Anyone else think the ending was surprisingly bleak? From having watched the show so many times, I’d expect them to show the beating Token gave Cartman without showing Cartman crawling around sobbing and choking afterward. And then Butters goes over and does pretty much the only vicious thing we’ve ever seen him do: His buddy is lying there crying in agony, and instead of offering help he says, “F*ck you, Eric” and walks off. And we cut to the credits.
Normally the ending is a big laugh, but that one was just brutal. Was there a message there that Cartman had finally gone over the top into “this-ain’t-funny” territory? Is South Park trying to show they’ve got a conscience? I’ve always seen it as one of the few shows on TV that obviously do have a conscience, in part because they don’t go out of their way to wave it around.
Eric Cartman is the epotome of unfeeling, unrepentant, unredeemable evil (Satan’s character is often portrayed in a kinder light!). Having him get his comeuppance is always a big laugh for me!
The animation is done with CGI; I believe they use the LucasArts system. That gives them a 5 day turnaround, as opposed to conventional animation (like The Simpsons) which requires 8 months per episode. That’s why South Park can be so current. They have always had the ability to show stuff as advanced as Star Wars: Episodes Crap, but have mostly stayed with the look and feel of cardboard. (They only used actual cardboard for the first episode about alien abductions.)
They don’t have to bleep out anything. They do it because it’s funnier. (Direct quote from Matt and Trey.) Similar to the movie title. The original title was a more blatant cock reference…something like South Park: Long and Hard. (Not it but equally unfunny.) After several titles were rejected by the MPAA or FCC or whomever, they finally came up with “Bigger, Longer, & Uncut”, which is a clearly funnier cock reference.
All this info I just recently learned from an hour long South Park interview/special on one of those channels…MTV, VH1, CC, E!; I can’t remember which one. It was in the vein of “Souh Park: Behind the Scenes.”
Actually, the original title of the South Park movie was South Park: All Hell Breaks Loose. The MPAA wouldn’t allow that.
If this makes no sense to you, remember that these are the people who in the same year gave Trey and Matt’s Orgazmo, which had no nudity and comic violence an NC-17 and Boogie Nights, with nudity, graphic violence and drug use, an R.
I loved the Christian Rock parody, and Butters’ “Fuck you, Eric” at the end was priceless. But I agree that the music downloading subplot was kinda weak. It was a decent idea, but sometimes their overly-simplistic moralizing gets kind of old. I mean, they do realize that not all musicians are millionaires, don’t they?
Yeah, I think they missed the boat by choosing to target “crybaby millionaire” rock superstars in this subplot.
When the boys told the cop they thought downloading MP3s was no big deal and he told them, “I’m gonna show you boys something and you aren’t gonna like it,” I expected him to introduce them to some RIAA middleman out of a job due to revenues lost to downloading, to which the boys would respond, “So we’re supposed to feel guilty because some ***ing lawyer lost his job? That’s a joke, right?”
I’ve gotten the idea that there are more than one groups of people who assign these things. Perhaps a lot of the distinction is between groups of raters.
Kinda sorta. There’s only one board at a time, but membership rotates. Two movies that are rated within a couple of months of each other most likely reflect the opinion of the same group of people. More info.
South Park isn’t really CGI. Characters and artwork are drawn by hand, scanned into a computer, and then animated with a 2D animation program called Maya. And I think all six of the first episodes were actually animated by hand, not just the pilot.
Even if it were done with 2D animation software, it would still be CGI.
As it happens, though, Maya is 3D modelling software.
Although the elements are practically 2D, they’re rendered with a 3D engine. Just ultra low-poly models of bits of cardboard with minimal texturing. “Lights” and “cameras” can move in 3-dimensions.
The same software was used for the Discovery Channel’s When Dinosaurs… series. (And Reboot, if I recall correctly? Or was that Softimage?)
About the music downloading subplot: Given what we can infer about Matt and Trey’s feelings on this subject, from this episode, should I and other broadband users not feel guilty about downloading a pirated version of a South Park dvd, rather than buying the original? Just a thought…