Off Kilter TV: Where Horror Rears its Ugly Head 

on Family Television

Pigmalion Episode from King of the Hill

Guest Starring Michael Keaton

King of the Hill—Pigmalion Season 7, Episode 9

Directed by Dominic Polcino and Klay Hall

Written by Jonathan Collier

Spoilers!

This article deconstructs the episode Pigmalion in an effort to describe the “gothic” elements inherent in its plot; thus, the beginning, middle and ending are discussed in some detail, so it is assumed readers are King of the Hill fans who have already seen the episode or non-fans who simply like to read the Off Kilter TV column. Thank you.

Typically, King of the Hill revolves around the Hill family. Hank, the patriarch, has trouble with the family or with the propane business where he works; Peggy, his wife, the intellectual manqué, has to deal with her substitute teaching responsibilities or her modest newspaper column where she is her own best reader; Bobby, their son, is an outgoing young preteen whose growing pains aggravate Hank and challenge Peg’s mothering skills. And then there’s Luanne. She is the niece of Hank and Peggy; she is attractive and either late teens to early twenties. She has trouble finding work and keeping a job.

Which begins our episode for today.

When Peggy hears the restaurant manager scolding Luane, who works there as a waitress, she bullies Luanne into quitting. Then in typical Peggy fashion, she enrolls the girl in a Learning Annex-type class on setting up your own business (the joke here is that Peg takes these fly-by-night classes verbatim over college courses, which would be the better choice for the university age girl). The teacher of the class turns out to be Trip Larsen (voiced by Micheal Keaton), owner of Larsen Pork Products. Trip is attracted to Luanne in a strange way that we will discuss later, but for now let’s just say he asks her out on a date under the guise of asking her to interview for a job. They soon become a couple.

Peggy, of course, tries to break them up, and Trip responds by first trying to kill Hank, who is ignorant of the attempt, and then leaving a headless pig carcass on her doorstep. She is aghast, but Hank and his friends are grateful for the gift of free meat. Peg realizes Trip is crazy and devises a way to keep him away from her niece. Peg’s ploy backfires on her, and she unwittingly drives Luanne into his arms and into his home. She moves into the mansion.

It is about here that we see the Hitchcockian elements emerging. There is the older professional man of mystery falling for the naïve and innocent girl who is intrigued by the worldly and wealthy man. He lives in a gothic mansion, where pigs run freely. The slaughter houses are about a quarter mile from the mansion. Trip’s requests to Luanne become more and more threatening as his voice waivers between soft and demanding. In Vertigo tradition, Trip begins to remake Luanne into the image of some bygone lover or someone. He starts with the hair-do, pig-tails of course, then the hair color, (wickedly red in a scene where Luanne awakes to find her head covered with the bloody colored dye), but it isn’t until he forces her to dress in a milkmaid’s outfit that we realize that Trip has been turning her into the Larsen Pork Products Girl (sort of a knock-off of the St. Pauli Girl).

The Pork Girl was created by Trip’s grandfather, and he has obsessed over her since he was a child. Dressed as a pig, and utterly mad, Trip attacks Luanne. Peggy and Luanne run into the slaughter house and turn on the machines in an effort to lose Trip. As he stands on the conveyor belt headed for the bolt device, shaped like a metal stake, that pierces skull of the pig before it enters the area for butchering, Trip passes through a Jacob’s Ladder strand of electricity designed to shock the pig before it is killed. When Trip is shocked, he regains his sanity and wonders where he is. Here the story could have ended. Trip is okay. He asks Luanne’s pardon. Peggy says I told you so. End of a regular episode. But this is an Off Kilter TV episode. The conveyor belt kicks in and drags Trip into the whirling blades. He is chopped to bits. In a Hitchcock movie this would be normal, but for an episode of KOTH, it is murder. It does not fit the happy go lucky pattern we have come to expect from our comedy show. Peggy does a whoops joke, but it’s too little, too late. The punishment was way too out of proportion for the crime. He was obsessed with a cartoon label; he remade Luanne in its image. So he was killed in a gruesome manner befitting a pig to the slaughter. Get it: Pigmalion. In Pygmalion, the old rich gentleman turns the poor uneducated woman into a “lady.” In Pigmalion, the old entrepeneur turns Luanne into a mascot, and he in turn is turned into a pig, as in pig meat. It’s funny, if you’re Uncle Fester.

By now, you might recognize the Gothic elements of the story, things not out of place in an Ann Radcliffe or Daphne du Maurier page-turner: The mysterious mansion, the crazed older man of the house, the young mistress taken by the elder gentleman, and a secret hidden behind love and doubt. Author Jonathan Collier, who wrote this episode, has much experience dealing with mysteries as he has written for Bones and Monk, two detective shows that revolve around death and crime. How he got his ending to Pigmalion into the show is probably a mystery worth solving. It’s pretty clear in the final words of Luanne and Peggy:

[Luanne's crazed boyfriend has fallen into a pork processing machine] 
Luanne Platter: Well, at least Trip seemed happy, and now he's in a better place. 
Peggy Hill: Honey, Trip had a mental breakdown and is now a sausage. That's not a better place. But you learned to defend yourself.

Luanne Platter: So, it’s a happy ending after all.