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South Park is an American animated sitcom, notorious for its crude, surreal, and often dark humor, which satirizes a wide range of topics including religion, politics, violence, abuse, sexuality, and mental illness. Matt Stone and Trey Parker created the show and continue to do most of the writing, directing, and voice acting.
The narrative revolves around four boys — Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, Eric Cartman, and Kenny McCormick — and their bizarre experiences in the titular mountain town. The show has won acclaim and a plethora of awards, including three Primetime Emmys for Outstanding Animated Program.
Comedy Central has aired a total of 181 episodes since the show's debut in 1997.
Discussion
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Quotations
Cartman that is the stupidest thing you've ever said, this week!
Come on, children. Let's go find ourselves a nice white woman to make love to.
(It Hits The Fan)
Dad! Tom Cruise won't come out of the closet!
("Trapped in the Closet")
Drugs are bad because if you do drugs you're a hippie and hippies suck.
("Ike's Wee Wee", ep. 2-5)
I think the rabbit just crapped on my jacket .
I wanna make love to you woman, I wanna lay you down by the fire!
Encyclopedia
South Park is an American animated sitcom, notorious for its crude, surreal, and often dark humor, which satirizes a wide range of topics including religion, politics, violence, abuse, sexuality, and mental illness. Matt Stone and Trey Parker created the show and continue to do most of the writing, directing, and voice acting.
The narrative revolves around four boys — Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, Eric Cartman, and Kenny McCormick — and their bizarre experiences in the titular mountain town. The show has won acclaim and a plethora of awards, including three Primetime Emmys for Outstanding Animated Program.
Comedy Central has aired a total of 181 episodes since the show's debut in 1997. Doug Herzog, who brought South Park to the network, credits the show's strong ratings for putting Comedy Central "on the map". The twelfth season concluded in November 2008, and the thirteenth season will premiere on March 11, 2009. Parker and Stone are under contract to produce 42 new episodes through to 2011.
Two feature-length movies have also been released; the musical film South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut had a widespread theatrical run in 1999, and the three-episode Imaginationland story arc was reissued straight-to-DVD in 2008.
Premise
The show revolves around the adventures of four boys — Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, Eric Cartman, and Kenny McCormick (often called "the boys" when as a group for easier reference) — and their friends living in the fictional small town of South Park, Colorado. The boys were in the third grade but midway through season four they entered the fourth grade where they have stayed ever since. There are many recurring characters on the show, including the boys' families, school staff, and other students. These include Leopold "Butters" Stotch, Chef (who no longer appears in the show), Mr. Hankey, Towelie, Jesus, and Satan. There are also many other minor characters.
South Parks early episodes tended to be shock value-oriented and featured more slapstick-style humor than later episodes. Although satire had been used on the show occasionally earlier on, it became more prevalent in later episodes. Episodes have parodied Michael Jackson ("The Jeffersons"), Paris Hilton ("Stupid Spoiled Whore Video Playset"), and The Passion of the Christ ("The Passion of the Jew"). The show has also addressed serious political issues such as terrorism ("Cartoon Wars"), American immigration policy ("Goobacks"), gay marriage ("Follow That Egg!"), and the Terri Schiavo case ("Best Friends Forever").
Controversies over South Park have occurred numerous times. The show depicts what many people find to be taboo subject matter, from its use of vulgarity ("It Hits the Fan") to its satire of subjects such as religion and cults (such as "All About the Mormons?", "Bloody Mary", "Red Hot Catholic Love", Fantastic Easter Special", and "Trapped in the Closet"), sexuality ("The Death Camp of Tolerance"), drugs ("My Future Self n' Me", "Up the Down Steroid"), and global warming ("Two Days Before the Day After Tomorrow"). The show, for these reasons, has been banned in Russia, following the outcry of certain conservative political groups. Stone and Parker are self-described "equal opportunity offenders" and episodes often lampoon all sides of a contentious issue, rather than taking a concrete position. Usually, the boys and/or other characters ponder over what has transpired during an episode and convey the important lesson taken from it with a speech commonly beginning with the phrase "You know what? I've learned something today...".
Production
Origin
South Park began in 1992 when Trey Parker and Matt Stone, at the time students at the University of Colorado, met in a film class and created an animated short called Jesus vs. Frosty. The low-budget crudely made film featured prototypes of the main characters of South Park, including a character resembling Cartman but named "Kenny", an unnamed character resembling what is today Kenny, and two near-identical unnamed characters who would resemble Stan and Kyle.
