Most animated sitcoms can’t claim to have had legit rock legends on the payroll. It’s not like Patti Smith ever worked on Bob’s Burgers, and as far as we know, Bob Dylan didn’t voice any of the Jetsons.
But, oddly enough, the great Tom Petty became a key fixture of King of the Hill in its later seasons. And although Petty died in 2017, the recently-released Hulu reboot still found a way to honor the Heartbreakers frontman.
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Petty, of course, voiced Lucky Kleinschmidt, who was first introduced back in Season Eight’s “The Redneck on Rainey Street.” While he wasn’t a huge part of that episode, Petty did get to deliver a lengthy monologue explaining that his nickname stems from a legal settlement he received from Costco after slipping on a puddle of piss in their restroom, which led to a back injury.
The following season, he began dating Luanne, and eventually the two got married in a ceremony held in the Hills’ backyard. Somehow they even got Chuck Mangione to play a version of Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March,” which slowly morphs into “Feels So Good.”
How did a three-time Grammy-winning ex-Traveling Wilbury end up on a Fox cartoon?
In 2009, King of the Hill creator Mike Judge explained how it all came together. Apparently, while writing “The Redneck on Rainey Street,” then-showrunner John Altschuler described Lucky’s appearance as “Tom Petty without the success.”
“And we thought, what if we tried to get Tom Petty?” Judge told The Chicago Tribune. “And he said, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it.’ And he was great, just killed at the table read. Then he said, ‘Any time you want me to do it, I’ll do it.’ Turns out he really meant it.”
During the King of the Hill panel at the ATX TV Festival this past May, showrunner Saladin K. Patterson confirmed that the show wouldn’t recast Lucky and Luanne (Brittany Murphy famously passed away in 2009, mere months after the show’s series finale aired). But Patterson claimed that the new season had found “opportunities” to reference them.
Seemingly, one of those opportunities was in Episode Two, “The Beer Story.” A montage showing Hank and Bobby working tirelessly to perfect their competing home brews is all set to Petty’s song “Runnin’ Down a Dream,” from the 1989 album Full Moon Fever.
The track works perfectly for the scene, both lyrically and tonally, so its deeper meaning could easily go unnoticed. But given Petty’s connection to the series, clearly this was intended as a loving shout-out.
I guess it was either this or having another character severely hurt their spine after slipping in some urine.
