South 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. The ongoing narrative revolves around four children—Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, Eric Cartman, and Kenny McCormick—and their bizarre adventures in and around the titular Colorado town.
Parker and Stone developed the show from two animated shorts they created in 1992 and 1995. The latter became one of the first Internet viral videos, which ultimately led to its production as a series. South Park debuted in August 1997 with great success, consistently earning the highest ratings of any basic cable program. Subsequent ratings have varied, but the show remains Comedy Central’s highest-rated program even after 188 episodes. Parker and Stone, who continue to do most of the writing, directing, and voice acting, are under contract to produce 14 new episodes a year through 2011. Their staff creates each episode with computer software that emulates the show’s distinct cutout animation style.
Following the early success of the series, the acclaimed feature-length musical film South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut had a widespread theatrical release in June 1999. South Park has also received numerous media awards, most notably three Primetime Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award.
Characters and setting
The show follows a group of four boys—Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, Eric Cartman, and Kenny McCormick—and the adventures they share in South Park, a fictional small town located within the real-life South Park basin in the Rocky Mountains of central Colorado. The town, sometimes described within the show as “a pissant white-bread mountain town”, is also home to an assortment of frequent characters such as students, families, elementary school staff, and other various residents. Prominent settings on the show include the local elementary school, bus stop, various neighborhoods and the surrounding snowy landscape, and the shops and businesses along the town’s main street, all of which are based on the appearance of similar locations in the town of Fairplay, Colorado.
Stan is portrayed as the everyman of the group, as the show’s official website describes him as “a normal, average, American, mixed-up kid”. Kyle is the lone Jew among the group, and his portrayal in this role is often dealt with satirically. Stan is modeled after Parker, while Kyle is modeled after Stone. Stan and Kyle are best friends, and their relationship, which is intended to reflect the real-life friendship between Parker and Stone, is a common topic throughout the series. Cartman—loud, obnoxious, and obese—is often portrayed as an antagonist whose anti-Semitic attitude has resulted in an ever-progressing rivalry with Kyle.[9][12] Kenny, who comes from a poor family, wears his parka hood so tightly that it covers most of his face and muffles his speech. During the show’s first five seasons, Kenny would die in nearly each episode before returning in the next with little or no definitive explanation given. During the show’s first 58 episodes, the boys were in the third grade. In the season four episode “4th Grade” (2000), they—along with the other main child characters—entered the fourth grade, where they have remained ever since.
Plots are often set in motion by events, ranging from the fairly typical to the supernatural and extraordinary, which frequently happen upon the town.[15] The boys often act as the voice of reason when these events cause panic or incongruous behavior among the adult populace, who are customarily depicted as irrational, gullible, and prone to vociferation.[7][16] The boys are also frequently confused by the contradictory and hypocritical behavior of their parents and other adults, and often perceive them as having distorted views on morality and society.
Themes and style
All characters and events in this show—even those based on real people—are entirely fictional. All celebrity voices are impersonated…..poorly. The following program contains coarse language and due to its content it should not be viewed by anyone.
South Park was the first weekly program to be assigned the TV-MA rating,[20] and is generally intended for adult audiences. The boys and most other child characters use strong profanity, with only the most taboo words being bleeped by censors during a broadcast. The use of such language serves as a means for Parker and Stone to display how they claim young boys really talk when they are alone.
South Park commonly makes use of carnivalesque and absurdist techniques, numerous running gags, violence, sexual content, offhand pop-cultural references, and satirical portrayal of celebrities. The early episodes tended to be shock value-oriented and featured more slapstick-style humor.[33] While social satire had been used on the show occasionally earlier on, it became more prevalent as the series progressed, with the show retaining some of its focus on the boys’ fondness of scatological humor in an attempt to remind adult viewers “what it was like to be eight years old”. Parker and Stone also began further developing other characters by giving them larger roles in certain storylines, and began writing plots as parables based around religion, politics, and numerous other topics. This provided the opportunity for the show to spoof both extreme sides of contentious issues, while lampooning both liberal and conservative points of view. Parker and Stone describe themselves as “equal opportunity offenders”, whose main agenda is to “be funny” and “make people laugh”, while stating that no particular topic or group of people be spared the expense of being subject to mockery and satire.
