the thing abt h*rry styles is like. i don't even personally like his music, and while i still haven't looked up the details of the latest nonsense it sure sounds like he said something dumb and unexaminedly homophobic and it's more than fair to critique that, but the way some people talk abt him sure is revealing wrt how agonizingly fucking narrowly they define queerness, and how viciously fucking snidely they want to police it!

Big E.T. in Arlen

Let’s start off with my very first video Big E.T. in Arlen. This video actually predates the Hankster Hillington channel, and was originally posted on a very different channel all the back in October of 2014. It never achieved more than a few hundred views, and when I decided to launch the Hankster Hillington channel a few months later, I reposted the video (along with the truly new Hank’s Waifu and You Only Dale Once), and for most people it was a brand new video. The opening joke of this YTP is simply “What if the opening of King of the Hill was boring?”. Basically, rather than having a time-lapse where many things happen, in this version nothing happens other than Hank, Dale, Bill, and Boomhauer looking all around. Truly, the pinnacle of clever comedy, I know.

The next joke, and the first proper bit of humor in this YTP begins with Hank exclaiming, “I heard a funny joke the other day.” The idea here is that Hank is reminiscing about the joke he heard, but isn’t going to tell his friends (or the audience) what it was. Really, this scene is just in here to set up the gag of Bill being destroyed by the ball. You think something will happen, but you aren’t sure what, so when Bill goes flying it should come as a big laugh, even if you have seen the real episode before. We see the ball fly past Hank, but it’s on screen for only 3 frames before cutting to Bill getting hit with it. This is quick enough to give the viewer the information they need so that the cut to Bill getting knocked over isn’t abrupt, but still fast enough that it feels instantaneous. Inside we get an assortment of more or less random jokes. We have Bobby lusting over Peggy’s giant breasts, “Warm Bulging Rains”, and Bill being pathetic before getting hit by another ball. There’s not much coherence to any of this. This was well before I started focusing on narrative driven humor, so these things are simply there to be funny without purpose. No more, no less. In the next scene we get our first of many sex jokes. This was well before I was comfortable showing any sort of real nudity in a video, so we have the brightness and coloring turned way down to simulate a dark room instead. It looks visually poor, but I think the dialogue works well despite that - especially  Hank falling asleep instantly after giving up on trying to pleasure Peggy.

“So what do you do? You just flick it?” The “Little Sister” song sequence that follows is nothing more than an excuse to showcase an underrated song I quite like. If there’s any joke here, it’s the unexpectedness of Bobby having a beautiful singing voice, perhaps juxtaposed against him holding a “black power” type fist pose. The scene of Bobby’s head expanding like a balloon before popping is supposed to be a physical manifestation of his ego. When Dale praises him it blows up, but it’s too much for him to handle and he “explodes” - quite literally. Dale sheds two tears here. Two are for Bobby’s beautiful song, and the third is for the death of Bobby himself. The “Joseph d-u-u-u-u-u-d-e” scene that follows is tantamount to filler. I couldn’t think a funnier follow up scene, so I stuck in this trite of Joseph’s vocals repeating quickly when he tries and is unable to correct himself from calling Peggy “dude”. Peggy’s reaction is supposed to be one of annoyance, and she quickly shuts Joseph without saying anything to him, but the whole scene doesn’t play well, and isn’t that funny. Luckily it’s over quick. The “Warm Buldging Rains” scene was supposed to be a little gag along the lines of, the YTP was bleeding into the actual real episode for a moment, before going back to the way it was. Or to put it another way, Big E.T. in Arlen is an alternate reality of the episode “Of Mice and Little Green Men”, and the other reality was peeking through for a moment. The joke doesn’t quite work however, and the typo doesn’t make it any better.

The next scene has a joke I really like. A man comes up to Peggy and asks, “Excuse me, is that seat free?”, and Peggy ever-so-slowly moves her purse into position before slamming it down on the empty chair. It’s unfortunate that the animation is so choppy here, because Peggy being a total bitch (and smiling at the pissed off guy) to a random stranger for basically no reason is pretty funny if you ask me. The cutaway to The Simpsons is a joke I would think twice about doing now. It’s funny as hell, but it feels like a bit of a tonal shift. Still, even if I would think twice about it, I would include a scene like it in a future video if I thought it was funny enough.

“Can you send a 13-year-old flowers?” If you look closely in this scene, you can see that Dale’s pants have some black lines, and a yellow spot on them. Likewise, his shoes have metallic stripes on them as well. The reason for this is because although this Dale was in the perfect pose to put in  this scene, he was partially obscured by some objects above him (he was originally on a mower, I believe) and I simply left those details in and hoped no one would notice. If I were making this video now, I would simply Photoshop those imperfections away, but I was young, naive, and needed the money.  (•﹏•) After a brief scene of more bitch Peggy (”Are you as nervous for Bobby as I am?”) we encounter that weird “Taters” scene that I for the life of me don’t recall how I came up with. It’s as bizarre to me as it is to all of you. I think it my thought process was something along the lines of “Wouldn’t it be funny if Peggy took a picture of Bobby, but it came out all real and grotesque”, and “Then the second time it comes out all real and cute”, but I honestly don’t remember for sure. We then come upon the “Go, Joe, Go!” scene, which isn’t really funny at all. The zoomed in Nancy face I thought was hilarious at the time, but now after having worked on so many YTPs and seeing so many off-model KotH characters, it just comes across as ordinary and boring to me.

