Or so it says at the start of every episode of South Park. While the warning is intended as a joke, it should be heeded, as nobody in the possession of a sane mind should watch the show. Criticised by many, adored by many more, the show uses a combination of satire, surrealism, and toilet-humour. Its first season was a massive hit and the show became a huge pop-culture phenomenon. The show is currently on its 9th season in the US and it has spawned a film.

South Park is a 'quiet, little, p*ss-ant, redneck, podunk, jerkwater, three corn, one horse, one hole, chicken butt, right wing, missing stuff, no mail, truck driving, old track, spacey, pea-brain, horsewhipped, hungry, un-kept, white trash, kick-*ss
mountain town' near Denver, Colorado. The show is loosely based on the lives of the shows creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, and their childhood growing up in separate mountain towns in Colorado.

The Boys

The show follows the lives of four young boys who live in South Park. At the start of the show they are all eight years old and are in third grade, but in the fourth season they all become nine years old and progress into fourth grade.

Stan Marsh

Stan is based on the show's co-creator, Trey Parker, and he’s the closest thing the show has to a normal person. He’s a good, honest, and decent person and he’s the unofficial leader of the group. He has an on-again, off-again relationship with Wendy Testaburger, but he gets so nervous around her that he normally just throws up on her.

Stan lives with his parents, Randy and Sharon, his bully sister, Shelly¹, and his crippled grandfather, Marvin, who keeps calling him Billy. In one episode, Stan's parents got divorced and Stan's mother got re-married to a control-freak father called Roy, but all returned to normal at the end of the episode. Stan also has a gay dog called Sparky².

Kyle Broflovski

Kyle is based on the shows co-creator, Matt Stone. He’s Jewish and has a strict overbearing mother who he hates. He and Stan are best friends and the two normally end up on the opposite side of an argument from Cartman. Being the only Jewish child in South Park, Kyle finds it hard at Christmas time.

Kyle's parents, Sheila and Gerald³, are devout Jews, and they don’t like Kyle getting swept along by popular trends. Kyle's baby brother, Ike, is actually an adopted Canadian who Kyle has grown to accept.

Eric Cartman

Normally just called by his surname, Cartman isn’t based on a real person, but rather on the fat kid in every group of friends. He’s a racist who’s especially prone to anti-Semitism, which brings him and Kyle to odds on many occasions. He also loathes hippies and frequently calls people he hates such. Despite these traits, Cartman does have a softer side and can often to be found have tea parties with his teddies. Fat and lazy, Cartman has one goal in life, to make $10 million.

Cartman lives with his mom, Lianne Cartman, who’s actually his dad since she’s a hermaphrodite. She completely spoils him and allows him to do nearly anything he wants. He has two pets, a cat called Kitty and a pig called Fluffy, which he apparently enjoys hitting with sticks.

Kenny McCormick

Kenny is based on the poor kid from every community. He is always wearing an orange parka that covers up his face and makes everything he says inaudible to the viewer, although people in the show can understand him perfectly⁴. He’s the most foul-mouthed of all the characters and his lines would probably be censored were it not for the fact that nobody can understand him.

Kenny is the strangest of the characters on the show for one reason: He keeps dying. In the first few seasons he would die nearly once every episode, but he’d always be back in the next episode⁵. By the end of the fifth season it was getting harder to write Kenny deaths so, in a special episode about him, a terminal disease killed him off permanently. He did make a slight comeback in the sixth season when Cartman accidentally drank his ashes, thinking it was chocolate milk. This led to Kenny’s soul getting stuck in Cartman's body for a few episodes. Kenny returned without explanation in the final episode of season six and has been in the show since⁶.

Kenny lives in a small, dilapidated house with his poor parents and his stupid older brother. His family could probably be best described as white-trash. His father, Stuart, is an unemployed alcoholic.

Leopold 'Butters' Stotch

Butters was in the show from the first season, but only as a background kid from school. He was given his big break in the final episode of season five where there was an episode based entirely about him. In the sixth season he replaced Kenny as the fourth friend of the group, but he annoyed them all so much that he was fired half-way through the season. This made him very angry, so much so that he made himself into a super-villain called Prof Chaos who has been his alter-ego ever since.

Butters is a nice quiet boy and very gullible, a characteristic that the gang prey on. Cartman hates him, probably more so than he hates Kyle.

His parents, Chris and Lynda, are fairly normal parents . . . or so it seemed. In the special episode about Butters, it was revealed that his father likes to frequent gay bath-houses. When Lynda finds out she goes insane and attempts to kill Butters and herself. Naturally, it all worked out in the end.

Tweek

Tweek joined the show in the second season for one episode as a boy who’s addicted to coffee because his parents own the town's coffee shop. After Butters was dropped by the gang, they held reality TV style auditions to find their next fourth friend, and Tweek was the one who was selected.

