Bobby's skit. Think about that for a minute. It went from feared to a joke in a cartoon show and nobody said a word because they are a joke.
Conflict with neighbors is a common theme. But also friendship with neighbors. Wilson Wilson Jr in Home Improvement. Lawrence in Office Space. All the guys in King of the Hill. Even in some which start off with frustrations about neighbors sometimes shows strong bonds between them later like Grand Torino or Family Matters or even The Simpsons.
I think a lot of TV shows and movies show a lot of different perspectives of neighbors, and I'm not convinced it's mostly negative. Lots show some amount of strife with neighbors, but even a romance movie will often show some amount of conflict between the protagonists.
> Mike Judge did Silicon Valley already.
I've seen Silicon Valley episodes, it is not at all in the same spirit as Office Space. Office Space spoke to the absurdity playing out in offices throughout the nation. Silicon Valley speaks to the VC-fueled privileged absurdity playing out in ... SV.
> Mike Judge's current work is a soon-to-be reboot of King of the Hill.
That's really unfortunate, King of the Hill was such a mediocre/milquetoast message, at least from what little I saw.
Oh boy this is just scratching the surface. I would go a LOT further and say the ENTIRE scholastic mental health system is a sham and a massive source of iatrogenic harm that students and teachers are pressured into in order to get more favourable treatment by the schools and government assistance, whereas the schools themselves get more government funding and lowered scrutiny in regards to standardised testing. How can mental health treatment in schools NOT cause harm with such perverse incentives?
I had a particularly fraudulent school psychiatrist. When my IQ tested low enough, my IQ score was reported. When my IQ tested too high, it was censored on the grounds of being "misleading". Parental and teacher evidence was submitted to justify further mental health interventions which was grossly fraudulent (I was portrayed as unable to dress or feed myself) and a cursory 5 minute examination of me would have revealed this. One of the most disgusting things they did was pull me out of gym classes to spend more time sitting in a room with special needs teachers who occasionally nagged me to use a planner and do my homework. Exercise you know, being an extremely evidence based intervention for mental health, unlike whatever that shit was. Being treated as mentally ill and being perceived that way by myself and my peers did nothing to help me, especially since it only helped to reinforce the idea that the lifelong physical health problems which got worse during my school years were nothing but "anxiety" and that consequent declines in my mental health could be attributed to my earlier mental health issues and all the medical fraud helped to confuse the shit out of doctors.
I think the mental health system is a sham and that it doesn't have proof it treats the problems it claims to treat, and if anything the rise of suicidality over the last few decades as scholastic mental health has become more common as well as increases in self-reported, parent-reported, teacher-reported, and physician-reported mental health problems among students proves its somewhere between totally impotent and actively harmful. The final goal of increased mental health interventions is not getting to a point where nobody is sick anymore, it's to create more patients.
The biggest thing that pisses me off is that it's rarely measured if scholastic mental health interventions work, they are just ASSUMED to be positive without evidence. Nobody gives a crap about iatrogenic effects.
The episode of King of the Hill "No Bobby Left Behind" speaks to me: https://kingofthehill.fandom.com/wiki/No_Bobby_Left_Behind
I love this device when it's used comedically in movies/tv shows - like this King of the Hill episode:
https://youtu.be/U9v_nTo5qmY
Anyone have other good examples?
If you prefer shell for simple, solo services, over docker-compose:
#!/bin/sh docker run -d \ --volume /opt/docker/data/jellyfin/config:/config \ --volume /opt/docker/data/jellyfin/cache:/cache \ --volume /mnt/Movies:/media/Movies \ --volume /mnt/TV:/media/TV \ --volume /mnt/Music:/media/Music \ --net=host \ --restart=unless-stopped \ jellyfin/jellyfin:10.8.5-amd64
Add and remove "--volume" entries as needed. You can have more than one movie or TV library or whatever, which is super-handy if you have kids because you can restrict their accounts to certain libraries. Consider using links from the main libraries to create the kids' libraries, if you want to have everything available, including kid stuff, on your adult account(s), as it's a little cleaner than adding both the adult and kid libraries to a single account. Left side is the host machine where the files actually live, right side is where it's mounted in the container. Replace the left side with whatever's right for your system. Names within the "media" directory in the container are arbitrary, but you will have to add each library in the web UI to make them show up, so it's worth giving them decent names.
Replace the "/opt/docker/...." bits with wherever you want to store the config and cache on the host machine. It'll survive restarts/reboots with everything intact with just those two config-related mounts.
the "--restart=unless-stopped" means you probably don't need to do anything else to get it to come back up on reboots. No messing with systemd or whatever, at least on many distros. Docker will take care of it.
