While recent headlines about Saudi Aramco focus on the oil company’s second-quarter financial results, the oil giant is also receiving attention for a reference in the revival of popular US show King of the Hill.
The animated show, which ran on network television from 1997 to 2009, has returned – this time to streaming platform Hulu – after more than 15 years.
The show, which quickly gained popularity in the late 1990s, portrays blue-collar conservative man Hank Hill and his family, living in the traditional, albeit changing fictional town of Arlen, Texas, where he proudly sells propane and propane accessories.
In the first episode of the revival, Hank said he has just returned from spending several years working in Saudi Arabia.
“I was the assistant manager in charge of Arabian propane and Arabian propane accessories for the Aramco,” Hank tells a man as he travels home after a long flight to Texas.
As Hank’s wife, Peggy, speaks with passengers on a plane, we learn that the they’ve been living in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where Saudi Aramco’s headquarters is located and which contains a community consisting of Saudi Aramco workers from overseas.
Peggy tells the passengers that Hank became a big fan of hummus and falafel while living overseas, and there is a flashback of what life was like for the Hills in Saudi Arabia.
For a show that spent its original run portraying the quirks and idiosyncrasies of a middle-class Texas family, the first episode of the revival referring to the Hills’ time spent in Saudi Arabia might come as a surprise, but given the size of the energy industry in Texas, the idea is firmly in the realm of possibility.
According to Saudi Aramco’s website, its US-based company, Aramco America, has more than 500 employees working in the country, and consists of three Aramco research centres in Boston, Detroit and Houston.
“Our history in the US dates back more than 70 years,” reads the company’s biography page, which also highlights Saudi Aramco’s “first international downstream joint venture” with US oil brand Texaco in 1989.
That joint venture, according to Aramco, eventually led to the company owning North America’s largest crude oil refinery in Texas.
Globally, Saudi Aramco employs more than 75,000 people, and through the King of the Hill revival, that now includes Hank Hill of Arlen, Texas.
