TalKing of the Hill - Texas City Twister

I'm up in Ottawa, Ontario and we had a fairly serious tornado back in September 2018 that passed through my neck of the woods. We didn't have any life-threatening damage luckily, and managed to get to the basement as the worst of it passed, but it was still a pretty frightening experience for someone who'd never lived through one before that. We lost some tall, old trees (including one that fell onto the roof and wrecked it pretty good) and power lines were down all over the yard, so we didn't have electricity for around 50 hours. People in the area did lose houses though, so I count my blessings. Either way, 0/10 would not do again. To be honest, any time the wind has been particularly strong and storm-ready since then, I get anxious about the possibility of another tornado.

Dylan (batmanboy11) Freitag

Hank Hill is presumably short for Henry, and Henry Hill was a mobster turned informant whom Ray Liotta played in Goodfellas. So my current theory is the secret backstory of King of the Hill is that when Henry Hill went into witness protection, he moved to Arlen, Texas, started going by Hank, and got into the legitimate propane business.

Tyler

Most people know Greg Kihn from "The Break-Up Song," his other big hit.

Dan Vincent

It isn't just Americans who thought that, Menachem Begin the Prime Minister of Israel thought that as well.

John Harrison

I went to Egypt about 10 years ago and that is what our tour guide told us... I never knew if it was true or not because, I suppose, an American Christian upbringing really does a number on a person’s views whether we like it or not. So it’s interesting to hear that it is actually a researched theory!

Sabrina

I remember Fox got into the hype of the movie Twister with their made for TV movie, the more obviously named, Tornado. It starred Bruce Campbell but that's all I remember from it. I wonder if this episode was a way to make fun of Fox for doing that made for TV movie?

Angel

If I may be pedantic, current consensus among Egyptologists is that the pyramids were built by off-season farmers during flooding when they were unable to work the land, rather than Hebrew slaves. There was still definitely slavery and forced labour in Egypt during the time, but that was not how they built the pyramids, at least according to current research.

Lockerus

The original song is just called “Jeopardy,” by a group you’ve never heard of called the Greg Kihn Band. (Kihn makes an appearance at the end of the Weird Al video, driving the car, which was apparently a condition he had for allowing the parody.) The hook is “Our love’s in jeopardy,” if memory serves.

Robert Flaxman

I remember watching this episode when it first came on, and I have seen it many times since. One of my favorite episodes of the show, with all of the action sequences, the great lines of dialogue, and the egg scene. Growing up in Louisiana, while we never had tornadoes, we always had the fear of hurricanes, and I think this episode captures the uncertainty of incoming tornadoes perfectly.

So I have a few things: I actually grew up in the area they’d shoot in Northern Oklahoma for the movie Twister, (my mom says we once saw Bill Paxton shopping at our K-Mart once), I’ve been to the town featured in the movie (Wakita, Oklahoma) and it has a Twister museum that basically had leftover props & merchandise from the movie. But also the level of detail in this show for parodying the film is astounding, listening to the scene where Hank admits his feelings in the storm the music actually sounds likes it’s parodying the film as well when Helen Hunt & Bill Paxton are holding on for life at the end. (I watched this film repeatedly as a kid) and speaking of tornadoes regarding whether or not they have eyes seems to correlate with how big they are, with some smaller tornadoes theorized having smaller vertices hidden inside them, while bigger, F5s are more likely to have a calm inside them.

Kiefer Fulsom