The 13th season of South Park starts tomorrow, but my mind is still full of vivid, hysterical, and yes often frightening images of season 12. Britney’s New Look was one of the most disturbing episodes of South Park to date, save perhaps Mr. Garrison’s Fancy New Vagina from season 9. I still stand by my “top 3″ Season 12 episodes from my post last November – Major Boobage, Over Logging and Breast Cancer Show Ever. If you haven’t chosen your top 3, maybe you should watch them all another 50 times. That’s how I did it. Lucky you – South Park: The Complete Twelfth Season is available today at any store that hasn’t yet gone bankrupt. Here’s a teaser:

Seven new episodes of South Park kick-off Wednesday night (10:00pm) with The Ring, the first episode of season 13. Comedy Central offered up this teaser clip of the episode, which sees Kenny getting a girlfriend.

According to an article at UPI.com, The City University of New York is now offering a course about Comedy Central’s animated series South Park. The course is titled South Park and Political Correctness. It whiffs of gimmickery, but anything to get butts in seats, I suppose. I for one wouldn’t complain if my homework assignment was to Tivo Comedy Central on Wednesday nights.

Miss the South Park season finale? The Ungroundable parodies this weekend’s highly-anticipated film Twilight, and you can watch the full episode now at SouthParkStudios.com. Season 12 of South Park is now behind us, and if you want my opinion, the best episodes were Major Boobage, Over Logging and Breast Cancer Show Ever. Here’s a clip from Wednesday’s season finale:

If you’ve been tuning into The Sarah Silverman Program on Comedy Central (Thursdays 10:30pm/9:30c), you’ve surely seen some of Rob Schrab’s work. Not only is Rob a co-creator of the show and a regular director, but he’s also found a way to get his phenomenal Draw-less Animation into several episodes. But that’s not the whole story on Rob’s connection to the animation world. He first shot to fame by way of his comic Scud: The Disposable Assassin (he released his 21st issue earlier this year), and this led him to make the big move to Los Angeles.

After writing and producing Heat Vision and Jack, the cult-classic Fox pilot, he went on to make Robot Bastard, his own independently-produced space opera. Rob’s DIY approach to filmmaking, using cardboard sets, costumes and props, was followed-up by his first Draw-less Animation project – Ringwald & Molly. After another live-action series, Twigger’s Holiday (which was made for Schrab and Dan Harmon’s film festival Channel 101), Schrab saw one of his scripts go to the silver screen. Monster House, (co-written with Harmon) which was originally intended to be live-action, was produced with Robert Zemeckis’ performance-capture technology and went onto snag an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature in 2006.

But it’s Schrab’s lo-fi self-produced animation work that really stands out from the pack. Take, for instance, his recent music video for Death Cab For Cutie. The mixed media puppetry and animation is so inventive and unlike anything you’ve ever seen, and he produced it for less than $5,000. Have a watch:

Now, two seasons into The Sarah Silverman Program, we catch up with Rob for a lengthy interview.

AARON: When you, Sarah and Dan Harmon first conceived The Sarah Silverman Program, were you talking about working your Draw-less Animation into the show?

ROB: A little bit of both. On the pilot I kind of kept my mouth shut, because everyone, with the exception of Dan Harmon and Sarah, was on the fence about me directing. The only work I had on my reel was stuff like the Heat Vision and Jack title sequence, Robot Bastard and Twigger’s Holiday. Everything was absurd, colorful, crazy and kind of a living cartoon. So I kept my mouth shut and said I’ll use this pilot as an experiment to just do scenes with people talking and still have it be entertaining – but put a little bit of flair every now and then.
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I’m serial! Digg’s Kevin Rose recently interviewed Al Gore and brought up the South Park episode ManBearPig. Gore is included in the episode as a fear-mongering eco-freak, but it appears the Nobel Peach Prize winner didn’t take any offense.

The LA Times reported on Friday that Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park, relied on Vegas odds to gamble on the storyline for last week’s episode, About Last Night. The 22-minute show featured recreations of Obama and McCain’s speeches from the night before, yet again illustrating that the crew is the fastest on TV. For comparison sake, a typical episode of The Simpsons takes between 6 to 10 months to finish, while the South Park team cranks one out in about a week. Last week they raised the bar even higher, and below we get an exclusive peak into the hours leading up to the Wednesday airing of the show.

AARON SIMPSON: Did your team ever pause to watch the November 4th election coverage, or did you just work right through it?

SOUTH PARK STUDIOS: We watched and worked at the same time. TVs all over the office were tuned to the coverage but we had so much show to finish we couldn’t just sit down and soak it all in.

AARON: How much of the episode was completed by the time polls opened on Tuesday?

SPS: We still had a lot of show to finish. About 15 (out of 22) minutes of show were finished when the polls opened on Tuesday.

AARON: Did the team have a plan if McCain pulled off an upset?
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