King of the Hill fans noticed a major shift in the series’ animation style with its return to Hulu fifteen years after the original show came to an end, and the showrunner behind it all explained why the show went through such a dramatic change for its new episodes. King of the Hill has returned for a new season of episodes, and it has gone through some big changes with its comeback. Not only do the characters look at lot different than they did back then, but they are going through different situations than fans had ever seen them with too.
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But one of the more immediately visible changes for the new King of the Hill episodes is the fact that it looks and is animated completely through digital work then compared to the original series. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, King of the Hill Season 14 showrunner Saladin K. Patterson addressed this change in how the show is made and explained that it would be “…impossible to do the show now the way it was done then” as those techniques don’t exist in the same way without being too costly.
Why King of the Hill’s Revival Looks So Different From the Original
“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,” Patterson began when talking about King of the Hill’s new look. “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,” the showrunner continued. “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.”
What Does This Mean for King of the Hill?
While King of the Hill Season 14 does look a lot different than the original series, it seems it would have been just too expensive to try and do it in the way the show used to be made. It was made with techniques that aren’t just as readily available as before, and it seems like the creative team instead decided to focus on the things that they could actually control such as the writing behind it all and other ways to make it feel like the original.
Given the new season’s success with both fans and critics thus far, it seems like King of the Hill‘s team made the right decision. It does look a lot different, but it’s helped by the fact that it does seem like an entirely different era of the series overall thanks to its older characters and situations compared to that first show.
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