So after another groan-worthy “Joe” joke, Dale and Hank get to talking, and Dale admits that Joseph isn’t his sus. This joke probably flew over the heads of most people, but the idea was that Dale calls Joseph his “sus” as a reference to all those older KotH YTPs where everyone would say “sus” and “yay”. Hank doesn’t respond, because he doesn’t understand what Dale means, before Dale corrects himself, by saying “son” instead. Luckily, this is followed up by an always hilarious gasp by Hank as he looks nervously back and forth, with Dale then stating, “Well, I didn’t impregnate Nancy’s pussy. So who did?” The word “pussy” fits so well into that sentence, you’ll almost wonder why it was never there to begin with. Okay, maybe not, but it feels more natural than having a character say “cock” out of nowhere like in some older YTPs. Anyway, the whole point of this scene is to imply (correctly) that Hank had an affair with Nancy and is in fact Joseph's father. Hank pulls the word “spacemen” out of his ass to try and cover his tracks, and Dale ignorantly believes him. Yet somehow Hank is completely right. Joseph is an alien, and he attacks Dale when confronted about this. Personally, I always like to think of Joseph lifting Dale up and breaking his back Bane / Batman style, but you can interpret it however you like. Next is a Big Wolf on Campus parody. I use the term “parody” lightly, as it’s basically just the theme song set to a bunch of clips from King of the Hill. It’s not a parody; it’s an AMV. You wouldn’t be surprised to see Vegeta powering up to Linkin Park at this point. To make matters worse, I didn’t have many episodes to work with at the time, so the clips in the sequence are all mostly from the same episode. It’s boring as hell in my opinion. I’ve never even seen Big Wolf, I just like the song. But unlike the earlier Rufus Wainwright tune, I feel this song was a mistake to include. The only positive that came out of it was Joseph’s scream at the end as he pops up in front of the title card, which I liked enough to keep as the thumbnail.

Some music from South Park plays as Hank enters the hospital. There’s this weird little scene where Hank talks with the receptionist that goes absolutely nowhere. You would be right to assume she’s talking with Dale, based on what happens in the next scene, but considering Dale is on his deathbed, I doubt he has the strength to even use the phone. Dale admits to knowing about Hank’s infidelity, and Hank apologizes before he dies. Hank then oddly smiles and walks away silently upon seeing his best friend die. This isn’t a joke. I just forget to add in footsteps and the sound of the door closing. I probably should’ve edited his face too to make him look more glum about this whole thing. But it turns out that Dale Winchester isn’t actually dead, but is now a demon! We see an extended sequence of fan girls reacting to the Gribble heartthrob dying and being resurrected as an agent of darkness. Personally, I think the whole thing goes on a little too long, but it was hard to trim it down, as it’s all buildup to the final scene where the two girls majorly overreact to Dale’s death. Funny enough, the girl from that finale clip actaully found out about this YouTube Poop and approved of her appearance in it. Who’da thunk it. (If you haven’t figured it out, those are actually reactions to the Supernatural season 9 finale, but with Dale taking the place of Dean who died and became a demon.)

“I don’t like this show anymore.” Dale uses his newfound second chance at life to live out his best Charles Whitman, in probably one of the funniest scenes in the episode. He blows off Bill’s head mid-sentence leaving a peeved Peggy on the other line to ponder Bill’s rudeness in hanging up on her. There aren’t any jokes in this scene. It’s just an excuse for Dale to be badass as he takes on the police and everyone in town. And honestly, I wouldn’t cut it for the world. I love this scene. It’s followed by a weird little snip of one of the Gun Club members saying “The police aren’t trained for this”, followed by them leaving, which seems like it’s going to set up another scene. I wish I could say that I put it in as a red herring so the ending would come as a surprise, but I actually forgot I had it in there, and didn’t remember to resolve the Gun Club subplot. Not that there was any story there to begin with. We then get a scene of Dale killing an unseen hostage (I probably should’ve put her body in a later scene), followed by the police shooting knockout gas at him. Cue shocked reactions from the cast. The idea here was that this would be a Dragon Ball Z-esque moment where all the characters are speechless by Dale’s new form, in which he’s able to withstand the police’s most toxic fumes, and they’re forced to think what they’re feeling instead of stating them aloud. It’s all very silly, but I feel like it works.

“The Dale we knew no longer exists.” Another funny little note... In the scene where the gas canister is shot into the tower, you can see Dale talking to someone, but we can’t hear his words. Perhaps he’s talking to the demon inhabiting his body? Perhaps he’s truly gone crazy? Or perhaps I simply forgot to put dialogue in that scene. It’s up to interpretation, and I think scholars will be debating it for years to come. In the finale, we get Hank slide-whistling his way up to try and talk Dale down. The scene takes itself fairly seriously, which is completely intentional. If there’s even a core of real emotion in this, it’s in this brief moment where the music kicks in, and Hank admits to his wrongdoings. It’s all set up to contrast what comes next. Curiosity gets the best ol’ Robert Hill, and in the ensuing struggle, the gun discharges shooting Hank, and causing him to fall to his death.

Hank’s dead. The end. We don’t get a resolution to the story. Much like life, it simply ends when it ends. I actually play (almost) the entire credits sequence set to  Blue Öyster Cult’s 1976 hit song “Don’t Fear the Reaper” to try to give it the feel like you were watching an actual episode of the show. This includes showing the production cards and 20th Century Fox logo with even a voice-over at the end of Bobby saying “Taters” and Joseph screaming his alien scream to mimic the actual show replaying a quote from the episode at the end. Honestly, I feel now that no one will actually watch the entire credits to the end, and most people will jump to another video or exit, so after this I shorted the credits when I used them before doing away with the idea completely (only bringing it back one last time for Metal Dale.) And that’s it. The first video that kicked off the Hankster Hilington channel you all know and love today. Ye-ep.