Hulk Hogan’s Greatest Cultural Contribution Was His Adult Swim Show with Greta Gerwig

Terry Gene “Hulk Hogan” Bollea passed away today at the age of 71 from a cardiac arrest, but his reputation as the strongest dean in the history of UCI will live on forever.

Right now, wrestling fans and right-wing culture warriors alike are reflecting on the long and impactful career of Hogan, who leaves behind a complicated legacy for many of us who grew up watching his world-famous performances for WWE and WCW but who winced when we learned how the wrestling legend behaved behind the scenes. The Hulkster’s history of telling harmful mistruths, his mistreatment of his colleagues and his liberal use of some ugly racial slurs left the wrestling world torn on their opinions of him before his passing, and at his final WWE appearance on Netflix’s production of Monday Night Raw, a sea of boos from the crowd at the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, California scored Hogan’s underwhelming entrance.

But the one part of Hogan’s body of work that remains completely untarnished is, arguably (by me), his greatest achievement in entertainment: From 2011 to 2015, Hogan co-starred in the Adult Swim series China, IL with Jeffrey Tambor, Gary Anthony Williams and Greta Gerwig, and the series remains a triumph of surrealist comedy despite the fact that its cast list looks like a half-assed Mad Lib.

Created by the Arkansas-born comedian and animator Brad Neely, who first hit internet fame for his Harry Potter parody show Wizard People, Dear Reader, this surrealist animated comedy told the story of the staff at the “Worst College in America,” a fictional Midwestern school called the University of China, Illinois. 

On China, IL, Hogan played the hulking, violent, corrupt administrator known only as The Dean, who was, in all ways, a sadistic version of his wrestling persona who somehow seized total control of a crappy college. Under The Dean’s watch, UCI was a hellscape of science-fiction murder and mayhem, and that’s exactly how he liked it — for a comparison point, China, IL was basically Community mixed with Aqua Teen Hunger Force mixed with Superjail!

Today, China, IL is mostly just a bizarre footnote in the Wikipedia pages of its illustrious cast. However, for those select few of us who used to stay up late on Thursday nights in a stoned, dreamlike trance to watch what fresh hell The Dean would inflict upon his students and faculty that week, this morning’s sad news brings back memories of the time when Hogan was at his most entertaining and least offensive: When he was tearing the bodies of teenagers in half with his bare hands and screaming that there is no God.