Isaac Hayes could have an action for misappropriation of image/likeness/persona if they did that. Tom Waits recently won millions of dollars from Ford after winning a misappropriation of voice claim against Ford. Ford wanted Waits’s voice for a truck commercial jingle and Waits refuses to do commercials, so Ford hired someone who sounds like him. The circumstances are slightly different than what they would be if South Park hired an Isaac Hayes lookalike, but there’s definitely a colorable claim there.
I’m sure they’ll want to have a little more fun with it than that.
You can’t just consider the USA market, though. If Crazy Tiny Tom refuses to do all publicity for the film, that will hurt the studio tremendously in the international market, where he is still very popular and where they make beaucoup bucks.
I doubt it. Ford wanted somebody who sounds like Tom Waits. Stone and Parker would need, not somebody who sounds like Isaac Hayes, but somebody who sounds like Chef – an image/likeness/persona Hayes does not own. There’s nothing remarkable about a TV show hiring a new actor to play a continuing character when the original actor, for whatever reason, becomes unavailable – happens all the time.
An article here says
<bolding mine>
Please God, let it be Donny Osmond.
No no no. Dakota Fanning.
I’m guessing the new voice will sound a lot like Michael Jackson. 
That would be an appropriate pie-in-the-face to the buttery basso (or maybe it’s bass’ole.)
Rolling Stone just did a big article about Scientology. It said that the highest ranking Scientologists are called Operating Thetans. Mr. Cruise, they said, is an OT VII (with an OT III being the highest.)
Have a heart. The guy had a stroke and he’s being controlled by a cult.
Brooke Shields, talkin’ as low as she can manage:
“What kind of mush-minded idiot told you little crackers that a daily dose of calcium, magnesium, and vitamin C is going to help you with a chronic mental illness? Butters, you need to get your messed-up little ass down to the clinic and see what Dr. Doctor can do for you.”
That’s a bit confused. The OT levels are above the non-OT members, but “Operating Thetan” is far from “Highest Ranking.” Scientologists go through auditing and training until they are declared “Clear” – the first goalpost. After they reach that goal, they are eligible to be invited to do the OT levels. After you complete OT I, you’re an “Operating Thetan.” There are still at least seven OT levels after that, and before you can do OT VIII you have to go through a set of courses called NOTS. “New Era Operating Thetan.” OT VIII is the highest level that has leaked to the public with any degree of reliability, because by then the investment is well into millions of dollars, and apparantly no-one has gotten there without being a life-time True Believer.
Aren’t “Operating Thetans” supposed to have supernatural powers or something?
They’re put across as natural powers. It’s those pesky engrams that inhibit them. Once you break the programming, you’re no longer “at effect” of MEST. (Matter, energy, space, and time.) You’re “at cause” over them, and can learn to manipulate them.
They don’t claim that you become OT and poof you’re a master magician – it’s like when you become human, you’re in an infant state – you’re human, but you still need to learn how to do the things that humans can do, like walk, talk, do differential calculus, and all that other stuff.
The “tech” of the OT levels is roughly parallel to the grades of the Golden Dawn or OTO – except they’re couched in pseudo-scientific language and sci-fi ideas and you have to take out a second mortgage on your house, instead of indulging in a bit of mummery with your mates and having beer and corn-chips afterwards, as is natural and proper.
Astral travel, telepathy, and literal mind-over-matter type stuff. These are called “native powers,” because all thetans supposedly have the abiliity to access them. Even a “Degraded Being,” someone so polluted with engrams and body-thetans that they are resistant or even antithetical to Scientology tech is never declared hopeless – they may just need a few thousand years of reincarnation before they can naturally recover to the point where Scientology counselling is useful to them. 
And do they ever, well, offer demonstrations?
Does Tom Cruise ever get frustrated because they call him an OT VII but he can’t read minds or manipulate objects by telekinesis? (Or perhaps he thinks he can . . .)
I know it’s only been ten minutes, and I’m neither much of an SP fan or a quoter, but if I may…
Dude, I think it might be best for us to never piss Parker and Stone off again.
You’d think that Ford would have learned from when Frito Lay tried that with Waits about 10 years ago and he sued the piss out of them and won.
You would think that, since he’s sued a couple of other companies for the same thing over the years. But what do we know.
Similar thing happened with Bette Middler and Ford. They hired someone to sing one of her songs, who sounded just like her.
She wound up winning $400k.
Actually it was one of her backup singers.
Oh. My. God. They killed Chef. Bastards.
I gotta say, that’s a horrible way to dispose of a character whose voice actor departed the show! I thought it was fucked up right up until Che’f death, but then redeemed itself during the funeral scene. I thought, “Okay, that was harsh, but I can see that.” It was the scene AFTER that, the final jab at Isaac Hayes and the Super Adventure Club, that I hated because it detracted from the scene immediately before it.
Season Ten, at long last, South Park may have Jumped The Shark.
I stopped watching South Park a few years ago, but I’ve gotta know what they did to Chef. Could someone who saw the episode summarize it in a spoiler box for me?
Based on Askia’s comments, it sounds like Parker and Stone are living up to their reputations as vindictive little crap stains.