I just started viewing King of the Hill, start to finish. I had watched the show occasionally over the years but fell in love watching it on [adultswim]. They don’t play the episodes in any kind of order and don’t rotate them often enough for my tastes, so I had to seek the rest out myself.
One of the characters I love most is Cotton Hill, Hank Hill’s cranky father. I was watching an episode where, as usual, he rambled about his experiences in World War II — he killed “fitty men!” Then it came to me:
- Duck Phillips killed “17 men in Okinawa” but Cotton Hill of course killed “Fitty Men”
- Cotton lost both his shins to machine-gun fire while Duck has both his intact
- Cotton learned to walk when they said he’d never walk again, and Duck is a raging alcoholic who couldn’t stay on the wagon
- Cotton can kill men by fire-breathing saki but Duck can beat up the unflappable Don Draper
- Who would win in a fight?
It’s conundrums like this for which Marvel comics, fan-fic writers and Robert Heinlein invent ridiculous excuses for time-travel and dimensional gateways. In this case, the characters need only be alive in some fictional universe that includes both Arlen, Texas and Mad Men’s Manhatten.
These are the weird little pop culture obsessions that get stuck in my head and won’t go away. Now you can have this one, too. Who’s been duking it out in your head recently?
