Zack
12-05-2005, 02:00 PM
Sometimes SOUTH PARK will include a joke that makes NO DAMN SENSE to me until the creators explain it later. Here are some of my favorites:
"Cripple Fight:" The way, WAY too long fight is a direct parody of the Roddy Piper film THEY LIVE. In fact, a "making of" special later explained how they certain bits as a shot-for-shot parody of the original.
"Twah:" Many viewers got the joke of David Blaine having a scientology-type cult, or the world's religous figures opposing him as "The Super Best Friends." But even Blaine himself was confused by his character's constantly trailing off his sentences with "twah." On the DVD commentary, Matt Stone explained how he based that on a musician friend with a similar speech habit...not that anyone viewing the episode would know that.
"Star Trek:" Many, many episodes contain hommages to the show. The planetarium episode is a take off on the episode "Dagger of the Mind." In the home-schooled kids episode, Kyle woos the home-schooled girl in a scene directly from an old episode. The boys' badly burned teacher in the mechanical wheelchair thing is a takeoff on "The Cage," while the adult-free town in "The Wacky Molestation Adventure" takes off another ep...along with LOGAN'S RUN, CHILDREN OF THE CORN, MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDROME and virtually every other "child-run world' movie ever.
TREK aliens appear in cameos for most alien scenes, and in the "Death Camp of Tolerance" episode with Lemmiwinks, a big-headed alien pops up to stage, "The museum tells us what to think! The museum!"
The 3 a.m. Joke: Trey Parker and Matt Stone have admitted that a number of jokes were created at 3 a.m. the night before the show was due to air. These often show up in the final episode as a particularly bizarre subplot.
One example is in the episode with the rich black celebrities moving into the neighborhood, in a sequence where Token goes to live with some joke-playing lions at the zoo. Another, better example is the "Crab People" bit from the Queer Eye episode, which has since become synonymous for "we can't think of an ending" in the writers' room.
More recently, an episode mocking the Hurricane Katrina situation had a subplot about Cartman coveting Kyle's "Jew Gold," which he believes Kyle keeps in a sack around his neck. Naturally, he's right.
The Meta-Narrative: This is a fancy way of saying that an episode is based around what's going on in SOUTH PARK's real-world existence. One Christmas episode is about the making of "The Spirit of Chirstmas," the real-world film that resulted in SOUTH PARK. A couple eps in Season 4 dealt with Trey and Matt's bitterness over losing the Oscar to Phil Collins by depicting him as an Oscar-kissing, Cockney-accented evildoer.
A more recent episode, dealing the kids putting on a news show, quickly turned into an allegory of what went on in the writers' room, complete with Butters reading from an actual comic strip that was published on the day the episode originally aired.
Other episodes draw from weird real-world things the guys have encountered, such as the Mexican Disneyland Casa Bonita, or the stilted Asian singer Wing.
Anyway, those are some of my favorites. Anyone have some jokes I missed?
Zack Smith
"Cripple Fight:" The way, WAY too long fight is a direct parody of the Roddy Piper film THEY LIVE. In fact, a "making of" special later explained how they certain bits as a shot-for-shot parody of the original.
"Twah:" Many viewers got the joke of David Blaine having a scientology-type cult, or the world's religous figures opposing him as "The Super Best Friends." But even Blaine himself was confused by his character's constantly trailing off his sentences with "twah." On the DVD commentary, Matt Stone explained how he based that on a musician friend with a similar speech habit...not that anyone viewing the episode would know that.
"Star Trek:" Many, many episodes contain hommages to the show. The planetarium episode is a take off on the episode "Dagger of the Mind." In the home-schooled kids episode, Kyle woos the home-schooled girl in a scene directly from an old episode. The boys' badly burned teacher in the mechanical wheelchair thing is a takeoff on "The Cage," while the adult-free town in "The Wacky Molestation Adventure" takes off another ep...along with LOGAN'S RUN, CHILDREN OF THE CORN, MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDROME and virtually every other "child-run world' movie ever.
TREK aliens appear in cameos for most alien scenes, and in the "Death Camp of Tolerance" episode with Lemmiwinks, a big-headed alien pops up to stage, "The museum tells us what to think! The museum!"
The 3 a.m. Joke: Trey Parker and Matt Stone have admitted that a number of jokes were created at 3 a.m. the night before the show was due to air. These often show up in the final episode as a particularly bizarre subplot.
One example is in the episode with the rich black celebrities moving into the neighborhood, in a sequence where Token goes to live with some joke-playing lions at the zoo. Another, better example is the "Crab People" bit from the Queer Eye episode, which has since become synonymous for "we can't think of an ending" in the writers' room.
More recently, an episode mocking the Hurricane Katrina situation had a subplot about Cartman coveting Kyle's "Jew Gold," which he believes Kyle keeps in a sack around his neck. Naturally, he's right.
The Meta-Narrative: This is a fancy way of saying that an episode is based around what's going on in SOUTH PARK's real-world existence. One Christmas episode is about the making of "The Spirit of Chirstmas," the real-world film that resulted in SOUTH PARK. A couple eps in Season 4 dealt with Trey and Matt's bitterness over losing the Oscar to Phil Collins by depicting him as an Oscar-kissing, Cockney-accented evildoer.
A more recent episode, dealing the kids putting on a news show, quickly turned into an allegory of what went on in the writers' room, complete with Butters reading from an actual comic strip that was published on the day the episode originally aired.
Other episodes draw from weird real-world things the guys have encountered, such as the Mexican Disneyland Casa Bonita, or the stilted Asian singer Wing.
Anyway, those are some of my favorites. Anyone have some jokes I missed?
Zack Smith