In the movie South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, the action is driven by a pair of Canadian comedians, “Terrance and Phillip,” who speak very with a very elegant accent, and whose material consists mainly of fart jokes and elaborately obscene insults. They also appear in several episodes of the TV series. Are Terrance and Phillip based on any real-life Canadian comedy act?
Um, actually aren’t they based on Beavis and Butthead?
Everybody knows Canadians don’t fart, silly.
I always figured that Terrance and Phillip was the crude cartoon that South Park kids watch, just as South Park is the crude cartoon we (well, some of us) watch. Presumably T&P watch a cartoon starring a pair of nauseated amoebae.
Yeah, that’s what I figured too, but they appear in person in the movie. And Kyle’s mom refers to them as actors.
Of course they are! CTV can’t afford animation.
I saw an E! show about Mike Myers. As a teen he was on a children’s western show on some local Canadian station. Good grief was it ever cheap.
They also refer to the T&P movie having ‘crappy animation’.
Ha ha, yeah, I love that line, because immediately after, you see the four boys walking down the street, animated crappily.
I saw the South Park creators on Dennis Miller’s talk show one time. They said that T&P came about because of the abuse they were getting that South Park had crappy animation and was nothing but fart jokes. They came up with a cartoon that was super crappy animation and literally nothing but fart jokes.
Certainly T&P don’t closely resemble anything on actual Canadian TV, although I’m sure something hilarious could be done with a parody of our bizarre National Film Board cartoons.
Essentially, they’re an exaggeration of certain elements in South Park itself, much like Itchy & Scratchy on the Simpsons are an exaggeration of certain elements of Tim & Jerry.
Archenar:
I guess the show is animated versions of real people. I recall there was a Mr. T animated show once, and he’s real. I’m sure there are numerous other examples.
Naw, Terrance and Phillip are “real people” to the South Park kids. It’s not supposed to be shoddy. Well, it is. But in the South Park world they’re just Canadians. Remeber the line “You canadians, with your beady eyes, and flapping heads!”? I always loved that one…
But why Canadians? I mean, why did the creators decide to make T&P Canadians? (Which leads to a U.S.-Canadian war in the movie.) Do Canadian comics have a reputation for over-the-top crudity? I never heard of such a thing, outside of South Park.
Love them flapping heads.
T&P regularly switch back and forth between being refered to as cartoon characters and actors. They started out as animated characters, but in Bigger, Longer, Uncut they were both, depending on the situation.
They made fun of this in the Behind the Music parody episode (Behind the Blow I think?) They showed a really well done Saturday-morning-style animated version of them as astronauts, but with different voices! The narrator then says how, “This lead to a lot of confusion as to whether Terrence & Phillip were real people or just cartoons”.
Otherwise it wouldn’t make any sense when Terrance calls Phillip “the biggest dick in Canada.”
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I have a quesiton, in the rainforest episode (getting gay with kids), the woman was supposedly voiced by Jennifer Aniston. It sounded a lot like her, a lot a lot, was it really her?
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TeemingOne, according to IMDB, that was Jennifer Aniston.
Robin
In a recent(?) episode of South Park the boys go up to Canada to rescue Kyle’s adopted brother Ike. They run into a guy name Scott. All the other Canadians say “Scott is a dick.”
Are they referring to that guy in the Alliance party???
And here I thought they meant Scott Thompson!
I get the feeling that T&P started out as cartoons with no real national origin. Then the creators realized, “Hey, they’ve got the same flapping head that Ike has, and we’ve already established that Ike is Canadian. So why not make all flapping-head people Canadian?”
That’s my impression of it anyway.