"
Cartman Gets an Anal Probe", the first episode of
Comedy CentralComedy Central is an American cable television and satellite television channel that carries predominantly comedy programming, both original and syndicated....
's animated series
South ParkSouth Park is an American animated sitcom created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone for the Comedy Central television network. Intended for mature audiences, the show has become infamous for its crude, surreal, satirical, and dark humor that lampoons a wide range of topics...
, originally aired on August 13, 1997. The episode features child protagonists
CartmanEric Theodore Cartman is a fictional character on the American animated television series South Park. One of the four main characters along with fellow protagonists Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, and Kenny McCormick, Cartman is often portrayed as the series' main antagonist in opposition of his friends...
,
KyleKyle Broflovski is a fictional character in the animated television series South Park. He is voiced by and loosely based on series co-creator Matt Stone. Kyle is one of the show's four central characters, along with his friends Stan Marsh, Kenny McCormick, and Eric Cartman...
,
StanStanley "Stan" Marsh is a fictional character in the animated television series South Park. He is voiced by and loosely based on series co-creator Trey Parker. Stan is one of the show's four central characters, along with his friends Kyle Broflovski, Kenny McCormick, and Eric Cartman...
, and
KennyKenny McCormick is a fictional character in the animated television series South Park. He is one of the four central characters along with his friends Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, and Eric Cartman. His oft-muffled and indiscernible speech, the result of the parka hood covering his mouth, is...
, who attempt to rescue Ike, Kyle's brother, from abduction by aliens. At the time of its writing,
South Park creators,
Trey ParkerTrey Parker is an American animator, screenwriter, director, producer, voice artist, musician and actor, best known for being the co-creator of the television series South Park along with his creative partner and best friend Matt Stone.Parker started his film career in 1992, making a holiday short...
and
Matt StoneMatthew Richard "Matt" Stone is an American screenwriter, producer, voice artist, musician and actor, best known for being the co-creator of South Park along with creative partner Trey Parker. He is married to Angela Howard....
did not yet have a series contract with Comedy Central, and Parker later commented that they felt "pressure" to live up to the internet shorts that first made them popular. Short on money, the duo animated the episode using
cut paperCutout animation is a technique for producing animations using flat characters, props and backgrounds cut from materials such as paper, card, stiff fabric or even photographs...
stop motionStop motion is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence...
techniques—"Cartman Gets an Anal Probe" is the only
South Park episode animated without computers.
Part of a reaction to the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s in the United States,
South Park is deliberately offensive. Much of its humor, and of "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe", arises from the juxtaposition of the seeming innocence of childhood and the violent, crude behavior exhibited by the main characters. The episode also exemplifies the
carnivalesqueCarnivalesque is a term coined by the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, which refers to a literary mode that subverts and liberates the assumptions of the dominant style or atmosphere through humor and chaos....
, which includes humor, bodily excess, linguistic games that challenge official discourse, and the inversion of social structures.
When the episode was first aired in Canada, "objectionable" material was cut; it was later restored when the show was aired at a later time. Initial reviews of the episode were generally negative; critics singled out the gratuitous obscenity of the show for particular scorn and compared
South Park unfavorably with what they felt were the more complex and nuanced
The SimpsonsThe Simpsons is an American animated television sitcom created by Matt Groening for the Fox Broadcasting Company. The series is a satirical parody of a middle class American lifestyle epitomized by its eponymous family, which consists of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie...
and
Beavis and Butthead.
Background
South Park began in 1992 when
Trey ParkerTrey Parker is an American animator, screenwriter, director, producer, voice artist, musician and actor, best known for being the co-creator of the television series South Park along with his creative partner and best friend Matt Stone.Parker started his film career in 1992, making a holiday short...
and
Matt StoneMatthew Richard "Matt" Stone is an American screenwriter, producer, voice artist, musician and actor, best known for being the co-creator of South Park along with creative partner Trey Parker. He is married to Angela Howard....
, students at the
University of ColoradoThe University of Colorado at Boulder is a public research university located in Boulder, Colorado. It is the flagship university of the University of Colorado system and was founded five months before Colorado was admitted to the union in 1876...
, met in a film class. They created two Christmas-related animated shorts called "Jesus vs. Frosty" and "Jesus vs. Santa". The low-budget, crudely made
Jesus vs. Frosty featured prototypes for the main characters of
South Park.
