‘King of the Hill’ Fans Can’t Stand Seeing Dale Gribble With A Vape and VR Goggles on the New Poster

Apparently, in the revival of King of the Hill, Dale Gribble has given up his beloved Manitoba cigarettes. Hopefully, that’s only because Dale sued them out of business.

This summer, King of the Hill will return with new episodes on Hulu, and Dale Gribble loves virtual reality and vaping his nicotine like some zoomer whose brain rotted away from all the peanut toxins.

Yesterday afternoon, Hulu released a new poster for the King of the Hill revival showing off all the topical technology that the show may apparently skewer in the coming season, and fans of Rusty Shackleford want to know why he’s wearing a government eye scanner and sucking on a lung-entry nanobot delivery stick:

It’s important to note that the controversial poster is purely promotional material, and we shouldn’t jump to conclusions about planned plot lines based on the obnoxiously modern set dressing that Hulu gave to the hallowed King of the Hill alleyway. And, based on Hank’s wrinkled frown, he’s definitely going to have exactly the disdain and distrust for such unnecessary tech that we would expect of him, though Dale might not share his distaste.

Considering that Dale has canonically smoked over one million Manitoba cigarettes, if he really does make the switch to trendy and separately toxic vaporizers in the King of the Hill revival, it will be a massive change to his character that will always be hard to square for his most hardcore fans. After all, if Hulu really wanted to switch Dale over to a slightly less carcinogenic nicotine alternative, wouldn’t it make more sense for him to be sucking on an entire tin of Zyns?

But the VR headset is really the worst part of what Dale has going on in this poster. In the first 13 seasons of King of the Hill, the conspiratorial exterminator who believes that all computers are sentient never expressed any interest in video games or cutting-edge entertainment technology, let alone the kind that literally looks like an alien brainwashing helmet. 

Although, maybe I’m being too presumptuous about Dale’s relationship with the radical new tech he’s sporting in this poster — just because Dale vapes, doesn’t mean that he can’t smoke cigarettes as well, and we don’t even know if the VR helmet is turned on. Dale could be using it as an eye-protector in case of a pocket sand attack.