TV Rewatch - South Park - Season Seven

I'm about halfway through Season Eight currently, so I figured I'd take a step back and evaluate what I thought about Season Seven in relation to the others. I think Season Seven is an even season, continuing on the success of Season Six, with some new concepts and fun ideas, but mostly delivers the South Park everyone knows and loves. I say these things because even though I have yet to see them, I've heard the more recent seasons of South Park take a dive until Parker and Stone's Book of Mormon play came out, and then the show apparently picks back up with renewed creativity and energy. I'm not sure exactly when the slump happens, but as I progress further and further I must assume I'll be upon it soon enough, and I want to be able to critique exactly why it will feel inferior to these seasons.

This season Parker and Stone continue to play with the character of Kenny, in that this time he continues on from his appearance in the Christmas episode of Season Six, with no explanation as to why he's returned, and not once explains why he's back nor kills him at all this season. On one hand I feel like one of the stand out points of the early seasons and the character of Kenny is the no-further-explanation death sequence in most episodes followed by his appearance and then subsequent death in the next episode. It was something absurd in a show that otherwise played off of otherwise just exaggerated stereotypes of people in a small, backwoods town.

On the other hand, I definitely understand why they decided to stop killing him. They literally did it for 4 seasons straight and a feature length movie. "They killed Kenny, those bastards!" Became a part of the cultural identity of the show, and after all that time I assume they just felt like they had done everything they could with the joke and to do it longer would just be treading upon the same material over and over again. Plus, as the show gets weirder and weirder as Parker and Stone look for boundaries to push each season, Kenny's death not only feels less absurd, but limits how they might want to tell an episode. So all in all, I'm glad Kenny is back in Season Seven and isn't killed once. It shows growth and expansion from the writers and creators.

Season Seven to me isn't as good as Season Six was, but it's only just slightly inferior. Right off the bat, the first episode of the season, Cancelled, which re-uses scenes and dialogue from the very first episode in a plot that involves Earth being just a big reality show for some aliens and that they're stuck in a repeat. It's just the right amount of meta humor and new content mixing with references to the old that I enjoy from the series and while the concept itself is nothing new, it's presented in true outlandish South Park style.

The next episode Krazy Kripples is one of my favorites. In it, Jimmy gets mad that Christopher Reeve upstages him at a speaking event and decides to declare war on those made crippled after the fact instead of being born with it. After a series of misunderstandings, Jimmy and Timmy join the Crips, thinking they're actually crippled people, and fight the Bloods. All the while, all the main characters check back in at major plot points and just comment that they're "not going anywhere near this one." and walk back off-screen. This was a storytelling device I really enjoyed because it indicates that Parker and Stone clearly know the story they're telling could be considered offensive if told through the format of a regular episode, but since the whole thing plays out with the characters two crippled characters and shows them at the focal point and how they could come up with the idea that Crips is a gang for crippled people, it comes off as not making fun of the handicapped and instead the situation the kids got themselves into.

The episode Toilet Paper is one that I felt was weak, but still enjoyable. The episode plays off as a series of references and homages to famous crime dramas and thrillers, mostly Silence of the Lambs, but includes references to Godfather Part II, Scarface and a scene from Platoon. While I stilled laugh with the episode, it felt weaker since it was taking most of it's jokes from references than things actually happening in the episode.

There are absolute gems in this season however,Red Man's Guilt, an episode where a play on history reversal happens and the Native Americans that own the new Casino near South Park intend to take the town of South Park to demolish it and build a highway to their Casino no matter the cost. Special mention for that episode for having their main Native American character named "Runs With Premise" and by the time they beat the joke into the ground in the last third revealing his son's name to be "Premise Running Thin." It's a 4th wall joke I can get behind because they know it's bad. Other highlights include South Park is Gay!, where all the males in town become "Metrosexual" and Kyle and Mr. Garrison go off to kill the men behind it, the cast of Queer Eye For The Straight Guy. Christian Rock Hard, where the boys use Napster and get caught downloading songs illegally and end up coming out against music piracy while showing how ludicrous some of these "artist damages" claims are. Plus Cartman's attempt at creating a successful Christian Rock band is hilarious to me because I grew up Catholic and heard a lot of Christian Rock music, and every parody was spot on.