Fox Broadcasting CompanyThe Fox Broadcasting Company , commonly referred to as Fox , is an American television network owned by Fox Entertainment Group, part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. Launched on October 9, 1986, from 2004 to 2009 Fox was the highest-rated broadcast network in the 18–49 demographic...
(FOX) executive
Brian Graden-Biography:Graden grew up in Illinois and graduated from Hillsboro High School in 1981. He graduated from Oral Roberts University in 1985 with a degree in business, and later graduated with a MBA from Harvard....
saw the film and in 1995 commissioned Parker and Stone to create a second short that he could send to his friends as a video Christmas card. Titled "Jesus vs. Santa", it resembled the style of the later series more closely. The video was popular and widely shared, both by duplication and over the internet. After the shorts began to generate interest for a possible television series, Parker and Stone developed a concept based on the town of South Park and the characters Stan, Kyle, Kenny, and Cartman. Later, when
Comedy CentralComedy Central is an American cable television and satellite television channel that carries predominantly comedy programming, both original and syndicated....
expressed interest in the series, Parker and Stone brought up the idea of a Mr. Hankey episode during negotiations with the network executives. Parker claimed he said during a meeting, "One thing we have to know before we really go any further: how do you feel about talking poo?" The executives were receptive to the idea, which Parker said was one of the main reasons he and Stone decided to sign on with the channel.
South Park was part of a reaction to the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s in the United States, in which issues such as
Murphy BrownMurphy Brown is an American situation comedy which aired on CBS from November 14, 1988 to May 18, 1998, for a total of 247 episodes. The program starred Candice Bergen as the eponymous Murphy Brown, an investigative journalist and news anchor for FYI, a fictional CBS television newsmagazine.The...
's motherhood, Tinky Winky's sexuality, and the
SimpsonsThe Simpson family is a family of fictional characters featured in the animated television series The Simpsons. The Simpsons are a nuclear family consisting of the married couple Homer and Marge and their three children Bart, Lisa and Maggie. They live at 742 Evergreen Terrace in the fictional town...
' family values were extensively debated. The culture wars, and
political correctnessPolitical correctness is a term denoting language, ideas, policies, and behavior seen as seeking to minimize social offense in gender, racial, cultural, handicap, and age-related usages...
in particular, were driven by the belief that
relativismRelativism is the idea that some elements or aspects of experience or culture are relative to, i.e., dependent on, other elements or aspects.Common statements that might be considered relativistic include:* "That's true for you but not for me."...
was becoming more relevant to daily life and thus that what were perceived as "traditional" and reliable values were losing their place in American society.
South Park, one scholar explains, "made a name for itself as rude, crude, vulgar, offensive, and potentially dangerous" within this debate about values. Its critics argued that Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny were poor role models for children while its supporters celebrated the show's defense of free speech.
Plot summary
As
KyleKyle Broflovski is a fictional character in the animated television series South Park. He is voiced by and loosely based on series co-creator Matt Stone. Kyle is one of the show's four central characters, along with his friends Stan Marsh, Kenny McCormick, and Eric Cartman...
,
StanStanley "Stan" Marsh is a fictional character in the animated television series South Park. He is voiced by and loosely based on series co-creator Trey Parker. Stan is one of the show's four central characters, along with his friends Kyle Broflovski, Kenny McCormick, and Eric Cartman...
,
KennyKenny McCormick is a fictional character in the animated television series South Park. He is one of the four central characters along with his friends Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, and Eric Cartman. His oft-muffled and indiscernible speech, the result of the parka hood covering his mouth, is...
, and
CartmanEric Theodore Cartman is a fictional character on the American animated television series South Park. One of the four main characters along with fellow protagonists Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, and Kenny McCormick, Cartman is often portrayed as the series' main antagonist in opposition of his friends...
wait for the school bus, Cartman tells the boys about a dream he had the previous night about being abducted by aliens. The others try to convince him that the events actually happened, but Cartman refuses to believe them.
ChefJerome "Chef" McElroy is a former recurring character on the Comedy Central series South Park. Voiced by Isaac Hayes, Chef, as his nickname implied, worked as an elementary school cafeteria worker in the fictional town of South Park, Colorado...
pulls up in his car and asks if the boys saw the spaceship the previous evening, inadvertently confirming Cartman's "dream", and relays stories of alien anal probes (which throughout the episode Cartman denies he experienced). After Chef leaves, the school bus picks up the boys and they watch in horror as the aliens abduct Kyle's little brother, Ike. Kyle spends the rest of the episode attempting to rescue him.
