I was VERY impressed at the Elian episode of South Park last night—especially as it had been promoted on-air last week! Cartoons take months to create, so I was gob-smacked.
Here’s my guess: they already had an Elian episode ready to go and—through sheer dumb luck—all this happened over the weekend. So they very hurredly threw together some additional scenes and voice-overs and rushed it on-air at the last minute.
I will never recover from the image of Janet Reno dressed at the Easter Bunny.
I’d just like to state that this thread is salt in the wound that is the result of my recent move to economize, which means no cable. I usually don’t miss it, until I hear about South Park episodes with Janet Reno as the Easter Bunny, and a THREE DAY MARATHON on Bravo of Shakespearian film. Dammit. AND Tom Jones on VH1, duetting with D’Angelo. I miss all the wierd stuff.
“I go on guilt trips a couple of time a year. Mom books them for me.” A custom made Wally .sig!
My iguana's sick.
He's all floppy. Could he have
Reptile dysfunction?
-Chef Troy, Haiku MasterApparently South Park (as it’s all done on a computer - made to look like paper cutouts) sometimes don’t complete their episodes until the day it goes to air. They can write, make, and screen one in a month.
I just want to say that I too was dumbfounded watching that last night. How the hell did they do that? My guess was that they had a lot of ideas already (the quints, Kenny in Romania) and ad-libbed the Easter parts. I’d love to hear the whole story of how they did it!
SwimmingRiddles, if you miss South Park bad enough, you can download the episodes from Usenet in Real Media and MPEG formats. Try alt.binaries.southpark. That’s how I watch all my episodes since the slack-ass cable company here never got Comedy Central.
How do I get into Usenet?
Life is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think.
Download a news reader. I use Free Agent. I just checked the group a couple minutes ago and last night’s episode has yet to be posted. Chances are it’ll be up within the next 24 hours, though. There’s a bunch of old episodes posted that you can watch in the meantime. The Real Media files tend to run about 30-40MB per episode. The MPEG’s have far superior picture quality and are usually 130MB or so.
If you search around hard enough, you may be able to find the Real Media episodes on some web sites as well.
As I was at a baseball game last night with my “tonsil hockey” teammate (nickname courtesy of Swimming Riddles), I did not get to see South Park. But that does not excuse the fact that I never remember to watch South Park anyway. Dammit I want my South Park!
OK - I’m going hom right now to to program the VCR. Good bye.
That was an amazing show. They made an Elian spoof much quicker than Seinfeld did of Johny Cochrane.
Tom Jones is not weird. 
Try not to have a good time…this is supposed to be educational.
-Charles Schulz
I also thought last night’s episode was hilarious–and was astounded at the speed with which they produced it.
Minor quibble: Romanian is a romance language–it isn’t germanic or slavic in origin or sound. So…the accents of the Romanians on the episodes were way off base. I hate to admit it, but it bugged me. (hides picky-oony head in shame)
Ignorant since 1972
I meant, of course, “in the episode”
I see (hear) they got really good voice-over actresses to replace the late whats-her-name, who used to do all the women on the show.
I still figure they had 90% of the show done and quickly “fixed it up” over the last couple of days. That’s the only way to account for the closet scenes!
What was Kenny singing, by the way? It was a lovely tune.
Oh, BTW, in case any of you South Park fans haven’t heard, in appears SP may only have a couple episodes left before it’s gone forever 
I didn’t see the South Park episode (shitty cable company also) but I’m reminded of a funny gag on the Simpsons a few months back. They had the bar patrons discussing the President and his wife and whenever one of them would mention them by name, the character would have his beer glass in front of his mouth, and the name would be in a different voice, implying that when they went into production they weren’t sure if the President would be impeached by air date, LOL!
“You guys are outta your league…You’re looking at a woman who has her own harpoon!”
Eve wrote
You mean Mary Kay Bergman, the woman with the golden voice in animation, and who committed suicide last November? Sure is a loss… I haven’t seen any new SP episodes so I’d be interested to see what they’ve done…
I read somewhere that Trey Parker and Matt Stone went into extreme overdrive to finish that Elian episode because they saw that things might be ramping up really quickly. Good timing, it turns out!
– Baglady
Eve said:
You got it. I read an article about it (must have been in the Chicago Tribune), and you described it pretty much right on the nose.
This week – Matt Lauer in Hawaii on a volcano. Cartman’s mom farts. Volcano erupts. Matt burns. Big Gay Al weeps.
David, you wouldn’t happen to have kept that article, would you? I looked in the Tribune online archives but couldn’t find anything. Or if anyone else can link or find a site with it…I’m looking but nothing’s coming up so far.
That Mr. Showbiz article was interesting…although it seems to contradict what Matt Stone and Trey Parker said in this month’s Playboy interview. They’re under contract to produce a total of around 72 episodes, and they should still have more than 30 to go.
I suppose it’s possible that they’ll break their contract and pay the penalty, but that’s not a very good idea in showbiz; you tend to get blacklisted when you do that.
About this last week’s episode: I’m starting to wonder if they produced a full episode, then scrapped it and threw together the Elian-homage episode in less than a week. There was some footage on the commercial for the episode that never appeared in the episode, and the girls on the commercial didn’t have an accent at all.