The episode Grey Dawn not only parodies Red Dawn but also brings forth another culturally important topic that had been newsworthy at the time and is still relevant, should senior citizen's be allowed to drive? The episode is the perfect South Park mixture of being funny while also being culturally relevant and presenting the argument in a fair and honest way. Another highlight is the episode All About The Mormoms, which is literally an episode about how crazy the origin story of Mormonism is, followed by another two favorites, Butt Out and Raisins, where Rob Reiner comes to town and demands everyone stop smoking and where Stan gets dumped and joins the Goth kids, respectfully. Both episodes drive down to the heart of the matter and get just as many laughs as insightful moments into the situation and it reaffirms why I love the show so much. No matter how crude, the show finds interesting and compelling ways to portray real-life issues with a no-holds-barred mentality.

TV Rewatch - South Park - Season Six

I ended up taking some time off between Seasons 5, 6 & 7 of South Park because I realized I was burning out on the show, as most readers could probably have guessed would happen with a show this long. I'll write later the stuff I watched in-between, but for now I guess I better focus on Season 6.

Season 6 was a lot of fun and delivered a lot of laughs and shook up the format once again, proving the show still had things to say. At the end of Season 5, Parker and Stone took a big risk and "really" killed Kenny. No one knew what that would mean for the show until the beginning of Season 6, when Kenny was shown to be truly dead in universe. This gave the creators a way to talk about death, and how kids might interpret death, as the first 12 episodes of the season deal on and off with the fact that Stan, Kyle and Cartman have trouble accepting that Kenny is dead and can't seem to find a replacement friend for their gang. This leads to one of my favorite characters, Butters, to get way more screen time than he has previous seasons and it's refreshing to see how his character flourishes in this world, and all the weird shit that it brings.

The season starts off with a bang with Jared Has Aides, an episode about Subway spokesman Jared Fogle coming to town to speak, and through a serious of unfortunate phrasings, makes everyone think he lost all his weight from AIDS, instead of with the help of personal trainers, or aides. While I found that plot initially funny it itself, about halfway through I just got tired of the joke because it just kept going and going. What saved it for me however was the fact that they knew it has gone to long and right towards the end of the episode have Jared beating a dead horse, aka, beating the joke into the ground. That saved it for me, knowing that they knew the joke was becoming less funny the more they said it. This same kind of 4th wall breaking logic showed up again in Season 7's Red Man's Greed, but I suppose I'll get to that when the time comes.

The rest of the season had great episodes too, like Asspen, an episode where the boys visit Aspen and invariably get sucked into an 80's romantic comedy about skiing, Fun With Veal, where the gang learns about how Veal is made and go on a hunger strike. Really the whole season is a hit, with episodes like the two parter Professor Chaos and Simpsons Already Did It being among the best. In these episodes, Butters gets kicked out of the gang and decides to become a supervillan, but he's so innocent and nice he can't do anything that bad. In the second part, Butters realizes that all of his evil plans to take over the world have already been done by The Simpsons, and the whole episode turns into a pastiche of the Simpsons, where the rest of the gang re-create a famous plot about acquiring sea people and raising their own society in a fishbowl and the characters turning into Simpsons designs in Butters' eyes. It's a set of episodes I praise highly, and not only because they're actually funny, but also as a kudos to the writers for making an episode of the show about how another show has basically taken every wacky plot they could think of. That's a level of meta-referencing Family Guy wishes they had.

Other standouts for me included Free Hat, a Raiders of the Lost Ark parody surrounding Spielberg and Lucas continuously changing their films; A Ladder To Heaven, in which the boys win a shopping spree in a candy store but realize Kenny had their winning ticket they need to redeem on him when he died, so they attempt to build a ladder to heaven to get it back from him; "The Return of the Fellowship of the Ring to the Two Towers, a Lord of the Rings parody about returning an accidentally acquired porn video back to the video store;  The Death Camp of Tolerance, where the overly PC-nature of our culture is brought into question when Mr. Garrison tries to get fired for being gay, but can't no matter how many obscene or inappropriate things he does, and My Future Self  n' Me, where adult versions of the some of the kids in town shown up to warn their kid selves about their bad habits. Like I said before, the whole season was pretty spectacular, I can't even really think of a low point, even the Christmas special parodying Black Hawk Down was wonderful.

One of my favorite things of the season is how they treat the character of Kenny, someone who has been their go-to punchline joke for the previous 5 seasons. They killed him at the end of last season, spend the first 12 episodes having the kids explore topics of death, grief and mourning over the loss of their friend, then have the last 4 episodes involve this wacky plot where Cartman swallows Kenny's ashes thinking their chocolate milk mix and Kenny's soul starts possessing him. Then after all that is resolved without Kenny coming back to life, the Christmas episode at the end of the season has him show up at the very end and go "Hey guys, what did I miss?" And the Stan says they'll fill him in on what happened. One of the things that works both for and against South Park is it's sitcom-y ability to forget or remember any plot points that might be relevant at any point in time, and while sometimes it gets annoying (like most religious episodes where they don't have the Jesus character) I think conviently forgetting anything that happened to Kenny just to bring him back as a main character in the next season was a funny move by Parker and Stone in similar tradition to how they used to always kill him and have him be fine the next episode.