At school, Cartman begins to fart fire and Kyle unsuccessfully tries to convince his teacher
Mr. GarrisonHerbert Garrison is a recurring character in the South Park cartoon series. He is voiced by Trey Parker. For the first eight seasons of the series, the character was known as Mr. Garrison but in season 9 underwent sex reassignment surgery. The character was thereafter known to the other characters...
to excuse him from class in order to find his brother. When Chef learns that Kyle's brother was abducted and sees a machine emerge from Cartman's rear end, he helps the boys escape from school by pulling the fire alarm. Once they are outside, Cartman reiterates that his abduction was just a dream, when suddenly he is hit by a beam and starts singing and dancing. Soon afterward, a spaceship appears. Kyle throws a stone and the spaceship fires back, propelling Kenny into the road where he is run over by a herd of cows and a police car, killing him.
Stan and Kyle meet Wendy at Stark's Pond and she suggests using the machine lodged inside of Cartman to contact the aliens. To lure the aliens back, the children tie Cartman to a tree and then an 80 foot (24 m) satellite dish emerges from his rear. The alien spaceship arrives and Ike jumps to safety. In the meantime, the aliens communicate with the cows in the area, having found them to be the most intelligent species on the planet. Cartman is again abducted by the aliens and returned to the bus stop the following day.
Production
Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators of
South Park, wrote "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe" and Parker directed; it was made on a budget of $300,000. It received poor results from test audiences and Comedy Central executives were uncertain whether or not to order additional episodes of the show. However, when the two original
South Park shorts, "Jesus vs. Frosty" and "Jesus vs. Santa", began to produce internet buzz, the network paid Parker and Stone to write one more episode. In writing "
Weight Gain 4000"Weight Gain 4000" is the second episode of the first season of the animated television series South Park. It originally aired on Comedy Central in the United States on August 20, 1997. In the episode, the residents of South Park excitedly prepare for a visit by celebrity Kathie Lee Gifford, whom...
", the duo sought to give the network an idea of how each episode could differ from the others. The network liked the script and agreed to commit to a series when Parker and Stone said they would not write another individual episode until Comedy Central signed off on a season of at least six episodes.
Parker has said that "In the first episode, we felt the pressure to live up to Spirit of Christmas, and tried to push things ... maybe further than we should". In contrast, he explains, "Subsequent episodes have been more about making fun of things that are taboo ... without just throwing a bunch of dirty words in there." The pilot was originally 28 minutes long, but Parker and Stone had to rewrite and reshoot parts of it so that it would fit in the 22-minute slot on Comedy Central. For example, in the original pilot, Cartman farts fire because some older kids feed him hot tamales, while in the shortened version, he does so because of the alien probe implanted in him.
"Cartman Gets an Anal Probe" is the only episode of
South Park Parker and Stone animated completely with traditional
cut paperCutout animation is a technique for producing animations using flat characters, props and backgrounds cut from materials such as paper, card, stiff fabric or even photographs...
stop motionStop motion is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence...
animation techniques. This laborious process took three-and-a-half months to complete; the characters who are not speaking rarely move, saving time in the animation process. Almost all subsequent episodes, including the new scenes made for the television pilot, were computer animated.
Style and themes
Describing the general tone of the show, Teri Fitsell of
The New Zealand HeraldThe New Zealand Herald is a daily broadsheet newspaper published in Auckland, New Zealand. It is owned by APN News & Media. Circulation peaked at over 200,000 copies in 2006, declining to 187,129 by June 2008. Despite the name, its main circulation area is the Auckland region...
explains that "South Park is a vicious social satire that works by spotlighting not the immorality of these kids but their amorality, and contrasting it with the conniving hypocrisy of the adults who surround them." Often compared to
The SimpsonsThe Simpsons is an American animated television sitcom created by Matt Groening for the Fox Broadcasting Company. The series is a satirical parody of a middle class American lifestyle epitomized by its eponymous family, which consists of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie...
and
King of the HillKing of the Hill is an American animated series created by Mike Judge and Greg Daniels, that ran from January 12, 1997 to September 13, 2009 on Fox. It centers on the Hills, a small-town Methodist family in Arlen, Texas...
,
South Park, according to Tom Lappin of
Scotland on SundayScotland on Sunday is a Scottish Sunday newspaper, published in Edinburgh by The Scotsman Publications Ltd and consequently assuming the role of Sunday sister to its daily stablemate The Scotsman...