Version number's the latest release, I like to handle that manually so there are no surprises. I think they have a "latest" tag or similar that you can use if you don't care about that and just want it to always run the newest thing.
Pro-tip: the youtube metadata plugin (not included by default) is far less smoothly-functioning than the rest of the system is (and also won't run on that docker image without some light modification—it needs youtube-dlp present) BUT many of the things from Youtube that you might want to watch on a real TV have entries on IMDB or thetvdb, so you can add them as TV shows, which is all-around a much better experience.
For smoothest operation, organize movies like:
/The Matrix (1999)/The Matrix (1999).mp4 /The Matrix (1999)/The Matrix (1999).en.srt /Star Wars (1977)/Star Wars (1977) - Special Edition.mkv /Star Wars (1977)/Star Wars (1977) - 4K77.mkv /Star Wars (1977)/Star Wars (1977) - Raw 35MM scan.mkv /Star Wars (1977)/Extras/From Star Wars to Jedi.avi
I think you can define what you want the "Extras" directory to be called when you set up the library, and that's what it'll look for. "Featurettes" is another common name for that.
If you do this, it'll automatically grab the right metadata like 99% of the time with no intervention.
For TV:
/King of the Hill (1997)/Season 1/S01E01.mkv /King of the Hill (1997)/Season 1/S01E02.mkv (et cetera) /King of the Hill 1997)/Season 0/S00E05 - The Making of King of the Hill.mp4
You can actually put almost anything you want in the actual episode file names, as long as it has that "SxxExx" pattern in it somewhere.
Again, I think you can use other names for the "specials" folders if you configure it when setting up the library, but they're "S00E01" and so on in thetvdb, so I use "Season 0"
If anything gets the wrong metadata, find its ID on imdb or thetvdb or tmdb or whatever, hit the hamburger menu on the thumbnail for it, click "identify", and enter your id in the matching field. That'll fix it. But this will very rarely happen if your naming is all correct.
[EDIT] Nb. this may not be a great config for transcoding, I'm not sure it'll have access to hardware decode/encode with this. I avoid that by only using frontend devices that can handle all the codecs I have (AppleTV FTW) so nothing's ever transcoded, since my server can't transcode for shit in the best of circumstances, but that may matter to some people.
If you do it in a comedy way, sure, why not?
If we can joke about cops (reno 911), bar owners (it's always sunny in philadelphia), rural americans (king of the hill and many, many other), canadians (south park), italians (euro trip), gingers (south park), nerds (pretty much every college movie), french girls (malcolm in the middle), middle managers (basically, every office-based movie), bodybuilders (brooklyn 99), "aspiring actresses" (working as baristas), student cooks (usually by gordon ramsey), .... why not us? Oh and let's not forget blondes.
Do you assume all italians wear stockings and molest other guys on trains if you've seen Eurotrip (movie)? Nope. Do you assume all french girls don't shave? Nope. So if the whole of the balkans, including bosnia has many many jokes with "Mujo and Haso" (they represent a "stupid" couple of guys, where the pun is in their stupidity, why do you (I assume you're not from the balkans) get to be offended for other people? There's even a movie just with jokes about them... made by bosnians of course - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5085118/
We also have regional jokes, where in slovenia, people assume that people from gorenjska region are stingy (in serbia, it's people from pirot).
A joke is a joke, you don't have to get offended for other people.
edit: also, we don't start wars because we thing the others are subhuman, we just stereotipically hate eachother (as groups, not as individuals), due to historic reasons, mostly war-related.
ps: What you americans would call racism could only be mentioned maybe against gypsies here (eve though they're techncally the same race). And even that is mostly by assuming, that if someone stole your gutters around the house (or basically anything metal), that it was the gypsies. Usually it's even true.
First time I heard: that's what she said as a punchline for double-entendres...
was around mid-to-late 90s on King of the Hill and I was a teenager. It was an episode where Ben Stiller guest starred as a new employee who worked with Hank Hill at Strickland Propane and the premise was that this new employee (I forget his name) would create a toxic work environment where he'd make crude jokes about everything and everyone and nobody had the balls to stand up to him except for Hank.
Now, given that writer/producer Greg Daniels, worked in both King of the Hill and The Office I figured that maybe he made the joke prominent in the latter show.
But I'm probably wrong.
