Children will sometimes say the darnedest things, and on the Comedy Central's "South Park," children say the crudest, raunchiest, most obscene things imaginable. In fact, the whole town does. This show is obviously the work of warped minds -- its creators...
[more]Children will sometimes say the darnedest things, and on the Comedy Central's "South Park," children say the crudest, raunchiest, most obscene things imaginable. In fact, the whole town does.
This show is obviously the work of warped minds -- its creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker began collaborating in the early '90s. They were commissioned in 1994 to do a small project by FoxLab executive Brian Graden; Graden had recently seen "Cannibal the Musical," Parker's outrageous feature about an infamous Colorado cannibal. Much impressed, Graden hired the demented duo to produce a video Christmas card for his friends in the Hollywood community. The resulting five-minute animation short, "The Spirit of Christmas," pitted Santa Claus against Jesus Christ in mortal combat for the right to rule the holiday. It also introduced the four scandalous little boys.
By 1997, the rest of America knew them as Kyle, Stan, Kenny, and Cartman. These obnoxious eight-year-olds utter every four-letter word a concerned parent could imagine, take trips to Big Gay Al's Big Gay Animal Sanctuary, affirm their belief in Mr. Hanky the Christmas Poo, and help to genetically engineer a three-assed monkey. Along with a classroom full of outrageous elementary school children, the community of South Park consists of a smattering of celebrity guests and an array of corrupt, chaotic, kinky, and neurotic townsfolk. Case in point is Mr. Garrison, the quirky, sarcastic teacher who talks out of the side of his mouth through a companion hand puppet (Mr. Hat), and Chef, the lovable cafeteria worker who puts his pedagogy to sexy song in a voice supplied by music legend Isaac Hayes.
Relentlessly racy and replete with the politically incorrect, "South Park" is essentially a satiric take on pop culture: its observations are impudently delivered from the mouths of babes. The clunkily animated cut-out figures are reminiscent of not-so-gracious paper dolls as they shuffle around against a flatly rendered small town backdrop. The awkward two dimensionality of the symbols, symptoms straight from the bowels of Americana, offsets the show's toilet humor in a way that makes it even more outrageous. With the television success of South Park came movie projects like Trey Parker's 1997 "Orgazmo" and 1998's "BASEketbal." In the summer of 1999 the South Park phenomena reached an even larger audience when "South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut" came to the silver screen.
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