Soth Park: Pushing the Limits of Cartoon Decency

South Park, the animated TV series aired on Comedy Central was created by Matt Stone and Trey Parker and is one of the many new shows that involve animation with high-level adult comedy that parodies current events going on across the United States and throughout the world. South Park is just one of many new shows that involve this sort of high end entertainment and they are taking the television ratings by storm. This show, along with others of its nature such as Family Guy, The Simpsons, and King of the Hill are all extremely controversial in nature and in regards to the situations portrayed on the television screen. These shows have gotten consistently more obnoxious, racial, and detrimental in content that it has caused major concern with viewers of all statures, whether it is a housewife mother's concern with their 10 year olds viewing habits or whether it be concern in the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). In light of all the controversy and lewd content, South Park continues to push the limits of what is acceptable for television viewing, continually going over the edge in many viewers' eyes. Like it or not South Park is extremely inventive in nature and on many levels has been more successful then anyone could have ever dreamed. In the following pages we will explore the many different aspects, criticisms, and accomplishments this heavily controversial cable television cartoon has touched upon.

South Park is an animated series that was created by Matt Stone and Trey Parker in the mid 90's featuring four boys who live in the Colorado town of South Park, which is often beset by frequent odd occurrences that prove mysteriously similar to current events going on in our world. The show grew out of a short film that Trey Parker and Matt Stone created called "Frosty" or also known as "The Spirit of Christmas". "Frosty", also known as "A Christmas Story," was shot on an old, rough and tumble 16mm Arriflex camera that was on an animation stand at the University of Colorado film department in Boulder. The video was very primitive stuff in nature, as it was patched together from construction-paper cutouts that were simply glued together with nothing more then Elmer's Glue. The cutouts were then placed on construction paper backgrounds and photographed frame by frame. The "Spirit of Christmas" on the other hand, began to pick up steam when Fox executive Brian Graden, whom Matt and Trey met through contacts they had made premiering their previous work at The Sundance Film Festival. FOX gave them $2,000 to make a video portfolio that he could send as a Christmas card to other company executives to pitch the idea of the show. "I did the animation using nothing more then construction paper cutouts," Parker says, "and we both improvised the dialogue, screaming obscenities at each other in my basement for hours while my mom was baking fudge upstairs wondering what in the world we were doing. It cost $750 and we pocketed the rest." To complete this project they used relatively the same exact setup as they had previously done at the University of Colorado in Boulder. When it came to doing work for the first Pilot show for South Park, Matt and Trey used more than 5,000 construction paper cut outs and a the same exact 16mm camera. Each action shot was filmed frame by frame directly onto video film. It took approximately 70 days to make the pilot for the show. Using traditional methods for the Comedy Central pilot the duo claimed it "took us forever, because it was 22 minutes long," Stone says. Another animator, Terrence Masson, was the first to suggest that South Park could be made using CG and he proceeded to make a 10 second playground scene using cut-outs he had received with approval from Matt and Trey. Computers were used starting with the very first episode, but the episodes didn't look like construction-paper animation again until episode 105, "An Elephant Makes Love to a Pig." The style of cinematography used to create the show is much more simplistic than traditional hand-drawn animation, but it is also very tedious and very labor intensive. The use of computers has made it more efficient because things don't have to be cut out and glued together by hand as was done for the pilot. Instead we use and reuse files from previous shows. Today the scripts for South Park episodes are written only days before a show actually airs, allowing the content of the show to stay up to date and topical. The make-up of the show is very nuclear in nature, as there are four boys whose lives and random run ins with society are elaborated on. The four main characters are Eric Cartman, who is the short, obnoxious, loud mouthed, fat kid whom the others constantly make fun of for being stupid and overweight. Then there is Stan Marsh, who is your normal run of the mill kid who has the sanest viewpoint of the entire bunch, when things go wrong Stan usually has the defining voice of reason. Next there is Kyle Broflovski who is the overtly smart one who also happens to be Jewish and lives a very stereotypical Jewish life in the way his parents, especially his mother, treat him. Kyle is always being made fun of for his intellectual skills and his religious affiliation. Last but not least there is Kenny McCormick, who rarely ever takes off his hooded jacket or speaks, and when he does, his voice is muffled. Kenny lives in your stereotypical poor family as he lives in a broken down shack of a house and has drunken and abusive parents that rarely care what happens. Kenny is extremely unlucky by nature and in some way shape or form is killed in every episode by something paralleling the point being made in each episode.

Most parents do not approve of the bleepable expletives that fly out of the kids' mouths on 'South Park' or the fact that Kenny dies violently in every episode. A lot of people want shows like this to be censored or taken off of the air. Parents try to shelter their children too much. They should let them experience life in the real world and not censor everything that they disagree with. Some of the past show topics have included anal probes and the alien abduction of Ike, Stan's younger brother. Parents do not care for the show, thinking that it will corrupt their child's innocence. One Georgia Mom, Paula Howard remarks, "I don't care for the disrespect. You have enough smart-aleck children running around without 'South Park' making it worse." Kids on the other hand take the show's content in a completely different way that parents would not expect. They know that they shouldn't follow in the footsteps of the four vulgar children of 'South Park.' In the show, Cartman dressed up as Hitler for Halloween. This may have alarmed some parents,