South Park: Classic or Dud?

quickdraw postin whippersnappers!

Don't watch it regularly but I think I saw this one way back, and the appearance of Moses as "super-computer" is more specifically the MCP from Tron. (Which had David Warner's face.)

(Using a horrible accent to get the word "shitty" on air multiple times; classic or dud?)

Will you suck my cock?

love,
Uncle Sam

B-b-b-b-but South Park is very pro-gay! Big Gay Al is, like, one of the most likeable characters ever!

Anyway: classic, if only for being the first tv show in the history of mankind to accurately portray what kids are really like (i.e. mean-hearted, sadistic bastards.) Also great: the deliberatley anti climatic endings ("yeah man, cartoons kick ass!" is my favourite)

btw I've got aides

Oh shit, that doesn't really work when it's written now.

On a related note, has anyone else been profoundly dissapointed
with the latest season of Home Movies? I mean, there's still
a few funny bits per episode, mostly featuring McGurk, but
that's a far cry from the nonstop, jaw-dropping hilarity of 75% of
all the previous episodes!

the ol' 'blind 'em with vague science' trick eh?

Furthermore, Ren & Stimpy had ONE funny season (the first one).

I'm sorry, but this is flat-out wrong. The ONLY Ren & Stimpy episode that can compare to South PArk is "Space Madness".

altho, Orgazmo DID require us to sneak booze in, just in case.

See, there's that attitude. South Park is good because they're
shocking, they're dangerous, they're pushing the limit.
PLEASE. That's not enough.

apparently the next thing shows the characters as if they actually aged normally over the last 25 years?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzEoBrr9gRA

looks fun and lol @ Cartman's chosen profession but everything else seems like Babylon Bee-style humor

The premise is that COVID is "nearly beaten" so things will get back to normal "soon". Trouble is, it's 40 years later.

It's a fairly gun romp at times which closes out the Randy stories of the past couple of seasons and has none-too-subtle digs at anti-vaxxers, cryptocurrency and woke comedians along with some interesting characterisation of what the cast are like at that age.

To be honest, I'd be happy if it was the end of the show. It's a perfectly good full stop, in much the same way that You Got Old was.

o nice, will watch this

i haven't watched south park in decades but i'll give this a shot

This show is not ending - it's been extended to its 30th season, with 14 additional movies to be made in between.

https://screenrant.com/south-park-season-30-renewed-new-movies-updates/

It's okay. They got given a massive sum of money to make a dozen or so hour-long specials. The result is that it feels a bit like they don't need money, ratings or notoriety so they are just doing whatever they want, even if it's not really very funny. The format was already evolving over the past few series but it's now feels very different from classic South Park. Reminds me a bit of when Red Dwarf did a series with longer, unfunny episodes and half the cast missing or changed.

It's plot-heavy and there are not many gags and some of them are old, or just fall flat. Removing the kids seems like it would put the show in every shark-jump top ten list forever. Cartman is totally neutered and Butters isn't present so they've lost the best characters. The parents and teachers etc are barely there so they've removed that important dynamic. Kinda expect everything to go back to normal but maybe not.

It's still pretty good though. 3 bags of popcorn and maybe it'll get better once Butters and the real Cartman show up.

Didn't mean to imply it was ending, just that it would have made a satisfactory coda.

Butters isn't present

Well, he is, but...

Yes, I do expect the next episode to be funnier.

There was a point where the show started getting heavily serialized and I was kind of curious to see how that would play out, but the character of "PC Principal" was so detached from reality it was hard to watch so much of him. Yes, even for South Park, it was too stupid.

I loved PC Principal

The second part was pretty funny. I watched it with a few others and we were all laughing a lot. Still think they wasted Cartman but Butters destiny was pretty lol.

Thought this was pretty cool, and like many non-Coloradans, I didn’t know if it was a real place or something they’d come up with for the show:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/us/casa-bonita-restaurant.html

That story is amazing

Good interview with Isaac Hayes' son, who says it was the Church of Scientology that pulled the plug on Hayes being part of the cast, while he was incapacitated.

So, initially, the episode came out in November, and there was no reaction. There wasn’t any upswell about that episode at all. It really wasn’t a big deal at the time. That January, in 2006, my dad had a stroke, and during the course of his recovery, I think that March, they re-aired the episode. When it re-aired, that’s when Scientology got upset.

At that time, my father was recovering from a stroke — literally learning how to talk, learning how to function. I visited my father. He was really struggling sometimes to even speak and say words. At the time, the people that were around him were largely Scientologists — his publicists and management. Those decisions about his involvement in the show, his leaving the show, were made by those people and not him. He would have never quit that show. He loved that show, and he was making a lot of money doing that show. So, I take issue with the way those decisions were made on his behalf because it put him in a position to actually have to go on the road and tour before he was ready to tour.

https://www.cracked.com/article_47426_my-dad-would-have-never-quit-that-show-isaac-hayes-iii-on-what-south-park-meant-to-his-father.html

lmao 2 days after Paramount gives them a massive deal

https://bsky.app/profile/esqueer.net/post/3luonhnkhvk2f

Yeah, I'll say this much: these dudes have flexible/questionable politics at times, but I like the idea of them explicitly picking a scorched-earth fight with that asshole.

As my brother put it, "I think they're opportunistic little weird Colorado libertarians, but if they're causing problems for Paramount and Trump, I'm here for the content."

And I think their knee-jerk anti-authoritarianism will just tend to push against/make fun of whoever's in power.

If there's one topic they're pretty consistent about politically over the last three (!!) decades, it's freedom of speech and satire. Given the current admin's pushes via media to indirectly censor political speech, this all out scorched earth ep is quite on brand.

wonder what they're gonna do with the Cartman arc now

you bastards!