TV Rewatch - South Park - Season Five

Season Five of South Park really picked up where I thought season four lacked. It was not only shorter, which made the season feel stronger overall, but it also had more cohesive writing and interesting new character developments that brings some new life into the shows fifth season.

This season is full of winner episodes and really is a must-watch overall. Episodes that had an interesting take on a cultural message this time were in full force. This time, they include the first episode It Hits The Fan, as well as Cripple Fight, Cartmanland, Proper Condom Use and Here Comes The Neighborhood. All of these were stand-out hits for me this season, with It Hits The Fan making fun of the overreaction of NYPD Blue saying "shit" on network TV, Cripple Fight taking on the Boy Scouts banning homosexuals from being in the Scouts, Cartmanland about dreams vs. reality when it comes to getting the thing you want most, Proper Condom Use about the various inappropriate methods in which sexual education is taught in schools and Here Comes The Neighborhood, where Token feels ostracized from his friends because he's richer than everyone else in town, but realizes he doesn't fit in with actual rich kids he convinces to move to town when he's ostracized by them too.

Each of those episodes swiftly and expertly get their message across while being funny in their own right. The episode Osama Bin Laden has Farty Pants is a special one because it intentional skews the line with an outrageous sub-plot but also a message driven main plot. Of course, this was the first episode made after September 11th, 2001. The main plot of the episode is that South Park elementary forces the boys to donate a dollar each for supporting kids in Afghanistan, and an Afghani equivelant of the gang send a goat back in return. The boys get caught in the middle as they try and send the goat back and end up in Afghanistan themselves. The sub-plot being a parody of a Bugs Bunny cartoon with Cartman and Bin Laden. The boys learn a new world perspective from the Afgani kids and Parker and Stone give America exactly what they wanted and has Cartman as Bugs Bunny beating down Bin Laden as Elmer Fudd. Many people list this episode as their favorite, and it's understandable why. South Park was pretty much the only show of it's kind where they could tell a cartoon-y story making fun of Osama Bin Laden, and in a time where America needed something to laugh about in a time of immense tragedy, they really pulled through with not only a message about tolerating and accepting other cultures and accepting that our Pro-America world view might not be shared by people outside America, as well as a fist-pumping, patriotic nod to the country as Cartman takes down Bin Laden. It's definitely a highlight of the season for me.

The other two highlights of the season for me is Scott Tenorman must die, where Cartman's Hannibal-based plan to exact revenge on a 9th grader takes Cartman to a darker, more diabolical place that they make note of in future episodes. It also signifies a shift in how Parker and Stone make the episodes, where now the majority of episodes from this season onward try to focus on just one plot and not an overarching plot and several minor plots. This allowed them to get more creative with the stories they were telling instead of focusing on a whole revolving cast of characters they need to include. My absolute favorite episode however, which I didn't realize was special when I saw it as a kid, was the episode Kenny Dies, where Kenny gets a muscular disease and dies a slow, agonizing death that's played for real.

Parker and Stone pulled another trick like they did at the end of the Season One, where they set up the question of who Cartman's dad was and then went on season hiatus, then came back for a Terrance and Phillip only episode before coming back later revealing the conclusion of the story. At the end of Kenny Dies, Kenny obviously dies. But it was the second to last episode of the season, and the last episode was a Butters only episode (which was also a highlight for me in how dark it was) so viewers had to wait until season six to know whether or not Kenny was really dead.

Overall, this season was exceptionally good, and brought us both Jimmie (a personal favorite) and Towelie. The episode I think I liked the least was How To Eat with Your Butt, a whole episode based around a single joke, that there were people in the world born with a butt over their face. Not a terrible episode, but it was pretty much the entire joke of the episode, in a season full of great jokes, that one just felt middling to me. In the end, Season five was totally worth it and a nice pick-up from the dip that season four was for me.

TV Rewatch - South Park - Season Four

I spent a good half a week nerding out about Guardians of the Galaxy, so now I'm back to marathoning South Park from beginning to current. And here I am with Season four completed.

