''King of the Hill'' features Internet porn

Hold onto your propane tanks, folks: ”King of the Hill” has quite the feat planned for Sweeps. Or rather, quite the FEET. In the May 14 episode of the animated Fox sitcom, dear ol’ Peggy winds up making — oh, how can we put this delicately? — Internet foot fetish videos.

Sydney Pollack lends his voice as a duplicitous film director who tricks Peggy into thinking that she’s shooting empowerment videos for women with large feet; Hank and the gang then discover that he’s actually turned her into the star of a slightly naughtier enterprise. But the jokes don’t stop there. To tease the show, ”Hill”’s producers are unveiling a website that includes interactive games like Paint Peggy’s Nails and (gulp!) Foot Spanking.

The cross-media stunt was hatched after ”Hill” staffers were discussing how Internet domain names can sell for ridiculous prices. The writer of this episode, John Collier, then registered the address. ”I got a message from [”Hill”s studio] Twentieth Century Fox months later saying, ‘We wanted to get ”peggysfeet.com,” but it’s already owned by someone,”’ chuckles series executive producer, Richard Appel. ”And I said, ‘Well, luckily it’s one of the writers on our show, so I THINK we have the inside track…. I’d like to believe that had we not registered it, 7 million people would have tried to after the episode aired.”

While Appel assures us that Peggy’s bizarre adventure still rates as family-friendly fare, one question remains: Didn’t someone there have to do a little, um, research? ”Without saying I knew at the time that such conduct was occurring in a workday,” Appel says, ”I do know that some visits — purely for purposes of accuracy — were made to these types of websites. I haven’t yet visited one, but the general consensus was that it’s much more about the smushing of mashed potatoes and worms than actual sex.”