South Park

South Park is an American animated television series created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone for the Comedy Central television network. Intended for mature audiences, the show has become famous for its crude language, surreal, satirical, and dark humor that lampoons a wide range of topics. The ongoing narrative revolves around four boys—Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, Eric Cartman and Kenny McCormick—and their bizarre adventures in and around the titular Colorado town. In the 2004 documentary The 100 Greatest Cartoons , South Park was placed at #3, just behind The Simpsons and Tom and Jerry . South Park is currently contracted to continue until 2016, taking the show to 20 seasons.

Parker and Stone, who met in college, developed the show from two animated shorts they created in 1992 and 1995. The duo were united by their love of Monty Python, whose dark humor, surrealism, and absurdity is a major influence on South Park . 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 and longest running program.

Each episode bar the very first one, which was produced by cutout animation, is created with computer software that emulates the cutout technique. Episodes are typically written and produced during the week preceding their broadcast, with the vast majority of shows being written, directed, and acted by Parker and Stone. After the first couple of seasons, Parker became the only credited director, and the only writer for the majority of the past four seasons. As of 2011, a total of 223 episodes have aired during the show's fifteen seasons.

Following the early success of the series, the 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, including four Primetime Emmy Awards. The show has also garnered a Peabody Award for Comedy Central.

Premise

Setting and characters

See also: List of characters in South ParkThe main characters standing at the school bus stop (in order from left to right): Eric Cartman, Kyle Broflovski, Stan Marsh, and Kenny McCormick

The show follows the exploits of four boys, Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, Eric Cartman and Kenny McCormick, except in season 6 when Kenny was temporarily written off the show and replaced with Butters then Tweek. The boys live in the fictional small town of South Park, located within the real life South Park basin in the Rocky Mountains of central Colorado. The town is also home to an assortment of frequent characters such as students, families, elementary school staff, and other various residents, who tend to regard South Park as a bland and quiet place to live. Prominent settings on the show include the local elementary school, bus stop, various neighborhoods and the surrounding snowy landscape, actual Colorado landmarks, 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, manipulative, racist and obese—is often portrayed as an antagonist whose anti-Semitic attitude has resulted in an ever-progressing rivalry with Kyle. 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 every episode before returning in the next with little or no definitive explanation given. He was written out of the show's sixth season in 2002, re-appearing in the season finale. Since then, the practice of killing Kenny has been seldom used by the show's creators. In season 14, it is revealed that Kenny cannot die, for he will just be reborn again. During the show's first 58 episodes, the boys were in the third grade. In the season four episode "4th Grade" (2000), they 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. 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. 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

Main article: Subject matter in South Park

Each episode opens with a tongue-in-cheek disclaimer: "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, 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 typical 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. 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 on 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 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

Main article: The Spirit of Christmas (short film)

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 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 resembled the style of the later series more closely. To differentiate between the two homonymous shorts, the first short is often referred to as Jesus vs. Frosty , and the second short as Jesus vs. Santa. Graden sent copies of the video to several of his friends, and from there it was copied and distributed, including on the Internet, where it became one of the first viral videos.

As Jesus vs. Santa 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. The two then entered negotiations 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