I have long viewed Mike Judge[0] as the anti-Scott Adams. He works with many of the same topics but the result is far, far funnier. And he does not try to shove any particular political point of view at the expense of basic humor.
In reviewing Idiocracy, Salon stated, "Judge's gimlet eye is so ruthless that at times his politics seem to border on South Park libertarianism".[73] A writer for the libertarian magazine Reason seems to agree, comparing King of the Hill to the anti-authoritarian point of view of South Park and The Simpsons, though he calls the show more populist, noting the disdain King of the Hill seems to have for bureaucrats, professionals, and big-box chains.[74]
Still, Judge denies having political messages in his shows, saying in an IGN interview about King of the Hill:[72]
"I try to not let the show get too political. To me, it's more social than political I guess you'd say, because that's funnier. I don't really like political reference humor that much. Although I liked the episode "Hank's Bully" where Hank's talking to the mailman and he says, 'Why would anyone want to lick a stamp that has Bill Clinton on it?' To me that's just like more of a character thing about Hank than it is a political joke or anything. I don't want to do a bunch of stuff about the war, particularly." [Wikipedia]
[0]King of the Hill, Office Space, Beavis and Butthead, Idiocracy, Silicon Valley
Even within the United States, different regions can feel like different worlds.
The most stark contrast I’ve seen is in the indie film Lady Bird where (SPOILERS) there is a setting change from a very small rural American town for most of the plot to New York City at the end of the film, with it’s subways, density, and architecture that felt familiar to any watcher from an urban area.
Similarly, the suburban Texas setting of the King of the Hill deliberately contrasts itself with New York-based shows (referring to Seinfeld as, “I'll tell you what, man, them dang ol' New York boys. Just a show about nothin,’” with other joked about the disdain of many Texans of New Yorkers).
Reminds me of the episode of King of the Hill where Hank worried about if his obituary headline read "Hank Hill: Found Dead, Not Working" because it would be embarrassing
It's a losing strategy though, with whitelabeling of streaming services it's easy for a content holder to just stick their stuff behind their own label or play Netflix vs Hulu vs Amazon Prime vs HBO.
Content generation was a good move, but they seem to be pursuing a strategy of trying to always have some mega-hit. This causes them to cancel shows that could grow into valuable content anchors.
Consider "The Office." I'm not going to say that everyone loves The Office, but a lot of people like it and enjoy tossing it on the TV when they are just looking for some background noise or just want to binge something they find enjoyable.
How much of Netflix's content fits this mold though? If you take a look at their longest running shows https://screenrant.com/longest-running-netflix-originals-ranked/ they just don't run their series for very long. On the plus side this means that they can go invest in other series, but it creates series that don't have the same sticking power.
They also seem to have a real hard time keeping quality up within a series, so you can have a show start off really strong with a great season 1, then season 2 is meh, and then they cancel it. I think this fundamentally makes their catalog less sticky because instead of their original content being something you can come back to again and again, it is disposable.
I've watched my fair share of Netflix original series, but where other series have grown to hold a special place in my memory and I can watch them over and over (Deep Space Nine, King of the Hill, {fill in your favorite long running series here}) I rarely find myself rewatching their original content. With 2 or 3 seasons, the series end up feeling like long mini-series, and not a whole arc that you can sit down and enjoy again and again.
And when I compare Netflix today to Netflix of year's gone by, the thing I find myself missing from the external content catalog was more of those "old favorites" of just watching through Breaking Bad again or enjoying the episode of Bones where they somehow scan a computer virus off of a bone and into their hologram thing.
What about Chuck Mangione living in the Megalo Mart on King of the Hill? Malcolm in the Middle also had an episode where a guy was living in the store for years without being detected.
Very sad to see her go.
Mike Judge's (of King of the Hill and Idiocracy fame) Tales From the Tour Bus episode on her was excellent.
Futurama can still get pretty meta. The first five minutes of the last reboot were about how those responsible for their cancelation were ground into Torgo's Executive Powder.
I think a better example of a return to straightforward comedy would be the King of the Hill reboot.
Also kindof wild to think of telling 1997 me that there would be new episodes of Futurama and KotH 25 years from now.
This entire comment thread is identical to a "King of the Hill" episode:
https://kingofthehill.fandom.com/wiki/My_Hair_Lady
I think it's because Japanese and Chinese are nationalities that have been long known by the wider, more xenophbic populace. And they are also used as catchall terms for Asians. For example, the first episode of King of the Hill where the Texans meet Kahn, a Laotian, and Dale repeatedly asks if that is Chinese or Japanese, not understand Laos is a country.