, "has a truly malevolent streak that sets it apart" from these shows; he cites the repeated death of Kenny as an example.
The humor of the show comes from the "disparity" between the "cute" appearance of the characters and their "crude" behavior. However, Parker and Stone said in an early interview that the show's language is realistic. "There are so many shows where little kids are good and sweet, and it's just not real...Don't people remember what they were like in third grade? We were little bastards." Frederic Biddle of
The Boston GlobeThe Boston Globe is an American daily newspaper based in Boston, Massachusetts. The Globe has been owned by The New York Times Company since 1993. Its chief print rival is the Boston Herald....
notes how the show "constantly plays on its grade-school aesthetic for shock value, with great success", arguing that at its height, it is "more a profane '
PeanutsPeanuts is a syndicated daily and Sunday comic strip written and illustrated by Charles M. Schulz, which ran from October 2, 1950, to February 13, 2000 , continuing in reruns afterward...
' than a downsized '
Beavis and Butt-headBeavis and Butt-head is an American animated television series created by Mike Judge. Judge's short film "Frog Baseball", starring the characters Beavis and Butt-head was featured on Liquid Television, a show featuring short animated and live action material that could be considered the precursor...
.'" He points, for example, to Kenny, who symbolically represents the voiceless underclass, which is eliminated in each episode. Claire Bickley of the
Toronto SunThe Toronto Sun is an English language daily tabloid newspaper published in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is known for its daily "Sunshine Girl" feature and for what it sees as a populist conservative editorial stance.-History:...
explains that "The show captures that mix of innocence and viciousness that can co-exist in kids that age", that "the boys are fascinated by bodily functions", and that they "mimic adult behavior and language". For example, Kyle instructs Stan and Wendy to "make sweet love down by the fire", a phrase he learns from Chef. In a light-hearted study of the humor of flatulence, Jim Dawson explains how the rise of adult animation in the 1990s allowed television to indulge in such humor with
The Ren and Stimpy ShowThe Ren and Stimpy Show is an American/Canadian animated television series created by Canadian animator John Kricfalusi. The series concerns the adventures of the titular characters: Ren Höek, a psychotic "asthma-hound" chihuahua, and Stimpson J. Cat, a dimwitted Manx cat...
,
The Simpsons, and
Beavis and Butthead. Beginning with "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe",
South Park builds on this tradition.
The episode employs what literary theorist
Mikhail BakhtinMikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher, literary critic, semiotician and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language...
calls the
carnivalesqueCarnivalesque is a term coined by the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, which refers to a literary mode that subverts and liberates the assumptions of the dominant style or atmosphere through humor and chaos....
. As Ethan Thompson explains in his article, "Good Demo, Bad Taste:
South Park as Carnivalesque Satire", the style consists of four crucial elements: humor,
bodily excessThe grotesque body is a concept, or literary trope, put forward by Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin in his study of Francois Rabelais' work. Through the use of the grotesque body in his novels, Rabelais related political conflicts to human physiology...
, linguistic games that challenge official discourse, and the inversion of social structures. Cartman's body—his obesity and his inability to control his farting—exemplifies the grotesque. The boys swear throughout the episode, using words and phrases such as "fat ass", "Jew", and "dildo", challenging the boundaries of appropriate language. Finally, the social structure of the town is inverted, as the episode focuses on the knowledge that the four boys have of the aliens as opposed to the ignorant and incompetent adults. Moreover, the aliens perceive the cows as more intelligent than the humans, inverting the species order.
South Park tends to employ large-scale musical numbers in its episodes, often parodying 1930s cartoons. For example, Cartman sings part of "
I Love to SingaI Love to Singa is both the title of a song written by Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg and a later Merrie Melodies animated short subject based on that song. Arlen and Harburg originally wrote the tune for the 1936 Warner Bros. feature-length film The Singing Kid...
", from the cartoon of the same name, when he is struck by a beam from the alien ship.
Release and reception
The episode aired for the first time at 10 pm EDT in the United States on August 13, 1997 on Comedy Central.