Season four is the first season where I thought the show was lacking. While it had a good lot of funny jokes and gags, nothing in this season made me laugh as hard as anything in the first three seasons or the movie. The show still delivers on some quality jokes, laughs and interesting ways to view adult scenarios, some episodes just felt like they were either a little too loose or too out there and could have used a little tightening up.

While I though early season episodes Cartman's Silly Hate Crime and Timmy 2000 were humorous and had a worthwhile statement to make, they spend too long trying to force their viewpoint on the audience, when the audience is likely made up of people who agree on their stance to begin with. Meanwhile, the episode streak of Cartman Joins NAMBLA, Cherokee Hair Tampons, Chef Goes Nanners, Something You Can Do With Your Finger, Do The Handicapped Go To Hell?, Probably, 4th Grade, and Trapper Keeper were the strongest episodes of the season, which generally provided an  interesting if not overzealous condemnation of some part of American culture and provides the best jokes and laughs of the season. The idea that Cartman, who looking for older men to make friends with becomes the poster child for a pedophile group was in particular one of my favorite sub-plots because it plays the line so well of being both a mockery of such a ridiculous group like NAMBLA and also making it believable (though unlikely) that someone like Cartman in real life could have this happen to him.

That I think is what is one of the strongest features of the show, bringing in believable child-like innocence to the plots. The show often deals with incredibly adult situations that the boys get themselves into, but the way in which they get themselves into it feels like it's something an innocent, well-meaning child could accidentally get into...unless they play it up to the incredibly absurd which they do on episodes like 4th Grade and Trapper Keeper, which both involve convoluted time travel plots played up as taking off nostalgia blinders in the former and the comically-absurd dangers of ever-changing technology in the later. But then even in the episode Trapper Keeper, the subplot of Ike's Kindergarten class having immense difficulties picking a class president is a direct parody of the 2000 election of George Bush and the recounts that took place in Florida at that time.

The weakest episodes to me were Quintuplets and Pip. While both had merits, they just kind of fell flat to me. Quintuplets felt like the weakest episode overall, because although I didn't like Pip a great deal, I appreciated the fact that they were comically recreating the novel Great Expectations as told through a show like Masterpiece Theater but in South Park style. It worked better as a concept as it does in reality I think, and I do want to give them credit for doing something different, it just fell flat for me.

My favorite episode overall however has to be the second to last episode, The Wacky Molestation Adventure, in which one by one every kid in town reports that an adult molested them, until only children are left, and they create themselves a land without order. The writing is consistently funny throughout the episode and the idea of all the kids taking over the town and having it go from paradise to dystopian future in a matter of days was great.

I do have to give a special mention to the last episode and Christmas special of the season, A Very Crappy Christmas, where the adults in town no longer believe in the commercialism of Christmas and the kids have to inject the "spirit of Christmas" into them to get them to spend money on the holiday. While a funny observation in itself, the plot anchors around the boys making their own little Christmas movie to raise the commercialism spirits of the people of the town and the entire process and finished product mirror Parker and Stone's work on the first season and their animated shorts before the show. It was a loving reminder of not only how far they had come since then, but also the amount of effort that went into making that content, which took a hell of a lot of effort for such a small reward. But just like in real life, having their animated shorts bring them notice and landing a tv show, the in-show animation inspires the town to believe in commercialism again, and the holiday and town are saved.

While overall this season kind of felt middle-of-the-road to me, I appreciated a large number of the episodes for what they were trying to do and when it was funny I found it very funny.

Movie Rewatch - South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut

I took a slight break from South Park to fanboy about Guardians of the Galaxy for about half a week, but I'm back, and at this point I've finished the movie Bigger, Longer & Uncut and the fourth season. This review will be focusing on just the film.

Bigger, Longer & Uncut came out about mid-way through the third season of the show, and for that I am impressed at how great the movie is and how consistently good the third season is, because it means they had to have been making the movie between the second season and the third, while the third was airing. So not only were they making a feature length movie, they also were producing new episodes of the tv show weekly, and the quality of both things were surprisingly unhindered by this.

