South Park

South Park is an animated American television comedy series created and written by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. The series has been distributed and aired by Comedy Central since 1997. The show revolves around the adventures of four boys, Stan, Kyle, Cartman, Kenny, and their friends living in the small town of South Park, Colorado. The show is well-known for its pop culture parody, scatological humor, and satirical handling of current events. Since its debut on August 13, 1997, the show has aired 181 episodes over 12 seasons.

South Park is often credited with putting Comedy Central "on the map". The show has won three Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Animated Program, two for programming less than one hour and one for programming more than one hour. In 1999, a feature-length film titled South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut was made. Three episodes, called Imaginationland , were put together with additional unseen footage and rendered completely uncensored to create a second (straight-to-DVD) South Park movie.

The twelfth season finished airing on November 19, 2008. The thirteenth season will premiere in March 2009. The show is contracted to produce new episodes through a fifteenth season, until late 2011.

Premise

The show revolves around the adventures of four boys — Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, Eric Cartman, and Kenny McCormick (often called "the boys" when as a group for easier reference) — and their friends living in the fictional small town of South Park, Colorado. The boys were in the third grade but midway through season four they entered the fourth grade where they have stayed ever since. There are many recurring characters on the show, including the boys' families, school staff, and other students. These include Leopold "Butters" Stotch, Chef (who no longer appears in the show), Mr. Hankey, Towelie, Jesus, and Satan. There are also many other minor characters.

South Park' s early episodes tended to be shock value-oriented and featured more slapstick-style humor than later episodes. Although satire had been used on the show occasionally earlier on, it became more prevalent in later episodes. Episodes have parodied Michael Jackson ("The Jeffersons"), Paris Hilton ("Stupid Spoiled Whore Video Playset"), and The Passion of the Christ ("The Passion of the Jew"), as well as addressed serious political issues such as terrorism ("Cartoon Wars"), American immigration policy ("Goobacks"), gay marriage ("Follow That Egg!"), and the Terri Schiavo case ("Best Friends Forever").

Controversies over South Park have occurred numerous times. The show depicts what many people find to be taboo subject matter, from its use of vulgarity ("It Hits the Fan") to its satire of subjects such as religion and cults (such as "All About Mormons", "Bloody Mary", "Red Hot Catholic Love", Fantastic Easter Special", and "Trapped in the Closet"), sexuality ("The Death Camp of Tolerance"), steroids ("Up the Down Steroid"), and global warming ("Two Days Before the Day After Tomorrow"). Stone and Parker are self-described "equal opportunity offenders" and episodes often lampoon all sides of a contentious issue, rather than taking a concrete position. Usually the boys and/or the other characters reconcile on the events of the episode and realize that they can take an important lesson from it, they often include the famous phrase "You know what, I've learned something today...".

Production

Origin

South Park began in 1992 when Trey Parker and Matt Stone, at the time students at the University of Colorado, met in a film class and created an animated short called Jesus vs. Frosty . The low-budget crudely made film featured 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 would resemble Stan and Kyle.

FOX executive Brian Graden saw the film and in 1995 commissioned Parker and Stone to create a second short film that he could send to his friends as a video Christmas card. Titled Jesus vs. Santa , it resembled the style of the later series more closely, and featured a martial arts duel and subsequent truce between Jesus and Santa Claus over the true meaning of Christmas. This video was later featured in the episode "A Very Crappy Christmas" in which Stan, Kyle, Cartman, Kenny, and Mr. Hankey "save" Christmas for the town. The video was popular and was widely shared, both by duplication and over the Internet. This led to talks to create a series, first with FOX, then with Comedy Central, where the series debuted on August 13, 1997.

Writing

Production on a new episode of South Park begins on a Thursday, six days prior to the episode's airing. The team works between 100 and 120 hours in a seven-day week to deliver the episodes. Almost all work on the series is done in-house at South Park Studios in Culver City, Los Angeles.

Thanks to this efficient method, the creators are able respond quickly to current events. The December 17, 2003 episode "It's Christmas in Canada" depicted the capture of Saddam Hussein a mere three days after the actual event, even referring to the "spider hole" in which he was found. In this instance — as with the Elián González episode ("Quintuplets 2000") — the creators changed the production of an episode at the last minute to focus on the new world event. The Season 12 episode "About Last Night..." aired just 23 hours after Barack Obama was declared the winner in the 2008 presidential election. The episode uses excerpts from the speeches given by Obama and John McCain the night before, and also refers to the celebration that ensued following Obama's victory.

Stan Marsh and Kyle Broflovski were initially designed to represent creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone respectively; however, both have admitted to ultimately identifying far more with Cartman. The town of South Park is inspired by both real-life towns in the South Park basin such as Fairplay and the Denver suburbs such as Littleton, the sites of the respective upbringings of South Park co-creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

Animation

The show's style of animation was inspired by the paper cut-out cartoons made by Terry Gilliam for Monty Python's Flying Circus , of which Trey Parker and Matt Stone have been lifelong fans. Construction paper and traditional stop motion cut-out animation techniques were used in the original animated shorts and in the pilot episode made for Comedy Central. The pilot episode required three months to produce. Subsequent episodes have been produced by computer animation providing a similar look to the originals while requiring a fraction of the time to produce. Episodes of South Park are usually completed in four or five days.

Adobe Photoshop (and previously CorelDRAW) is used to design new characters and objects, which are then imported into and animated using Maya. (PowerAnimator was used prior to the fifth season). The use of PowerAnimator and Maya is an interesting choice as they are mainly used for 3D computer graphics; Parker and Stone compared it to "building a sandcastle with a bulldozer." However, according to Director of Animation Eric Stough, PowerAnimator was chosen because it "has the best shadow and ray casting, so it looks like construction paper sitting on a camera stand." Several other techniques are used to achieve the "amateur" look. Objects are moved across the screen manually and a "stepped" curve is applied to every second frame giving motion an "organic jumpy look". The show is also animated at 24 frames per second and transferred to 30 fps video using the 3:2 pulldown process.

PowerAnimator was also used for special effects such as the disco lights in the episode "Big Gay Al's Big Gay Boat Ride" and the laser beams in "Mecha-Streisand". Nowadays, the team uses Motion for special effects. In the beginning, animation was done on SGI workstations linked to a 54-processor render farm that could render 10 to 15 shots an hour. For a short time, Windows computers were used. When Maya was released for Mac, production shifted to Mac workstations. The studio now runs a 120-processor render farm that can produce 30 or more shots an hour.

The appearance of characters and scenes has become less crude over time, largely in order to enhance the comedic effect. Special effects, such as prepackaged explosions, have replaced cardboard-style fires. Light shading has been used to highlight "sappy", movie-like moments as well as some of Cartman's dramatic poses. Some episodes, such as "Tweek vs. Craig" and "Mr. Garrison's Fancy New Vagina", have even incorporated sections of live action video. A few episodes use an entirely different style of animation, for example, portions of "Good Times with Weapons" was done in anime style, while "Make Love, Not Warcraft" was done partly in machinima.

Voice cast

Matt Stone and Trey Parker voice most of the male South Park characters, while April Stewart and Mona Marshall (formerly Mary Kay Bergman and Eliza Schneider) voice most of the female characters such as Wendy Testaburger and Sheila Broflovski. Other voices are