Growing up isn’t easy. Time ceaselessly pushes forward, bringing with it a host of changes both welcomed and dreaded. At no point is the fear and anxiety about growing up more present than in your early adolescence in the throes of puberty. The unseen hormone-driven emotional changes form an uncontrollable whirlwind and are paired with uncomfortable physical changes too. These experiences are something that everyone goes through...except cartoon characters. They remain the same age for the entire run of the show. The static age is most apparent in child cartoon characters.It’s blatantly obvious that the children in these shows should be growing, but they never do. We never see Gene Belcher and Lisa Simpson go through the struggles of puberty. There is only one cartoon I can think of that shows real, permanent growth in its children characters and that’s King of the Hill.
The lovable animated sitcom about a small Texas town in a way almost feels like a live-action sitcom as the show shys away from the typical hallmarks associated with animated programming. There’s no ‘cartoon violence’; Hank never strangles Bobby senseless à la Homer and Bart. There’s no wild plot that takes them to some wacky far-off destination (unless you count the occasional trip to Dallas). There are no unrealistic cartoon plot points like aliens or super-intelligent babies. King of the HIll is, at its core, a grounded and heartfelt exploration into the lives of a few friends and neighbors in Texas, and nowhere is the heart of the show more apparent than in the episodes centering around the kid characters and their struggles growing up.
Our trio of children is Bobby, Connie, and Joseph. Bobby Hill struggles to connect with his dad. Where his father was a star athlete in his youth Bobby is, by his own admission, fat and unathletic. Connie is the daughter of overbearing immigrant parents. When her family moves in the first episode she quickly becomes friends with Bobby and slowly develops a romantic relationship with him, becoming his girlfriend. Finally, Joseph Gribble is Bobby’s fairly normal best friend. What makes these three so special is that we watch them genuinely grow up right before our eyes. There’s several episodes centered around actual growth from the characters, but to me the perfect example of watching the characters grow is the Season 5 episode “I Don’t Want to Wait for our Lives to Be Over”.
The main premise of the episode involves Bobby returning from a visit with his grandparents feeling as though he is a man, but his newfound confidence is crushed when he sees Joseph has hit a growth spurt and is now almost a full foot taller than him. The episode deals with each of the character’s individual struggles in growing up. Joseph feels isolated and alone after his growth spurt. His bike is now too small for him to use and he has acne and stretch marks on his back. Bobby however has the opposite problem. He is a late bloomer that struggles with feelings of inadequacy and insecurity when he sees his friends seemingly growing faster than he is. Connie struggles with confusing romantic attraction to both Joseph and Bobby. The three of them are unable to reconcile all of their conflicting feelings and, in the climax of the episode,the tension culminates in a physical fight between them that is basically the end of the episode. After the fight ends the three go their separate ways back home. The characters don’t have some cheesy Kumbaya moment where they all promise their friendship will last forever. Their parents don’t give them a heartfelt monologue at the end of the episode. They simply go back to their lives and try to continue to navigate the muddy waters of adolescence. There are no lessons learned, no truths gleamed, no milestones surpassed, but that’s realistic. There aren’t individual moments in your life that you can singularly point to as being the exact moment you grew up. There are hundreds, even thousands of small events that shape us as people and for Bobby, Connie, and Joseph this is just one step in an immensely long journey.
Matthew Daugherty is a young writer from Northeast Ohio. He is primarily a fiction writer, but enjoys the occasional foray into pop culture and media criticism. He can be found Tweeting into the void at @mdaugherty1221.