Tweek is very nervous and speaks in a high-pitched voice. His coffee addiction has led to constant jittering and the 'tweeking' of his eye. He never buttons his shirt right, and his hair is a constant mess. His parents believe this is all down to him having attention deficit disorder.

Recurring Characters

Chef: Jerome ‘Chef’ McElroy⁷ is the cafeteria chef at South Park Elementary and is one of the few black characters in the show. Promiscuous in the extreme, his favourite pastime is sleeping with 'fine white women'. The boys really look-up to him and are constantly asking for his advice. Unfortunately, his advice normally comes as a rather adult song which the boys don’t understand.

Mr/Mrs Garrison: Mr Garrison was the boys' third grade teacher. He had a LOT of psychological issues, the most important being that he was a closet homosexual with homophobia. He was fired for allegedly abusing a child and went on to write a best-selling romance novel that won a gay-Pulitzer prize. After this he confronted his homosexuality and admitted to himself that he was gay.

He has had a number of puppets/sidekicks in his time. The first, Mr Hat, was a puppet that was actually a personality in his head. Mr Hat disappeared for a short time in the third season, and was replaced by Mr Twig⁸. When Mr Garrison was rehired by the school as a kindergarten teacher, he got rid of Mr Hat and replaced him with Mr Slave, his sex-slave boyfriend. He was then made the fourth grade teacher.

In the ninth season Mr Garrison had a sex-change operation and became a woman called Mrs Garrison. This led to Mr Slave leaving her.

Mr Mackey: Mr Mackey is the school guidance counsellor. He has several traits, such as an impossibly large head and the fact that he ends most sentences with 'mmm’kay?'. He is very anti-drugs, which is ironic as he becomes a drug addict in one episode. He temporarily takes on the job as the boys' substitute teacher in the sixth season.

Wendy Testaburger⁹: Wendy was Stan's girlfriend until she dumped him for Token. Probably the most intelligent person in the class, Wendy has very liberal views which are always bring her into conflict with Cartman.

Token Black: Token Black is exactly what his name suggests. He’s the only black kid in school and he normally only gets minor parts. His father is a successful lawyer and the richest person in town.

Timmy: Timmy is mostly disabled and used to be considered retarded. He can only say a handful of things, of which 'Timmah!' is the most frequent. Despite this, Timmy shows signs of being very intelligent. He uses an electric wheelchair to get around.

Jimmy: Jimmy is also handicapped like Timmy, but he uses crutches to move around. He’s always telling jokes and wants to be a stand-up comedian. This makes him very popular and hence Timmy gets jealous and tries to kill him. Eventually the two get over this problem and become good friends.

Pip: Philip 'Pip' Pirrip is an unpopular British class-mate. He is always being called French in a derogatory manner, despite the fact that he hates the French himself. He is loosely based on the character of Pip from Charles Dicken’s ‘Great Expectations’.

Jimbo and Ned: Jimbo Kerns is Stan’s gun-nut uncle. He loves hunting, explosions, and anything else which liberals hate. He served in Vietnam, and that’s where he met his best friend, Ned Gerblansky. Ned lost an arm in the war and needs a voicebox to speak.

Mayor McDaniels: She is the mayor of South Park, a town that she hates. She cares little about the fate of the town or its people, and is far more interested in her public appearance. A typical politician then.

Big Gay Al: Al is a stereotypical gay man. He’s very camp, and as a result many of the parents don’t want him around their children. He used to be the boys scout-leader, but was fired because of fears that he may molest children. He also runs a home for homosexual animals.

Terrance and Phillip: Terrance and Phillip are two Canadian comedians who have a children’s TV show. Their show is essentially just a bunch of fart jokes, and the boys' parents don’t like them watching it.

Towelie: Towelie is a genetically engineered towel who likes to get high. He originally appeared in the season 5 episode ‘Towelie’, an episode based around the US military’s attempts to capture him, and was designed to be a really bad character. He was so bad that fans of the show loved him, and he was brought back for several cameo appearances, mainly to remind the boys to bring a towel with them on their adventures.

Mr Hankey: Mr Hankey is a Christmas poo. He’s essentially a piece of excrement that comes up people’s toilets every Christmas and gives people of non-Christian faith presents. He lives in the sewers, and has magical control over all poo.

Santa Clause: Despite doing all the normal things that Santa should do, he’s also a gun-toting maniac who likes to kill satanic animals with a shotgun.

Jesus: Jesus is the resurrected son of God who tries to live a normal life in South Park. He had a cable access TV show called Jesus and Pals where he would try and deliver the word of god. Despite some hostility between them at the start of the show, Jesus and Santa grew to be good friends, and Jesus was killed¹⁰ while trying to rescue him from one of Saddam Hussein’s sons who was torturing him.

Satan: Satan is the master of all darkness and the leader of the minions of hell. He’s gay and generally tries to get along peacefully with God who is an old friend of his.