FOX executive Brian Graden saw the film and in 1995 commissioned Parker and Stone to create a second short film 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, and featured a martial arts duel and subsequent truce between Jesus and Santa Claus over the true meaning of Christmas. This video was later featured in the episode "A Very Crappy Christmas" in which Stan, Kyle, Cartman, Kenny, and Mr. Hankey "save" Christmas for the town. The video was popular and was widely shared, both by duplication and over the Internet. This led to talks to create a series, first with FOX, then with Comedy Central, where the series debuted on August 13, 1997.
Writing
Unlike most animated shows, which take months to be written and produced, episodes of South Park are usually created in less than a week. New episodes air on Wednesdays, so production begins the previous Thursday and takes the entire team 100--120 hours each to complete in the ensuing week. Almost all work on the series is done in-house at South Park Studios in Culver City, Los Angeles.
Thanks to this efficient method, the creators are able to respond quickly to current events. The December 17, 2003 episode "It's Christmas in Canada" depicted the capture of Saddam Hussein a mere three days after the actual event, even referring to the "spider hole" in which he was found. In this instance — as with the Elián González episode ("Quintuplets 2000") — the creators changed the production of an episode at the last minute to focus on the new world event. The Season 12 episode "About Last Night..." aired just 23 hours after Barack Obama was declared the winner in the 2008 presidential election. The episode uses excerpts from the speeches given by Obama and John McCain the night before, and also refers to the celebration that ensued following Obama's victory.
Stan Marsh and Kyle Broflovski were initially designed to represent creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone respectively; however, both have admitted to ultimately identifying far more with Cartman. The town of South Park is inspired by both real-life towns in the South Park basin such as Fairplay and the Denver suburbs such as Littleton, the sites of the respective upbringings of South Park co-creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone.
Animation
The show's style of animation was inspired by the paper cut-out cartoons made by Terry Gilliam for Monty Python's Flying Circus, of which Trey Parker and Matt Stone have been lifelong fans. Construction paper and traditional stop motion cutout animation techniques were used in the original animated shorts and in the pilot episode made for Comedy Central. The pilot episode required three months to produce. Subsequent episodes have been produced by computer animation providing a similar look to the originals while requiring a fraction of the time to produce. Episodes of South Park are usually completed in four or five days.
Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator (and previously CorelDRAW) is used to design new characters and objects, which are then imported into and animated using Maya
(PowerAnimator was used prior to the fifth season). The use of PowerAnimator and Maya is an interesting choice as they are mainly used for 3D computer graphics; Parker and Stone compared it to "building a sandcastle with a bulldozer." However, according to Director of Animation Eric Stough, PowerAnimator was chosen because it "has the best shadow and ray casting, so it looks like construction paper sitting on a camera stand." Several other techniques are used to achieve the "amateur" look. Objects are moved across the screen manually and a "stepped" curve is applied to every second frame giving motion an "organic jumpy look". The show is also animated at 24 frames per second and transferred to 30 fps video using the 3:2 pulldown process.
PowerAnimator was also used for special effects such as the disco lights in the episode "Big Gay Al's Big Gay Boat Ride" and the laser beams in "Mecha-Streisand". Nowadays, the team uses Motion for special effects. In the beginning, animation was done on SGI workstations linked to a 54-processor render farm that could render 10 to 15 shots an hour. For a short time, Windows computers were used. When Maya was released for Mac, production shifted to Mac workstations. The studio now runs a 120-processor render farm that can produce 30 or more shots an hour.
The appearance of characters and scenes has become less crude over time, largely in order to enhance the comedic effect. Special effects, such as prepackaged explosions, have replaced cardboard-style fires. Light shading has been used to highlight "sappy", movie-like moments as well as some of Cartman's dramatic poses. Some episodes, such as "Tweek vs. Craig" and "Mr. Garrison's Fancy New Vagina", have even incorporated sections of live-action video. A few episodes use an entirely different style of animation, for example, portions of "Good Times with Weapons" was done in anime style, while "Make Love, Not Warcraft" was done partly in machinima.
