The Official South Park Thread

[Andrew]

Sounds alright to me. Beats having to wait months between the two halves of the season and with the quality dipping a bit the past few years, perhaps cutting the number of episodes will trim away some of the throwaway shows and leave them feeling fresher and more focused on the ten they are producing.

[Oznogrd]

I was a little confused when I saw the announcement for 10 episodes and none till september, but Im all for it like you guys said. There's been as many misses as hits in the past couple of years and maybe having less episodes will solve that.

[benji]

One of the recent deals involving Warner and Paramount untangling a bunch of their crap (from various buyouts/takeovers/mergers/etc. over the years) revealed that a second South Park movie may have been thwarted over the last few years due to all the rights being fucked up. (Something like Paramount owns the franchise, but Warner owns the movie rights or something.) Now Paramount has five years to make another South Park movie to lock those rights up longer. (Same reason Sony rushed out the Spider-Man reboot as one famous example.)

I wonder what might have gone the movie route: Imaginationland? The Coon Trilogy? 200/201?

[Andrew]

Yeah, probably Imaginationland or The Coon Trilogy, on an even grander scale. 200/201 kind of belongs within the TV series.

[Andrew]

Anyone else catch the season premiere last week?

It kind of grew on me as it went along, but to be honest I was a bit underwhelmed. It doesn't help that I've grown tired of Cartman schemes (at least it didn't turn into another Cartman vs Kyle plot), but on top of that the jokes and the commentary felt too obvious. It's the kind of topic you'd expect them to touch upon and they weren't going to let it pass them by, but I don't feel they turned it into a particularly entertaining episode. Some of the stuff with Butters was alright, but again the jokes were pretty obvious and too much like stuff they've done before when satirising religion. Average at best, though it got a little better as it went along.

[JaoSming]

It was fine just fine

[el badman]

Last episode with Minecraft was hilarious.

[JaoSming]

quite good indeed

[Andrew]

Agreed, I liked it a lot better than the season premiere. Good story, good satire/commentary, flat out hilarious. Probably my favourite episode in some time.

[Oznogrd]

Agreed, I liked it a lot better than the season premiere. Good story, good satire/commentary, flat out hilarious. Probably my favourite episode in some time.

This. I didnt dig the government episode, but this one had me laughing from start to finish.

Probably helped my dad watches a ton of murder porn though

[benji]

The plane running gag had me dyin.

[el badman]

Same here, perfect ending too. Two awesome episodes in a row.

[Andrew]

I wasn't a big fan of it. Like the first episode, it was something they were naturally going to touch upon, but it didn't feel like the jokes or commentary were that fresh or funny. Like I said before, I don't really enjoy Cartman-centric episodes these days, so that didn't help.

[benji]

South Park's commentary has always been quite on the nose in part because of time constraints and in part because Trey and Matt are pretty straightforward. All three this season have skewered some real popular oddities or idiocy but where else can you go with them really?

I thought the Zimmerman home/hero part was well done.

[Andrew]

I guess. Perhaps I'm just growing weary of their style, though again I think my Cartman-centric episode fatigue probably has a fair bit to do with it as well.

[Andrew]

Good episode with the goth kids last week. Probably nothing they haven't said before about those subcultures, but I thought the redone intro was pretty funny, as was Edgar Allen Poe's appearance. I liked that they went with a bit of a swerve at the end, revealing the whole thing as a prank rather than running with their standard revelation of a crazy conspiracy. Of course, it does bear mentioning that The Simpsons already did it.

[Andrew]

Latest episode was hilarious, easily the best of the season for me so far.

[Kenny]

This season of South Park has been amazing. It's provided one of my favourite moments ever (in World War Zimmerman where the guy is dying and just before he dies, Cartman reveals what they're fighting and he goes "wait, what?")

The Tom Brady joke in the last episode got me too

[Andrew]

It's felt a bit uneven to me, but the three of the five that I've liked so far were all really strong episodes.

[Andrew]

I have a feeling I'll be in the minority here, quite possibly the only person who regularly posts in this thread to feel this way, but the latest episode was easily my least favourite of the entire series. I really did not care for that one at all.

It had Cartman vs Kyle...again. It had Kyle being the buttmonkey for the entire episode...again. It had Cartman avoiding any kind of comeuppance, not even so much as a punch in the mouth from Kyle at the end...again. It had some generic commentary on the conflict in the Middle East. It was repetitive, unfunny, mean-spirited without any kind of cathartic payoff, had nothing interesting or provocative to say and on the whole, it was just flat out depressing.

A lot of comedy does come from having characters suffer and South Park is certainly not meant to celebrate niceness or avoid taboos. And it's worked, when there's been humour, an actual joke. The show's humour, brilliance and success has been built upon pushing the envelope, being controversial and obscene while often having a good point. It's had good jokes come out of abusing its characters.

This episode however just saw a character being mistreated by being farted on, an unsympathetic character get off scot-free, a lazy attempt at social commentary and some live action footage to pad the episode. In other words, this was basically a bottom-of-the-barrel Family Guy episode. Those are all the same dreadful hallmarks.

I don't like "I'm never watching again!" declarations on the Internet, because you know nine times out of ten, that person is going to be back watching the following week. So I'm not going to say that. But just like I had a moment with Family Guy last season, the thought did occur to me while watching this episode. It just left a really bad taste in my mouth (insert Cartman fart joke here) and a feeling that if we get too many more episodes like that, the quality of the show is really going to nosedive.

For me, just an awful, unlikeable, unfunny episode. Like I said, I'm guessing this won't be most people's reaction to the episode but it's definitely not to my taste.

[Andrew]

Liked the latest one a lot more than last week's offering, looks like it's at least going to be a two-parter. Enjoyed the lampooning of the upcoming console war, though I can't help but feel they've got it backwards based on the general reaction so far. In any case, they certainly nailed the fanboyism that we so often see. I'm guessing they were also taking a shot at themselves and The Stick of Truth when they riffed on the culture of pre-ordering.

[Kenny]

I kind of agree with you about the middle east episode. While I still enjoyed it, it probably was the second weakest one of the season for me (wasn't too fond of the goth kids episode). The highlight of the episode was all the symbols combining together to make the Van Halen symbol. Everyone else I watched it with didn't get it to start with, since they're 18. Made me feel old when I lost my shit.

With all the ads for the latest one, I was a bit disappointed that it wasn't more oriented around Randy, but overall it was a very funny episode. Don't touch me Elmo

For obvious reasons, I kind of like that Kenny has been more prominent.

[el badman]

Agree with the both of you when it comes to the episode from last week, it had some really good things going on for it but the Kyle vs Cartman thing was just too much for me in that one.
This week's episode was great I thought. It reminded me of the amazing couple of episodes they did a few years ago about Cartman who couldn't wait for the Wii and froze himself for centuries...But yeah, I also think they got the reactions backwards on this, I guess we'll see after today and after next week though.
The "Stop Touching Me Elmo" ad was fucking epic.

[Andrew]

"Stop Touching Me Elmo" was definitely one of the best moments in the latest ep. As for the previous one, I thought I'd be alone with that reaction, so it's nice to know that parts of it did rub someone else the wrong way.

[Andrew]

I didn't think Part 2 was quite as strong as Part 1 overall, but the stuff with George R.R. Martin was pretty funny.

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