‘King Of The Hill’ Revival Boss Says It’s “Impossible” To Recreate Original’s Animation Style Because Tools “Don’t Exist Anymore”
While the Disney-produced King of the Hill revival may have delivered in terms of its writing, its animation was just as disappointingly stiff and lifeless as early previews had suggested – and while many fans were hoping it would bear something akin to the original’s hand-drawn aesthetic, showrunner Saladin K. Patterson says that such a goal is near “impossible” in the current era.
Patterson, a noted TV producer and writer whose past credits include The Bernie Mac Show, Psych, The Big Bang Theory, and the 2021 reboot of The Wonder Years, offered this insight into Rainy Street’s new look while speaking to The Hollywood Reporter’s Abbey White in reflection of the revival season’s production.
Asked by White if he could “talk about the decision-making” that went into King of the Hill’s new ‘flat’ animation style, Patterson bluntly admitted to his host that said change was an unfortunate side-effect of the industry’s move towards cost-cutting and digitization:
“I do want to address the art because that’s probably been the most universal thing that has shook the new audience when they saw the previews and things like that — that the animation looks so different.”
“I get it, and I get why people who want to revisit the show may be taken aback a little bit. The new animation style is all digital now, but the truth of the matter is, it is impossible to do the show now the way it was done then. The hand-drawn animation, the water colors, those don’t exist anymore. If they exist, they certainly don’t exist at a cost where you can do a TV show. So it has to be updated, and so we updated it with the current style and makeup of animation that animated shows do.
“I admit it does look different and maybe jarring to some people. I just want to put out there that even though it’s updated, we still went and tried to give it an age old look, to make it feel more like the color palette and the landscape of the original, more so than other shows. We certainly went through a lot of back and forth with the background designers and things like that, to make our colors feel closer to what they felt in the original and the tones and things the most that we could.”
And while not specifically related to its visuals, Patterson also noted that in addition to animation budget restrictions, the script for King of the Hill‘s new season also had to weather its script being picked according to the the pearl-clutching sensitivities of Disney executives:
“Yes, Fox back then with adult animation let certain shows really push the envelope. Family Guy really pushed the envelope. The Simpsons to a very measured extent. King of the Hill, though, never pushed the envelope in the same way, in terms of being in your face. But it may have pushed the envelope in terms of some of the social commentary.
“So when we were doing it now for Hulu, under the Disney banner, on the one hand, the Hulu execs for the show were fans of the original, so we all were on the same page in terms of wanting to recapture what made the original special. But there were situations where the Disney of it all put some limiters on us that I know Fox would not have, even though we were on Hulu and streaming, which theoretically has broader S&P [standards and practices] than Fox. But for us, staying true to the show meant we weren’t ever going to be too gratuitous with the curse words and things, but we do take some liberties. The characters do curse in ways they can’t curse on broadcast.
“That being said, Hulu still made us go through and pull out all the F-bombs because they don’t want the TV-MA label, and it’s fine. Totally get it. It is what it is. I’m not a huge fan of shows pushing the envelope in that way anyway, so it wasn’t a big loss, but it was ironic, especially considering, like you said, the history of the show being on Fox where the whole purpose was to try to push the envelope as much as you could.”