This is the subject of the first episode of King of the Hill (1997).
https://youtu.be/OsjmmpyGgHY
> Indeed, but millions of humans have lived for millenia in places where grass does not grow easily.
And what were the populations of those communities? Did they have hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of individuals draining natural resources?
In recent times humans haven't really done as much accepting the "world as it is". We've tried to shoehorn ourselves into circumstances where we probably should not have. I am reminded of the episode of the cartoon King of the Hill where they visit Phoenix:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PYt0SDnrBE
> Therefore, I decided that the best weather was the weather that would most encourage a person to go outdoors and stay outdoors. For that purpose, key weather elements would be sunshine, warmth, and dryness — calling to mind the Dreary Weather Index offered by Brian Brettschneider:
I think this is a bad measure of encouragement to go outdoors, as it gives (e.g.) large swaths of New Mexico and Arizona a good (i.e., low) score: there's no way I'm going outside when it's >40C.
Certainly not all of places in Arizona get so hot that airplanes can't fly of course:
* https://www.wired.com/story/phoenix-flights-canceled-heat/
So hopefully the min and max temperature was taken into account in this article's calculations, as it does not seem to be in the "Dreary Weather Index". I am reminded of the episode of the cartoon King of the Hill where they visit Phoenix:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PYt0SDnrBE
I learned about this when I watched that king of the hill episode where bobby grows roses in his closet and i still think about it all the time
I'll never forget this fact because there is a King of the Hill episode (10:13) where a mentally-ill, homeless man named Spongy exclaims "Ronald Reagan kicked me out of my mental hospital!" and Hank bashfully tries to justify it as part of winning the cold war.
Not to take away from the post (which is nice), but it's kind of funny that the illusion is to make a black and white image look sort of color only by overlaying it with some color.
This reminds me of the old King of the Hill episode where Dale says "If you want, I can show you how to make a bomb out of a roll of toilet paper and a stick of dynamite."
Reminds me of a King of the Hill episode where Hank gets a lo-flow toilet to save water, only to find that it wasted water in practice as it required several flushes to get the job done.
It's really a kind of recurring issue, where something is superficially "solved" (sounds good on the surface), but actually ends up making things worse in practice.
Fiat do have a reputation for making unreliable cars. I have no idea whether it’s deserved or not, but the joke that Fiat stands for “Fix it again, Tony” has been around for a very long time. I first heard that joke in a 1997 episode of King of the Hill, so people have been making it since at least then. Fiat made ads referencing the joke in 2014, so I presume it’s had some staying power too.
according to the people who told me about moving to a worse school, transcripts coming from "urban underserved schools" (there was an actual technical term they used but i forgot it) are more appealing to ivy league schools. They had about five tricks to make their kids more appealing to ivy's that included moving houses, changing schools, specific sports, certain extra curricular, etc. -- to clarify we were chatting at a 4 y/o's birthday party.
See this thread for young marriage to hide parental income as another tactic.
You probably went to a crappy school because your parents were poor and they wouldn't know any tricks to give you advantages.
You (having poor parents) wouldn't need an entire class of these scams designed to hide your wealthy upbringing.
Alternatively watch king of the hill episode "The Redneck on Rainey Street" :)
I kind of have this feeling for most of Mike Judge's stuff. I think we've all been in an Office Space situation. Being from the same part of Texas that King Of The Hill is based on, I totally know people that I could swear Judge based the characters off of for the show. At this point, Idiocracy should be moved from the comedy category and into the prophecy/documentary category.
> In King of the Hill, our white Alpha, Hank Hill, the only guy with any common sense
Ah, that's not my memory of King of the Hill. In it Hank is the biggest idiot and it's only those around him that have any common sense.
I probably only watched the first season but I remember one episode in particular where some Laotians moved into the neighborhood and Hank couldn't except that they weren't Chinese or Japanese. His father who fought in South East Asia knew immediately that they were Laotians but Hank refused to acknowledge any kind thing other than Chinese or Japanese. Hank's wife went on to bake a "Apple Brown Betty" (I think that's what it's called) and got upset when the Laotian neighbor made it better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_CaZ4EAexQ
In office space Peter Gibbons, our white Alpha, and the only guy with any sense, tries to stay sane and hold it together in a world that has gone haywire.
In King of the Hill, our white Alpha, Hank Hill, the only guy with any common sense, tries to stay sane and keep it from all falling apart in a world that has gone Haywire.