Voice cast
Matt Stone and Trey Parker voice most of the male South Park characters, while April Stewart and Mona Marshall (formerly Mary Kay Bergman and Eliza Schneider) voice most of the female characters such as Wendy Testaburger and Sheila Broflovski. Other voices are currently provided by Adrien Beard (Token Black), Vernon Chatman (Towelie), and Jennifer Howell (Bebe Stevens). Former members of the voice cast include Isaac Hayes (Chef) and John Hansen (Mr. Slave). Hayes, a Scientologist, left after a falling out with the creators over their treatment of Scientology in the episode "Trapped in the Closet".
Celebrities that appear on the show are usually impersonated, however, some celebrities lend their voice to their characters. Celebrities who have voiced themselves include Jay Leno, and the bands Radiohead and Korn. Celebrities who have lent their voices to other characters include Jennifer Aniston, George Clooney, Cheech & Chong, Henry Winkler, Natasha Henstridge, and Peter Serafinowicz.
The voices are often edited with Pro Tools.
Music
The show's original theme song was a musical score performed by the band Primus and sang by the band's lead singer Les Claypool. The original composition was originally slower but was sped up for the show. An instrumental version of the original theme song is still often played during the show's closing credits. The opening theme song has been remixed three times during the course of the series (as of season ten), and certain lines have been altered. Starting from the episode "4th Grade", a hip hop version of the theme song remixed by Paul Robb was used. From season six onwards, the theme song changed to an even faster version with a more country music influence. Halfway through season 10 the title music was once again remixed to sample the song "Whamola", performed by The Les Claypool Frog Brigade, from the album Purple Onion.
Additional musical contributions to the show formerly came from Isaac Hayes, who voiced Chef's singing of usually sexual songs to explain certain adult themes to the boys. The Chef song "Chocolate Salty Balls" was released as a single in the UK in 1998 to support the Chef Aid album and became a number one hit. Many episodes also feature highly melodramatic musical scores to comically exaggerate the emotional content of the scene. For example, melancholy music plays in the background when Timmy sends away his beloved pet turkey, Gobbles, in the episode "Helen Keller! The Musical". In the show, Eric Cartman will often burst into song to convey a false altruism or optimism that belies his baser motivations. In "Red Sleigh Down", he sings "Poo-Choo Train", an unnervingly cheery Christmas carol, in an obvious attempt to convince Mr. Hankey and Santa Claus that he is worthy of Christmas presents. Cartman also uses the song "Heat of the Moment" by the band Asia in the episode "Kenny Dies" to convince the US Senate to approve stem cell research.
Popular songs such as "Kyle's Mom is a Big Fat Bitch" originated on the show, but the creators' musical abilities were not frequently used until the release of South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. The film's soundtrack (co-written and produced by Grammy Award-winning composer-lyricist Marc Shaiman) featured songs like "Blame Canada" (nominated for an Oscar), "I'm Super," "La Resistance Medley," "Hell Isn't Good," "Mountain Town," "Uncle Fucka" (won an MTV Movie Award for "Best Musical Performance"), "Up There," and "What Would Brian Boitano Do?." Parker and Stone have, on occasion, performed these songs (and others) with their band DVDA.
Distribution
Censorship edited versions of South Park episodes, with the TV-14 rating, began broadcasting in syndication on September 19, 2005 on various local channels around the US such as: WPIX in New York and New Jersey. The series is co-distributed by Debmar-Mercury (owned by Lions Gate Films) and 20th Television; the latter replaced Tribune Entertainment as co-distributor in early 2008, after Tribune ceased business. In Australia, the show is broadcasted on SBS and The Comedy Channel. In Belgium, the show is broadcasted on TMF. In Canada, the show is broadcasted on Comedy Network. In Estonia, the show is broadcasted on TV6. In Germany, the show is broadcasted on MTV Germany and Comedy Central Germany. In Ireland, the show is broadcasted on Paramount Comedy and MTV, with the Irish language version version being broadcasted on TG4. In Israel, the show is broadcasted on Bip. In Italy, the show is broadcasted on Comedy Central Italy. In the United Kingdom, the show was broadcasted on Channel 4 till 2004 and now Sky1, Paramount Comedy, and MTV One. In Serbia, the show is broadcasted on B92.
