South Park 11/5

[ladyfoxfyre]

So far I'm enjoying it, much funnier than last week.

[John DiFool]

You mean 11/6, the one with Obama as a key character?

[Larry Borgia]

First good episode this season. Did not see the Jewel thief angle coming. And the funny thing is I was at a drunken impromptu street celebration last night. Not quite as extreme though.

[Fiveroptic]

I loved it. Ike being in on the whole thing was the best part.

[ladyfoxfyre]

You mean 11/6, the one with Obama as a key character?

My computer says today is Wednesday, November 5th. Unless I'm not getting the joke....

[MyFootsZZZ]

I know it takes about a week to do an episode. Since Obama and McCain were actually working together there were SOME scenes, (not all, like with Obama in the Oval Office) , along with the kids getting Ike to the hospital.
Do you think they just presumed what was going to happen? Think they planned for the outcome to be different at all? Just wonder how they approached this one.

This episode was GREAT. I love Palin's second persona.

[nikonikosuru]

I loved it. Ike being in on the whole thing was the best part.


Was just about to say the same. Boom baby!

"Where are my pants? And where's my TV?!"

[Danger Man]

I know it takes about a week to do an episode. Since Obama and McCain were actually working together there were SOME scenes, (not all, like with Obama in the Oval Office) , along with the kids getting Ike to the hospital.
Do you think they just presumed what was going to happen? Think they planned for the outcome to be different at all? Just wonder how they approached this one.

This episode was GREAT. I love Palin's second persona.

I guess they were just going to switch out a few scenes and change the t-shirt logos and some dialogues if McCain won.

[CutterJohn]

Yup.. easiest thing in the world for them to do.. they already have all the scenes and animations set up.. swapping the obama stuff for mccain stuff woulda been simplicity in itself.

Most likely was they simply had that done already, and just produced two versions of the episode. I bet a 'mccain wins!' version will leak someday, or show up on a dvd.

[lawoot]

Didn't they make direct references to Obama's speech last night? Like the 'getting kids a puppy' bit?

[quixotic78]

It seemed that they had some stuff from McCain's concession speech (especially the "Aw no come on!" after McCain said it was his fault that he lost, not the fault of his supporters), and they also had some stuff from Obama's victory speech (the bit about how Melia and Sasha will get a puppy). So they've got to be able to do <24 hour turnaround on some scenes, at least, which is damn impressive.

[Tuckerfan]

It seemed that they had some stuff from McCain's concession speech (especially the "Aw no come on!" after McCain said it was his fault that he lost, not the fault of his supporters), and they also had some stuff from Obama's victory speech (the bit about how Melia and Sasha will get a puppy). So they've got to be able to do <24 hour turnaround on some scenes, at least, which is damn impressive.

Well, they can do the voices at any time, so its not that impressive. In the thread about the episode where Kenny gets a PSP, someone mentioned what kind of software they're using. Given that the animation's gotten a lot better (more high deffy), it seems obvious to me that they're constantly upgrading their gear. They might have a deal like Lucas had with SGI, where they get to play with the "toys" before they're released.

A good ep, and I have to wonder if the Obamas aren't going to be recurring characters. (I also liked Michelle saying "Fuck it!")

[Ichbin Dubist]

I'm still impressed. A huge number of scenes were contingent on an Obama victory, not just signs and dialog but every scene where Obama was in the Oval Office and therefore the guy in the secret tunnel, as well as the ending. I do wonder what their backup plan was. Or would they have really animated 2/3 of the show in -- what -- 20 hours or so? That's remarkable.

I'm glad that the commercial kind of teased it as an "Obama is trying to take over!" plot, and that they didn't go there at all.

[EvilHamsterOnCrack]

This isn't the first time they've had a ~24 hr turnaround on an episode. Remember Christmas in Canada, one day after we got saddam, they had saddam as the prime minister of Canada.

There were a lot of obama-centric parts as well besides those already mentioned... dunno if we'd have everyone going nuts in the streets about "CHANGE!!!!" and "everything's different now, you can do whatever you want" if McCain won. I think they just assumed it was inevitable and began the episode before the election.

[bouv]

Or would they have really animated 2/3 of the show in -- what -- 20 hours or so? That's remarkable.


All they would have to do is change Obama being in the Oval Office/Tunnel to McCain. They use some good software, and it's almost as easy as just going in and saying "delete Obama character, insert McCain character." All the backgrounds and other characters in the scene can stay put.

[Hockey Monkey]

Awesome episode. Finally.

Boom baby!

[Cisco]

This is why people who say the show is dead are full of shit. A show can have a slump without being dead or jumping the shark. This was the best episode since Imaginationland. If they do crap the rest of the season this still makes up for it. Hilarious.

Re: the timely stuff; they've said before that they've put off even starting an episode until the night before it airs, so this is nothing new. I doubt they made two episodes or designed the script to be easily flippable.

[Mahaloth]

This is why people who say the show is dead are full of shit. A show can have a slump without being dead or jumping the shark. This was the best episode since Imaginationland. If they do crap the rest of the season this still makes up for it. Hilarious.

.

I agree 100% South Park is nowhere near dead. It's true they've had some crapola episodes recently, but this and Imagination Land are brilliant.

[Yookeroo]

This is why people who say the show is dead are full of shit. A show can have a slump without being dead or jumping the shark. This was the best episode since Imaginationland.

