Exclusive: Celebrate The 20th Anniversary Of “Mission Hill” With This Excerpt From Our Upcoming Book

Mission Hill is celebrating it’s 20th Anniversary (September 24th, 1999) and we decided to give you guys a sneak peek of our upcoming untitled book about the history of adult animation. This is our chapter for Mission Hill which will be included in the hard copy release coming soon to a store near you!

Had social media been around when Mission Hill would have lasted a heck of a lot longer than one season. Originally picked up by WB, the series only aired a handful of episodes before finishing it’s run on Adult Swim.

The important note on Mission Hill, is that the international response from Australia, Canada, and elsewhere still keeps this series in fans’ prayers for a renewal or continuation of the show’s first season (there were six episodes that were never seen that were nearly complete before the show was canned for good). A lot of this has to do with the post-Daria crowd that would find refuge in reruns that would help embolden the hipster revolution that would come about in the late naughties. The series was ahead of its time in terms of it’s presentation looking more like an MTV series on the wrong network with premises revolving around masturbation, gay romance (a taboo topic when this series was produced in the late nineties), and contemporary music accompanying the original theme. 

The characters were a little more polished than the standard animated fare at the time, again, probably indirect influence from the likes of Daria through a DNA-strand of Friends could also be seen. The premise revolves around 24-year old Andy French who has a gaggle of roommates including his brother Kevin, his bff Jim, his girlfriend Gwen, and of course Vickie. 

Co-creators Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein concocted a world of twenty-somethings that The Simpsons simply weren’t even touching at the time, and used their personal experiences  (as well as experiences from their pal, The Simpsons creator Matt Groening) to potentially orchestrate a similar rise to fame for Andy to eventually become a successful cartoon producer. Unfortunately, we never got to see this full-fleshed out, clearly, the WB was going through an identity crisis in terms of creative direction and the series suffered as a result. Mission Hill is critically the Apollo 13 of adult animation, in that the series didn’t get to the moon, but we got a great show out of it.