In March 2008, Comedy Central made all South Park episodes available for legal streaming on the South Park Studios website. When asked about the site Stone and Parker said, "We got really sick of having to download our own show illegally all the time so we gave ourselves a legal alternative." Within less than a week, the site served more than a million streams of full episodes, and the number grew to 55 million by October 2008. However, legal issues prevent the episodes from being accessible in Canada, the UK, Australia, and a few other territories outside the US. Starting with Season 13 the show will be broadcast in high definition, as well as Season 12 being released in high definition on Blu-ray Disc format.
Impact
In 2007, Time magazine included the show on their list of the "100 Best TV Shows of All Time." South Park was named the 12th greatest TV show of the past 25 years by Entertainment Weekly in 2008.
Ratings
South Park was a huge ratings success for Comedy Central and is seen as being largely responsible for the success of the channel. As of July 2008, South Park remains the highest rated series on Comedy Central. The show's first episode, "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe", earned a Nielsen rating of 1.3 (65,000 viewers), considered high for a cable program. By the sixth episode, "Death", the show had reached a 1.7 rating. The ratings continued to rise rapidly with the eighth ("Starvin' Marvin'") and tenth ("Damien") episodes earning a 4.8 and 6.4 rating, respectively. The ratings peaked with the second episode of season two, "Cartman's Mom Is Still a Dirty Slut", which aired on April 22, 1998. The episode earned an 8.2 rating (6.2 million viewers) and became the highest-rated non-sports show on cable television. The success of South Park prompted more cable companies to carry Comedy Central and led it to become one of the fastest-growing cable channels. The number of households that had Comedy Central jumped from 9.1 million in 1997 to 50 million in June 1998.
By the third season (1999), the series' ratings began to falter. The third season premiere episode drew only 3.4 million viewers, a dramatic drop from the 5.5 million of the previous season's premiere. Stone and Parker attributed this drop in the show's ratings to the media hype that surrounded the show in the previous year, adding that the third season ratings reflected the show's "true" fan base. A diminished level of creativity caused by the stress of making the film has also been cited as a reason for the drop in ratings in the third season. The show's ratings dropped further in its fourth season (2000), with episodes averaging just above 1.5 million viewers. The ratings climbed to 2.3 million in July 2001 (season five) and to 2.8 million in 2002 (season six). In its next three seasons, the show lingered around a Nielsen rating of 2.7 (3 million viewers). The one hundredth episode earned a 2.7, as did the eighth season (2004). The ninth season (2005) earned a 2.6 rating.
Awards
South Park is the one of the very few actively running television series that has won a CableACE Award. It won the award for Best Animated Series in 1997, the last year the awards were given out. In 1998, South Park was nominated for the Annie Award for Outstanding Achievement in an Animated Primetime or Late Night Television Program. It was also nominated for the 1998 GLAAD Award for Outstanding TV — Individual Episode for "Big Gay Al's Big Gay Boat Ride". It also received an Image Award nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series (Isaac Hayes) in 1999.
South Park has been nominated for the Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program seven times (1998, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007). The show has now won twice, for the 2005 episode "Best Friends Forever" and the 2006 episode "Make Love, Not Warcraft". The Imaginationland trilogy won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program (For Programming One Hour Or More) in 2008.
In 2006, the show won a Peabody Award. South Park was nominated for a 2006 Teen Choice Award for "Best Animated Show", but lost to Family Guy.
Media and merchandise
In 1999, less than two years after the series first aired, a feature-length film was released. The film, a comedy/musical, was generally well-received by critics. The film satirizes the controversy surrounding the film itself and gained a spot in the 2001 edition of Guinness World Records for "Most Swearing in an Animated Film". The song "Blame Canada" from the film's soundtrack was nominated for an Oscar for "Best Music, Original Song".
Several video games based on the series have been released. South Park, a first-person shooter, was released in by Acclaim for the PC, Nintendo 64, and PlayStation. This was followed in 1999 by South Park: Chef's Luv Shack, a party video game featuring quizzes and mini-games, on the Dreamcast, PlayStation, Nintendo 64, and PC. In 2000, South Park Rally, a racing game, was released on the Dreamcast, PlayStation, Nintendo 64, and PC. An as-yet-untitled South Park game is currently being developed by Doublesix Games for the Xbox Live Arcade on the Xbox 360.
A South Park pinball machine was released in 1999 by Sega Pinball. Starting in 2003, a line of South Park action figures was released by Mirage. A new line was released by Mezco Toyz starting in 2006 following the demise of Mirage.
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