In Idiocracy, our White Alpha, Joe Bauer, the only guy with any sense, tries to stay sane and keep it from falling apart in a world that has gone haywire.
In Extract, Joel, our down to earth White Alpha, tries to stay sane and hold it together in a world that has gone haywire.
And in Silicon Valley, well- you get the idea. I love Mike Judge films, he is an astute observer and hilarious. but his ouvre is not broad. He's got a formula, and it works, and that's fine.
I've never even been to Texas, but I consider King of the Hill to be on the best written sitcoms ever. My wife and I still make jokes about Aisle 8A all the time. No other TV show I've seen has ever crossed that threshold of comedy so beautifully.
Man, this is literally my Plex library. <15 shows that I ever enjoy watching (ATHF, Mr Robot, The Wire, Sopranos, GoT, Squidbillies, House, King of the Hill, Silicon Valley, Buffy, Futurama to be exact.) They still take up a full 1.5TB because I like to get the highest quality rips possible.
Some shows like House I have edited personally to create 'binge versions,' with the intro and outro cut out, with only special episodes that have special endings or intros included. Saves a good chunk of time with House and The Wire when I rewatch them. I wish a lot of other people did this as well. Instead groups stick to following scene rules that leave us with ugly formats, poor management and naming schemes and more. They were created for a different era.
Maybe I'll try to put it out there.
This is an excellent article. From the Wiki article on the Dalai Lama[0]:
>Since the time of the fifth Dalai Lama, his personage has always been a symbol of unification of the state of Tibet, where he has represented Buddhist values and traditions.
This explains the interest by the Chinese Communist Party in wanting the Dalai Lama spirit to stick around. If he goes away, then political turmoil is sure to follow.
Also, this bit reminded me of an episode of Mike Judge's King of the Hill:
>They present a number of artifacts, only some of which belonged to the previous Dalai Lama, and if the boy chooses the items which belonged to the previous Dalai Lama, this is seen as a sign, in conjunction with all of the other claimed indications, that the boy is the reincarnation.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalai_Lama
Look, gramps, you either fit into the box or you don't matter. Get with the program and start buying your groceries from costco or your toilet paper from apple.
Also watch "Raise the Steaks" episode of King of the Hill.
>If you set aside his long-running TV show “King of the Hill,” which is much too loving to be considered satire, Judge’s corpus of work cleaves neatly into two pieces.
Set it aside? Having grown up in that region of Texas it certainly is (wonderfully) satirical to me. It certainly isn't a hateful satire, but "too loving to be considered satire" misses it. In an otherwise very good article I'm also surprised by such a dismissal of a huge part of hit work.
Reminds me of Ted Wassanasong from King of the Hill. There's an episode when Khan asks him why he doesn't see him at the Buddhist temple any more and he replies, "We're Episcopalian now. It's just good business."
A good friend of mine _wink_ has been a pirate since the golden age of IRC. I, uh He, always said he'd pay for digital content when they made distribution digital. And when they did, I was happy to start paying for it. I was happy to have every King of the Hill on someone else's hard drive finally.
Then the price for playing by the rules kept going up and up. Meanwhile there was less and less, and less, I cared to see. I can't even think of the last movie I actually itched to see. Maybe I've gotten old and don't have time to search for diamonds in the rough, but I don't see any more movies like Oh Brother Where Art Thou or Fight Club or Snatch that I can't get tired of.
They can't cry poverty when every time Adam Sandler squeezes one out it makes $75 million. I know creative accounting makes it seem like they break even, but I call BS on that. If companies besides Pixar would actually pay for writing that moves people, their wallets would come with them.
I've been playing around with reencoding all my media to H.265/HEVC at home. The space savings over the older H.264 are around 50% (or better!) depending on what I encode
I have a lot of digitized box sets of TV shows, things like The Simpsons or King of the Hill. Most bit torrent copies of these shows weigh in at about 180MB/episode (for a 480P video)
Encoding them through H.265 using NVIDIA's "Nvenc" encoder (CPU encoding is paaaainfully slow) I can get them down to a mere 60MB on average, with no discernible quality difference
Moving up to 1080P files, I encoded some Star Trek: The Next Generation digital remasters, they shrunk from 600MB to about 350-400MB. Not quite as impressive, though I had to scale up the quality as HEVC was wrecking havoc on some of the low contrast areas (like character uniforms turning into one flat smeared looking color)
Agreed.
The author also seems to assume that everyone reads like he does, pausing to think about each word, "walking through another's thoughts." This is something I've given a bit of thought to recently, interestingly triggered by an episode of King of the Hill. I don't read in this manner and never really have.