South Park originally aired during
prime timePrime time or primetime is the block of programming on television during the middle of the evening.The term prime time is often defined in terms of a fixed time period, for example, from 8:00 pm to 11:00 pm...
after
SeinfeldSeinfeld is an American television sitcom that originally aired on NBC from July 5, 1989, to May 14, 1998, lasting nine seasons, and is now in syndication. The eponymous series was created by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, with the latter starring as a fictionalized version of himself...
on Canada's Global TV, with objectionable material cut from the show. The "dildo" jokes were removed from the pilot as well as two scenes in which Kyle kicks his baby brother, Ike. After complaints from viewers, the series was moved to midnight on October 17, 1997 and the deleted material was restored. Almost a year later after its original air date, the episode aired for the first time in Britain (outside of satellite television) on July 10, 1998 on
Channel 4Channel 4 is a UK public-service television broadcaster which began working on November 2, 1982. Although commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority , the station owned now and operated by the Channel Four Television...
. A station representative said "It's for the audience coming back from the pub with a curry". The episode was first released on video on May 5, 1998 as part of a the three-volume
VHSVideo Home System, better known by its abbreviation VHS, was a video tape recording standard developed during the 1970s. It was released to the public during the latter half of the decade. During the late part of the 1970s and the early 1980s it formed one-half of the VHS vs Betamax war, which it...
set, which included introductions to each show by Parker and Stone.
"Cartman Gets an Anal Probe" initially earned a
Nielsen RatingNielsen ratings are audience measurement systems developed by Nielsen Media Research, in an effort to determine the audience size and composition of television programming in the United States...
rating of 1.3, translating to 980,000 viewers, which is considered high for a
cable programCable television in the United States is a common form of television delivery, generally by subscription. Cable television first became available in the United States in 1948, with subscription services in 1949...
in the United States. In April 2007,
The New Zealand HeraldThe New Zealand Herald is a daily broadsheet newspaper published in Auckland, New Zealand. It is owned by APN News & Media. Circulation peaked at over 200,000 copies in 2006, declining to 187,129 by June 2008. Despite the name, its main circulation area is the Auckland region...
called the first episode "a huge success", however reviews at the time of the episode's airing were generally negative, most focusing on the low, obscene comedy. Bruce Fretts of
Entertainment WeeklyEntertainment Weekly is an American magazine, published by the Time division of Time Warner, that covers film, television, music, Broadway theatre, books and popular culture. Unlike celebrity-focused publications US Weekly, People, and In Touch Weekly, EWs primary concentration is on entertainment...
thought poorly of the writing and characters stating that "If only the kids' jokes were as fresh as their mouths" and "It might help if the South Park kids had personalities, but they're as one-dimensional as the show's cut-and-paste animation". Tim Goodman of
The San Francisco ExaminerSan Francisco Examiner is a U.S. daily newspaper. It has been published continuously in San Francisco, California, since the late 19th century.-19th century:...
acknowledged that many viewers will find South Park "vile, rude, sick, potentially dangerous, childish and mean-spirited". He argued that viewers "have to come into 'South Park' with a bent for irony, sarcasm, anger and an understanding that cardboard cut-out animation of foul-mouthed third-graders is a tragically underused comic premise."
Calling the series "sophomoric, gross, and unfunny," Hal Boedeker of the
Orlando Sentinel believed that this episode "makes such a bad impression that it's hard to get on the show's strange wavelength." Ann Hodges of the
Houston Chronicle considered the show "made by and for childish grown-ups" and for "adults who enjoy kid shows". Seeing the show as the inheritor of
The Simpsons and
Beavis and Butthead, Ginia Bellafante of
TimeTime is a component of the measuring system used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify the motions of objects...
noted its failure to cohere and considered the show "devoid of subtext". Caryn James of
The New York Times commented that the series "succeeds best in small touches" but "seems to have a future." In a generally negative review of the first three episodes of the series,
Tom ShalesTom Shales is an American critic of television programming and operations. He is best-known as TV critic for The Washington Post; in 1988, Shales received the Pulitzer Prize...
of
The Washington PostThe Washington Post is the newspaper with the largest circulation in Washington, D.C. and is the city's oldest paper, founded in 1877. Being located in the nation's capital, it has a particular emphasis on national politics and international affairs...
, wrote that "Most of the alleged humor on the premiere is self-conscious and self-congratulatory in its vulgarity: flatulence jokes, repeated use of the word 'dildo' (in the literal as well as pejorative sense) and a general air of malicious unpleasantness." In one of the few generally positive reviews, Eric Mink of the
Daily News praised the South Park universe and the "distinct, interesting characters" within it. He singled out Cartman, calling him "the most vibrant of the bunch", describing him as "a bitter old man living in an 8-year-old's body".
External links