That's an awfully low standard. All the episodes since then have been horrible.

But this one was much better than the other episodes this season.

[Leaper]

There were a lot of obama-centric parts as well besides those already mentioned... dunno if we'd have everyone going nuts in the streets about "CHANGE!!!!" and "everything's different now, you can do whatever you want" if McCain won. I think they just assumed it was inevitable and began the episode before the election.

I theorize that if McCain had won, those parts would've parodied "blacks/liberals/everyone will riot if Obama loses!" predictions.

[cochrane]

I am so going to hell for laughing at the bit about Obama's grandmother faking her death.

[The Scrivener]

I didn't recognize Joe Biden anywhere in the episode... maybe because depicting a secretly savvy Biden would overly burden our suspension of disbelief?

[AllWalker]

They sometimes throw in contemporary - and I mean really contemporary - stuff into their eps. How long after Gore won the Nobel prize did he appear in the show wearing it?

I don't think they would have made the ep in advance assuming Obama would win. After all, they called Gore for the 2000 election, and that threw them on their That's My Bush!/Everybody loves Al (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That%27s_My_Bush!#Prior_to_the_2000_Presidential_Election) sitcom thingy. I'd think they would have learnt their lesson.

Glad to see the boys back in good form. Another plot sitting just beyond the boundary of absurdity, tantalisingly out of reach of your sanity. Makes the show what it is, IMO

[Cisco]

That's an awfully low standard. All the episodes since then have been horrible.

Well, going backwards I had to stop there because it was a highlight of the series. If you take it as one episode it would easily be top 10. This one was maybe top 25.

[EvilHamsterOnCrack]

I didn't recognize Joe Biden anywhere in the episode... maybe because depicting a secretly savvy Biden would overly burden our suspension of disbelief?

That was one of the funniest jokes of the episode, I thought. Everyone else was in on it... except for Joe Biden.

[gonzoron]

I think it was the Elian Gonzales parody episode where the said they'd been working all week on the new episode and then scrapped it late monday night and threw together a new one in 1.5 days. Comedy Central trusts them enough at this point that as long as the get it there with like an hour to spare, it'll go on.

no cite because I'm too lazy to look it up right now.

(pretty good episode, too. My favorite was Palin's accent shift. That had me chuckling.)

[fusoya]

There was no second version. The crew knew Obama had it in the bag, and only had to wait for the actual speeches to animate JUST THOSE SCENES Wednesday morning. If McCain managed to win, then a "Dewey Defeats Truman" moment would have been the least of their concerns.....

Woodland Critters Christmas was the fastest produced episode - they started doing it Tuesday night, to air Wednesday night, after scrapping a totally different Christmas special that they'd been working on since Saturday, which Trey & Matt thought was going to hell due to them getting really stumped. Listen to the commentary for that episode's DVD....it's probably the most interesting one they've recorded.

Best South Park episode I've seen since Guitar Queero. I loved that they WENT THERE with Obama's Grandmother.

[Cisco]

If McCain managed to win, then a "Dewey Defeats Truman" moment would have been the least of their concerns.....


What do you mean? They're not Democrats, if that's what you're implying.

[MyFootsZZZ]

Woodland Critters Christmas was the fastest produced episode - they started doing it Tuesday night, to air Wednesday night, after scrapping a totally different Christmas special that they'd been working on since Saturday, which Trey & Matt thought was going to hell due to them getting really stumped.

Holy crap! That was a good episode too! It's as if the less time they have to work on a show, the better it is.

[neutron star]

I liked the generic heist movie parody. This is one of the very, very, very rare times where I actually like/have-seen the film/genre-of-film that they're trying to parody. Really, it's almost uncanny how much stuff they've parodied that I've never seen compared to what I have.

[kasuo]

References to Ocean's Eleven are here and there, up to the last scene where they are waiting for their flight out of town, complete with the same music as the fountain scene from Ocean's.

[Tuckerfan]

Holy crap! That was a good episode too! It's as if the less time they have to work on a show, the better it is.

Sort of like in school, when the paper you spend weeks slaving over gets only "C," but the one you slapped together the night before gets an "A+."

[Freudian Slit]

Couldn't they just have done two versions of the same episode, one with Obama winning and one with McCain winning, and shown the Obama one? It's not like they'd have to do any new animating in the twenty hours remaining, right?

[Tuckerfan]

How they did it. (http://tv.ign.com/articles/928/928073p1.html)Stone: So we didn't really start in earnest on this show until one week ago. For the speeches we had a blank space in there, with the acceptance and concession speeches in there. That only takes us a couple hours to do. It's a very easy animation. The main thing was waiting until they gave the speeches so we could get the backdrops and see what it looked like. Then we copied down the speech and put it in there.

What was funny is that we'd written placeholder crap and put it in there. It was "I want to thank my fellow Americans and blah blah blah" and "Change is going to come.." We just wrote some junk to put in there as temp, and it was amazing how much the temporary stuff matched the boilerplate in there. We then took a few things that people would remember, like Obama promising his kids the dog. We copied the words and put that in, but that was easy for us because we do the show so quick. We were here all night, but we usually are on Tuesday finishing the show.He also says they figured Obama was going to win, so they didn't bother producing a second version.

[Coriolanus]

That's cool. I was wondering how they did it that fast.

I could be wrong, but I think I heard Obama say, in his Saturday Address, "I hope South Park is funny this Wednesday." ;)