Saddam Hussein: The evil Iraqi dictator was initially in a special episode about Terrance and Phillip, but his big break came in the South Park film where he was Satan’s lover. The two have since broken up and Saddam was punished by being forced to live in Heaven ¹¹. For some reason, he has a desire to control Canada.

How it came to be

The show's creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, originally met while film students at the University of Colorado. The two teamed up since they shared the same sense of humour, and were the only people in the class who didn’t want to make art-house style films. In 1991 they made a crude animation-sort called Jesus V Frosty which had the kids from South Park¹² build a snowman that came to life when they put a magic hat on him. Baby Jesus then saves the day by decapitating Frosty with his halo.

Years later, executives at Fox saw the film and they commissioned Trey and Matt to create a video Christmas card along those lines. This film, called The Spirit of Christmas was a big hit, especially on the internet¹³ . Its popularity led to talks with Fox about making it into a show, but Fox thought it might be to risky, and hence Comedy Central bought it. The show was produced and premiered on Comedy Central on the 13th of August 1997.

South Park's Traits

The shows follow the tried and tested formula of having bad things happen, then having the boys learn something from the experience. Most episodes end with either Stan or Kyle saying 'You know, I’ve learned something today . . .' after which they explain what they learned. As a result, most of the shows have a good moral message to them that you might not expect from a show about four foul-mouthed young boys.

A lot of the shows are 'issue-shows' where the writers¹⁴ try and put their point of view across. The political leaning of the show is quite complicated as it makes fun of conservatives and liberals alike. Mainly the show is very libertarian, and frequently makes fun of political correctness. In an interview, Trey Parker once said he was a registered member of the American Libertarian Party.

The show's animation is very crude. The original episodes were stop-motion-animation using construction paper, but since then they have used computers to give that effect. While the 'poor' animation quality may seem like a drawback, it’s actually very useful as it allows the shows to be made very quickly. Whereas an episode of The Simpsons takes 9 nine months to go from writing to being shown on screen, an episode of South Park can take only a few weeks. This allows them to do episodes on current events, for example, an episode where the town debates whether or not to remove Kenny’s feeding-tube was shown in the US during the Terri Schiavo case¹⁵.

One aspect of South Park that comes up a lot is Trey Parker's and Matt Stone's musical abilities. The two are trained musicians and both studied music in their youth. There are a number of original scores that they wrote in the series, such as Montage, a song that is played during a montage. They also write the songs that Chef sings in the show, hence Trey's and Matt's claims that they've written songs for Isaac Hayes. Their musical talent can be seen most prominently in the feature film. One of the songs in it, Blame Canada, was nominated for an Oscar and was sung by Robin Williams at the awards ceremony.

South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut

South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut is the feature film based on South Park. Released in cinemas in 1999, during the show's third season, it’s notorious for one thing: its frequent use of swearwords. In fact, this film has the record for most swearwords used in a film so far. It’s essentially a musical in all but name.

The story begins with the boys going to see the Terrance and Phillip movie and despite its R-rating, they manage to get in. The frequent bad language used by Terrance and Phillip influences their fragile little minds, and they start swearing constantly. When their parents find out about this, they set up an organisation called ‘Mothers Against Canada’ and manage to convince the US government to illegally arrest Terrance and Phillip and plan to have them executed. In retaliation for this, the Canadians bomb the Baldwin family, and thus begins World War 3.

Meanwhile, down in Hell, Satan is being manipulated by his lover, Saddam Hussein, and is planning his invasion of Earth, which can take place once Terrance's and Phillip's blood hits American soil. The only hope for the world is that Kenny¹⁶ can convince Satan that Saddam is using him.

The film was a huge success. One of the big hypes about the film was the fact that fans would finally be able to see and hear Kenny without the orange parka. The film made huge profits, partly because it was so cheap to make. Plots from the film, such as the Satan/Saddam relationship have been continued in the show.

The Aftermath

The show was a huge success from its first season and it passed into American pop-culture within its first few episodes. Its success led to angry protests from conservative groups in the US, and it is right up there with the Grand Theft Auto computer games on their list of things to ban.

One of the show's most notorious episodes, the season-five episode entitled It Hits the Fan, had 162 uncensored utterances of a notorious four-lettered swearword, making it the most profanities ever spoken on TV in 23 minutes. Despite the writers doubting the show would ever be allowed, the episode aired with very little controversy, perhaps a sign that TV standards are changing.

Perhaps the greatest gift that South Park ever gave humanity was its sixth season episode Free Hat. Prior to the DVD release of Raiders of the Lost Ark there were rumours that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were going to re-do the special effects to 'make the film better'. So Free Hat was written as a parody where they do remake Raiders of the Lost Ark and it turns out to be so bad that it kills the entire audience. Shortly after the show was aired Lucas and Spielberg announced that there’d be no changes to the film, something which Trey and Matt claim was prompted by the episode.

So South Park can’t be all that bad.