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:
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?
Read more »
How the hell does the South Park team do it? Less than 24 hours after Obama took the stage in Grant Park, Comedy Central was broadcasting About Last Night, a new episode sending up the recent run-up to the US presidential election. Well, according to the South Park blog, the crew did pull an all-nighter bringing the show to life, but that’s still a ridiculous turn-around for a half-hour show. I’m assuming they took a gamble and assumed Obama was going to win – and built elements of the episode that didn’t involve the two speeches we all watched. With this type of incredible speed, maybe Matt and Trey should be on Obama’s transition committee. Here’s a clip from the show.
Somehow Matt Stone and Trey Parker managed to make the concept of a “Guinea Saurus Rex” seem somehow plausible in their latest 2-part episode of South Park. This clip below features some of the mixed-media animation that makes South Park simply the funniest animated show on TV. This is from the second half of the two part episode Pandemic (now viewable online at SouthParkStudios.com), which parodies the 2008 film Cloverfield.
Russia’s version of Cartoon Network, 2×2, has come under government scrutiny over a recent airing of the South Park episode Cartoon Wars Part II. Currently at the 2×2 website, they’ve posted an image of Cartman with the words “no comments” (inset), and on their blog they’ve included a scan of the government notice.
The episode originally aired in the US in April 2006, and caused a stir then, as it features controversial depictions of the prophet Muhammad. On Comedy Central, the shot was replaced by a black screen and the text “In this shot, Muhammad hands a football helmet to Family Guy; Comedy Central has refused to broadcast an image of Muhammad on their network.” Here’s a video report on the topic from Russia Today:
View a gallery below of images from this controversy:
The entire episode is available for viewing at SouthParkStudios.com.
