This Is the Last Movie Hank Hill Says He Enjoyed

Hank Hill loves his family, propane and propane accessories — but how does he feel about movies? 

In the recently-released 14th season of King of the Hill, both Peggy and Hank are now retired, and as a result, they have a whole lot more time for watching movies and TV. Although Hank initially resists weekday TV-watching. “We don’t live in an opium den,” he tells Peggy.

Nevertheless, he briefly joins her to watch the British reality show Make-Up Bake-Up, in which “a couple tries to work through their relationship issues while making a pastry, cake or tart.” Also, “they are naked.” (I had to double-check to make sure this wasn’t a real show.)

Later, Hank hate-watches the Property Brothers-esque reality show Property Twins. Laminate beams in a flood zone? Stupid Property Twins,” Hank complains. “They’d be better off installing sleeves onto their shirts.”

But when Peggy suggests converting Bobby’s old room into a home cinema, Hank shoots down the idea. “Maybe when Hollywood makes something for us again,” he responds. “Like Forrest Gump.”

While complaints that Hollywood doesn’t make movies for regular Americans is nothing new, Forrest Gump may seem like an odd movie for Hank to namecheck as his most recent favorite. On the other hand, it’s arguably a deeply conservative movie. Upon closer inspection, the 1994 Robert Zemeckis film checks a number of boxes for Hank — from football scenes, to a subplot focusing on the U.S. military, to the suggestion that hippies are cartoonishly annoying. 

In the original King of the Hill series, we learned that one of Hank’s favorites is the 1979 Robert Duvall-starring war picture The Great Santini. During an argument with a video store clerk about bogus fines (for the “stag film” Cuffs & Collars), Hank proudly proclaims that he rented and returned The Great Santini “23 times.”

But Hank may be forgetting about another movie, which clearly came out after Forrest Gump and had a big impact on him: Flowers of Time. In Season Five's “Chasing Bobby,” Hank, Peggy, Dale and Nancy visit the local multiplex and watch the (fictional) syrupy drama starring Charlton Heston and Ethan Hawke. As Peggy observed, it was “good enough to have been based on a novel.” 

During the film’s climax, in which (spoilers for a movie that actually doesn’t exist in our reality) Heston’s character dies in a horrific tractor accident, Hank becomes incredibly emotional and starts weeping in the movie theater, to his great embarrassment.

And while that movie looked very stupid, it was still probably less stupid than Forrest Gump.