I read fiction for the story. I want to know what happens next. I don't linger on a sentence trying to decipher the subtext. It was a great struggle for me to learn to read in that manner for English courses, and I never really enjoyed it.
Meanwhile today there are great TV shows with interesting things to say. The Wire, The Sopranos, and Black Mirror all have gotten me thinking, trying to see from another perspective much more easily than any book ever has.
I believe that our brains don't all work the same way. What the author gets out of reading, I get out of TV and movies and cannot get naturally out of books.
I think they'll ultimately need to ease up on the wacky humor and make it more of a drama, similar to Entourage or other HBO rags-to-riches shows like How to Make It in America. I'd be concerned at such a pivot, but Mike Judge had episodes of King of the Hill full of real, warm, human drama, so I think he can pull it off. Office Space had heart at its core, too.
I spent many years feeling guilty because I secretly wanted to make money. Realizing that it's ok was a huge relief to me.
I'm reminded of the King of the Hill episode "Orange You Sad I Did Say Banana?" where Kahn (who always wants to be rich) becomes convinced that the should be in touch with his roots and not want or care for money. In the end he realizes that the people trying to convince him not to be rich are the rich people and he was happier being true to himself.
That's an opinion(so of course it can't be wrong) that I have heard, it is being debated fairly intelligently downthread along with a debate about the fantastic King of the Hill and Office Space.
Here is a list of movies that critics and non-critics consider to be much better post WWII satires than Idiocracy, according to internet ratings of these movies. Note: many of these are more humorous and brutal while being less crude and light-hearted than Idiocracy. Also many have plot, emotion, and deep characterization.
Films: American Psycho, A Clockwork Orange, Fahrenheit 451, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Dr. Strangelove, Office Space(also Mike Judge)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satire
My main problem with Idiocracy as a satire is that the message it sends is flatly incorrect, because the rules of their world are not the same as ours. It is a satire of some alternate universe in which we are not living, it has no applicability for the world we live in.
Film's message: "If our societies ever end up giving a competitive advantage to low IQ people, time travel will be necessary to correct society's decline."
The truth:"If our societies ever end up giving a competitive advantage to low IQ people, natural selection will take care of it, since intelligence seems to be a competitive advantage for apes."
I think the true message is also a better call to arms for both intelligent people and unintelligent people. The movie Idiocracy seemed like it was made to be consumed by the citizens of the low-IQ world, in both plot and acting. I do enjoy its light-heartedness.
Much more realistic are the famous dystopian texts, especially Harrison Bergeron: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
Well I have seen most of the episodes of King of the Hill and pretty much agree with that assessment.
It's not about the setting or the characters or even the jokes (which are both more dry and generally less funny than other projects, and I love dry humour).
It's about the complete reversal of the counter-culture commentary that made Office Space and Idiocracy popular. If you choose a boring hack writer setting (teacher wife, blue collar father, stupid son, etc, etc) for your show then you better make that choice the focus of your commentary, like the Simpsons did. The setting was chosen in order to comment on it. If King of the Hill was doing that then the commentary appeared to be "Isn't this nice. See how wonderful life can be when you don't question your place? Learning won't make you happy, conformity will. Good hard work and ignorance can be fulfilling".
I don't think anyone is wrong for liking it, but you certainly can't complain that fans of Judge's other work dislike that level of support for an anti-intellectual outlook.
Now that I live in Austin, I only appreciate King of the Hill even more. I'll never forget the episode where Bobby proposes a town where there's music everywhere, everyone has cool things and drives convertibles, Hank replies: "Ugh, sounds like Austin"
Boy I got a good laugh out of that I tell you what. Mike Judge knows how to cut to the bone with everything he creates
Lol, reminds me of a season 9 episode of king of the hill. Not sure which one anymore. After half way I think.
One of Hank Hill's employees shows up on his doorstep demanding he hang out, but Hank refuses to mix work and personal relationships.
Just thought I'd share :P
> Today, they're the butt of every joke.
I think this trend probably peaked a few years ago (Family Guy is a good example.) You can actually see it reversing if you watch King of the Hill: the earliest episodes generally show Hank as a small minded redneck, whereas later episodes portray him as a lone voice of sanity.
Anyways, if you look outside of comedies, there are plenty of masculine male leads in popular shows (Jack Bauer comes to mind.) As for race, I can't even think of a popular drama where the male lead is black (and the other characters aren't.) But maybe I just don't watch enough TV.