The basic plot of the movie is based on the season one episode Death, in which Kyle's mom finds Terrance and Phillip to be too vulgar for people to be watching and organizes a group to get the show taken off the air. Of course, being the movie version where anything goes, the movie takes this plot and takes it to absolute extremes. In the film, Terrance and Phillip release their first movie which happens to be R-rated, and the boys sneak into the film. Filled with vulgarities and situations too adult for their age-range, the boys take everything they heard and saw back home with them and introduces all the adults to the new colorful insults they've learned. When Kyle's mom hears of it, she decides to take a stand and tries to eradicate the effects of Terrance and Phillip from the town of South Park. When this doesn't work and the boys and all the other kids see the movie again, Kenny attempts to recreate a stunt from the movie, and when he dies as a result, Mrs. Broflovski creates a rallying cry to blame Canada for producing Terrance & Phillip, as a misguided attempt at removing the blame from anyone actually responsible for Kenny's death. Soon, the United States capture Terrance and Phillip and plan to publicly execute them before going to war with Canada. All that and more happen in this wacky, raunchy, musical.

Anyone with more than a passing knowledge of South Park know that it's creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone love the idea of story telling through musicals, and this is their first big attempt at such a thing. After having watched the first three seasons I could totally see them doing this, as each season has had it's share of catchy songs and musical numbers, whether it be from Isaac Haye's Chef or the boys themselves. Without a 20 minute time constraint it made sense that they could take that love of irreverent musical numbers and stretch them out to full-length songs for this movie, and they are what really sets this apart from being just 5-ish episodes of the show stitched together.

The animation is a little nicer, and you can tell they had a budget to hire some extra people to work on the Hell sequences which look great, but what really makes the movie great is that it really just feels like an extenuation of the show. Because the movie is animated the same way as the show is, you don't get any change in quality between the two, a problem that often plagues movies that come from tv shows. The only thing that's really different between the show and the movie is that the movie can get away with things they couldn't on cable tv and it's feature length. Parker and Stone have this wonderful, comfy environment they have set up of the South park universe and they still give you that but continue to expand upon it, giving us the character of Satan and some wonderful gags like Cartman's V-chip that never would have and still couldn't work on cable tv.

In the end, the film is a fun romp through the South Park universe with songs that are surprisingly clever and catchy for being so raunchy or irreverent. It really showed us what Parker and Stone were capable of when given a feature running time and the ability to be fully uncensored, and made a movie all about how censorship and blaming the media gets blown out of proportion in today's society.

Movie Review - Guardians of the Galaxy

Last night I saw Guardians of the Galaxy in IMAX 3D, and it was the most enjoyable experience I've had in theaters this summer, and that's in a summer where I saw Amazing Spider-Man 2, X-Men Days of Future Past and Godzilla. My hat is off to both Marvel and James Gunn, because Guardians of the Galaxy is not only the film of the summer, but helps ease the Marvel Cinematic Universe into the Cosmic Marvel Universe and proves that you can take a property nobody but comic book readers knows about and still end up with a movie as strong if not better than the other well known properties.

Since I saw the movie last night and it's still barely into opening weekend, I'll keep any spoilers and talk of the movie past the first act to a minimum, just know that you need to see it to understand and my writing wouldn't do it justice.

So Guardians of the Galaxy starts the movie off with our main character, Peter Quill, a human that was captured from earth as a young boy in the '80s and works with a group of people who are essentially outlaw object collector's. They go around planets stealing items that other people want but don't have the means to get themselves. Peter, who insists on going by the name Star Lord, happens to acquire an item wanted by someone named Ronan, played by Lee Pace. Without giving pretty much anything away, the film follows Quill and friends on a mission to keep this item away from Ronan, because it happens to be an infinity gem, a very powerful item that ultimate Bad Guy Thanos from Avengers wants. The Tesseract from The Avengers holds an infinity gem, and the Aether from Thor: The Dark World also contains an infinity gem. If Thanos gets a hold of all six gems he will have god-like powers and total control over the universe. Along the way we have a lot of laughter, some tears and a lot of cool action sequences.

If that seemed like a lot of new concepts to follow well, you're kind of right. One of the only complaints I have about the film is that it tends to front-load the movie with all these alien names, places, events and things that we need to know for the rest of the movie, but I think they did the best with what they had. The truth is that this is the first film truly exploring the Marvel Cosmic Universe, exploring all the other planets and worlds aside from Earth. They have a lot of information they have to get through to set it up, and they do a good job of covering it, it's just a lot to absorb at first. Throughout the film however I think it does a good job of making you understand what all those things mean for the film universe and it works well, it's just a little dense in the first 20-30 minutes or so.

Everyone in the movie gives a great performance, Chris Pratt was a perfect choice for Star Lord, Bradley Cooper was exceptional as Rocket, Zoe Saldana kicks ass as Gamora and even Vin Diesel's limited performance as Groot is wonderful. Everyone here is turning in solid performances, Lee Pace and Karen Gillan as the villains are wonderfully terrifying. Michael Rooker is great, though you could argue that he's so...himself in everything he does that we're just seeing Michael Rooker in space, but that doesn't make it bad, he's just the amount of hammy and badass that the movie needs.

