When I picture Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators of South Park, it’s of them sitting around a table filled with stacks of money. One of them floats a random idea to repackage a handful of old episodes into a brand new DVD set and the other replies, to quote Mr. Burns. “We‘ll all be rich. Rich as Nazis!”

The latest South Park DVD set, The Cult of Cartman, is nothing more than an anthology of 12 episodes that focus on Eric Cartman at his best (which is also his worst). Why should you pay $25.99 for these episodes? That’s a good question.

The primary selling point is that three of the episodes are “new to DVD,” which means they’re from season 12 and will be available along with the rest of the entire season soon enough. I’m not just sure you don’t need this set right now…I’m HIV positive. Funny as that episode is (as well as the episodes where Cartman is a substitute teacher for inner city kids and where he and Butters leave the frontier class trip that turns into a hostage situation), it’s not worth the money.

The other “new” features are animated introductions to each episode by Cartman. Before you get too excited, know that these amount to a series of 5-second clips of Cartman saying a single-sentence moral for each episode.

The truth is that South Park reruns are so prodigious thanks to syndication and Comedy Central that if you simply set up your DVR to record every episode that airs, you’ll probably have this entire set for free by the end of the month.

Perhaps there’s some value in compilation sets if they come with lots of cool DVD extras or if they provide a coherent storyline (such as when The X-Files released a compilation of episodes solely about the larger mythology). But for Matt Stone and Trey Parker to essentially randomly select 12 episodes from the series, slap them in a DVD and call it “new” is a tad disingenuous. I can only hope they’ll eventually make an episode mocking DVD compilations, then put that episode on a DVD compilation.


-John Kubicek, BuddyTV Senior Writer
(Image courtesy of Comedy Central)