When South Park first became famous, it was known largely as that cartoon with crappy animation and kids who swear like it was nobody's business.  True enough, the first few seasons of the hit Comedy Central show did feature a lot of slapstick antics that were bound to shock the timid. Going forward, however, as South Park reached its 10th season and beyond, things got a lot more intelligent in the little mountain town in Colorado.

The show's creators started relying less and less on visual comedy and began using convoluted plots, outrageous premises, and out-of-this world characters to elicit laughter from its fans.  Of course, the usual swearing and cussing and irreverence are still there, but somehow, South Park has evolved from the disgusting cartoon to the disgusting cartoon with substance and a steadfast political stance.

If there is a burning issue that's worth mulling over, trust that South Park will have it covered – sooner, rather than later.  Particularly striking in recent memory was how it tackled the momentous US presidential elections.  Earlier on, fellow supposedly politically learned cartoon Family Guy portrayed Republican bets as Nazis.  Deciding to take a less obvious route, the guys over at South Park just opted to poke fun at the whole thing.  They reasoned almost everything had been said about Palin, Obama, McCain, and Biden.  Let's just make them an Ocean 11-like gang who hatched the grandiose 2008 polls as nothing more but a grand conspiracy to steal some diamond. Genius.

Treading South Park's history of attacking the seemingly sacred, touching the supposedly untouchable is several years in the making.  Name whatever issue, and more often than not there is a South Park episode that deals with it the way no mainstream media outfit does.  Take, for instance, the High School Musical craze.  Just as everyone was gushing over Vanessa Hudgens and Zac Efron, South Park fleshed out the fallacies that the HSM franchise was dispensing: the illusory equality that high schools are supposedly capable of.  That, and the absurdity of nonlinear bursts of song.

Among the issues tackled masterfully by South Park include the meteoric rise of China as a new superpower, the Twilight craze, homosexuality (a number of times), global warming, scientology, the Y2K craze, religion, even Britney Spears.

And people do watch.  Other than its consistent ratings, the best in the history of Comedy Central, there have been some cases such as Tom Cruise reportedly threatening to withdraw from promotion of Mission Impossible III if the network wouldn't stop airing a scheduled repeat of the episode “Trapped in the Closet” which essentially portrayed Scientology as a global scam to milk money out of its members. (MI 3 flopped so apparently it would've hardly mattered.)

In the end, South Park creators have been adamant in insisting that they are “equal opportunity offenders” so people should just lighten up.  And it's true.  Always, South Park represents a completely new way of looking at things, and it is always refreshing, educational, and downright funny.



-Glenn L. Diaz, BuddyTV Staff Columnist
(Image Courtesy of Comedy Central)