The cinematography and sound direction in this film is absolutely delightful. The film is a much needed contrast to the rest of the Marvel universe in how absurdly colorful it is, both in the world designs and the people themselves, in contrast to how dark and grim the second phase of the MCU has been. There are long takes, excellent depth of field usage and shot selections that make this possibly the best shot Marvel film to date. The sound direction is just as good and plays such an integral part of the story. Choosing to have the soundtrack be a majority of 70's and 80's pop hits brings a level of humanity to the film that it absolutely needed. Basically, it fits the film perfectly even though the film is set entirely on different planets in outer space, and it takes people with true vision to make me believe that works as well as it does.

One of the best things about this film can be I guess considered part of a sci-fi/fantasy trope these days, but it works so well; having Peter Quill have an endless reference base of pop culture knowledge up to the 80's and refusal to stop using it and American idioms when talking to alien races that would have no idea what he's talking about. In a film that stars one earthling and none of the other main characters have been to earth, the audience will endear themselves to the movie to a point that would be unlikely if there were no references to American pop culture. It's a way to both connect ourselves with this crazy, otherworldly, grandiose story and make jokes based on misunderstanding of pop culture or idioms, which comes into play at least twice towards the end of the movie and the theater and myself were busting up laughing. That's another one of the highlights of this film, how funny it was. While I thought both The Dark World and Winter Soldier had a good amount of humor to them, nothing touched the combination of Iron Man 3's comedy and kick-assery, until now. Guardians of the Galaxy is at once hilarious, as well as touching and a kick-ass action-y sci-fi movie.

At this point I think I've gone on long enough about the film, though there are at least another handful of paragraphs I could write about how wonderful this movie is and how great it is an addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The IMAX 3D was a nice addition to the movie, especially in helping with a depth-of-field joke while our main characters are all in prision togerher, however it didn't really add too much to the film. There are certainly some nice shots that translate well to 3D and it never looked bad, it just looked good. So if you're interested in seeing it in IMAX 3D do it, but I don't think you'll miss anything going to a regular screening. Basically, if you're interested at all in seeing this movie, go. Go see it multiple times, which is my plan. I'm already planning on seeing it again tomorrow night.

In summation, I am Groot.

TV Rewatch - South Park - Season Three

And so I've come to the third season of South Park. I think I found it just as enjoyable if not more so than the second season. Whereas Season 2 went for more of expanding on the same as the first season, Season 3 really tried to once again push the boundaries of what was acceptable, and what you can laugh at. I found myself continuously laughing hard on many occasions throughout the 17 episode season, with barely any low points.

This season we got the introduction of one of my favorite characters Butters, as well as some of my favorite episodes so far, including Korn's Groovy Pirate Ghost Mystery, a Halloween episode based around Korn coming to town to play a Halloween festival when a bunch of ghost pirates come to town and ruin everyone's events, ala a Scooby-Doo episode.

While some episodes this season didn't make me laugh out loud, the premise behind the episodes themselves made me appreciate the jokes they were telling. For example, in the season opener Rainforest Shmainforest, the boys join a singing kids group to travel to the Rainforest and encourage people to stop destroying it. However they get lost and people end up dying. By the end of the episode, they're petitioning to destroy the rainforest because of how dangerous it actually is. Another was the episode Jakovasaurs, in which the boys find a male and female of an extinct species and the town  decides they need to help them to repopulate. Once they intervene however, they find that the Jakovasaurs are the most annoying and irritating things they've ever encountered and should have left them to die. They spend the rest of the episode trying to get the creatures to move away from South Park.

There were so many good episodes this season, with things like Sally Struthers as Jabba the Hutt in a Star Wars/Star Trek pastiche episode, the Kyle and Stan's dad's having an eye-opening sexual encounter that makes them define what it means to be straight and gay, and one of my personal favorites, the New Year's episode Are You There God? It's Me Jesus, in which God agrees to reveal himself once every 2000 years to answer one single question they can think up, and Stan wastes the one question they can ask in 2000 years by having to have God explain how Stan can't have a period because only girls can.

Overall, this season was solid, delivering laughs all around. The only episode I didn't really enjoy was the Christmas episode Mr. Hankey's Christmas Classics, because as much as I appreciated the novelty of it, it was low on actual jokes for me.