The two insist that the show is still more about “kids being kids” and “what it’s like to be in [elementary school] in America”, stating that the introduction of a more satirical element to the series was the result of the two adding more of a “moral center” to the show so that it would rely less on simply being crude and shocking in an attempt to maintain an audience. While profane, and with a tendency to sometimes be cynical, Parker notes that there is still an “underlying sweetness” aspect to the child characters, and Time described the boys as “sometimes cruel but with a core of innocence”. 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 short monologue. During earlier seasons, this speech would commonly begin with a variation of the phrase “You know what? I’ve learned something today…”.
Origins and creation
Soon after meeting in film class at the University of Colorado in 1992, Parker and Stone created an animated short entitled “The Spirit of Christmas”. The film, referred to as “Jesus vs. Frosty” by fans, was created by animating construction paper cutouts with stop motion, and features 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 resemble Stan and Kyle. Brian Graden, Fox network executive and mutual friend, commissioned Parker and Stone to create a second short film as a video Christmas card. Created in 1995, the second “The Spirit of Christmas” short (referred to by fans as “Jesus vs. Santa”) resembled the style of the later series more closely. Graden sent copies of the video to several of his friends, and from there it was copied and distributed, including among the Internet, where it became one of the first viral videos.
As the short became more popular, Parker and Stone began talks of developing the short into a television series. Fox refused to pick up the series, not wanting to air a show that included the character Mr. Hankey, a talking piece of feces.[46] The two then entered n
egotiations with both MTV and Comedy Central. Parker preferred the show be produced by Comedy Central, fearing that MTV would turn it into a kids show. When Comedy Central executive Doug Herzog watched the short, he commissioned for it to be developed into a series.
Parker and Stone assembled a small staff and spent three months creating the pilot episode “Cartman Gets an Anal Probe”. South Park was in danger of being canceled before it even aired when the show tested poorly with test audiences, particularly with women. However, the shorts were still gaining more popularity over the Internet, and Comedy Central agreed to order a run of six episodes. South Park debuted with “Cartman Gets an Anal Probe” on August 13, 1997.
Animation
The show’s style of animation is inspired by the paper cut-out cartoons made by Terry Gilliam for Monty Python’s Flying Circus, of which Parker and 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. Subsequent episodes have been produced by computer animation, providing a similar look to the originals while requiring a fraction of the time to produce. Before computer artists begin animating an episode, a series of animatics drawn with Adobe Photoshop are provided by the show’s storyboard artists.
The characters and objects are composed of simple geometrical shapes and primary colors. Most child characters are the same size and shape, and are distinguished by their distinctive clothing and head wear. Characters are mostly presented two-dimensionally and from only one angle. Their movements are animated in an intentionally jerky fashion, as they are purposely not offered the same free range of motion associated with hand-drawn characters. Occasionally, some non-fictional characters are depicted with photographic cutouts of their actual head and face in lieu of a face reminiscent of the show’s traditional style. Canadians on the show are often portrayed in an even more minimalist fashion; they have simple beady eyes, and the top halves of their heads simply flap up and down when the characters speak.
When the show began utilizing computers, the cardboard cutouts were scanned and re-drawn with CorelDRAW, then imported into PowerAnimator, which was used with SGI workstations to animate the characters. The workstations were linked to a 54-processor render farm that could render 10 to 15 shots an hour. Beginning with season five, the animators began using Maya instead of PowerAnimator. The studio now runs a 120-processor render farm that can produce 30 or more shots an hour.
PowerAnimator and Maya are high-end programs mainly used for 3D computer graphics, while co-producer and former animation director, Eric Stough, notes that PowerAnimator was initially chosen because its features helped animators retain the show’s “homemade” look. PowerAnimator was also used for making some of the show’s special effects, which are now created using Motion, a newer graphics program created by Apple, Inc. for their Mac OS X operating system. The show’s visual quality has improved in recent seasons, though several other techniques are used to intentionally preserve the cheap cutout animation look.
A few episodes feature sections of live-action footage, while others have incorporated other styles of animation. Portions of the season eight (2004) premiere “Good Times with Weapons” are done in anime style, while the season 10 episode “Make Love, Not Warcraft” is done partly in machinima. The season 12 episode “Major Boobage”, an homage to the 1981 animated film Heavy Metal, implements scenes accomplished with rotoscoping.Since the beginning of season 13 (2009) the show has been broadcast in high definition, and season 12 was released in high definition on Blu-ray Disc format.
