So I've given up the idea of catching up with South Park before the new season in a couple weeks, but I will catch up eventually, just on a much slower time table. I've finished Season Eight and decided I should get around to writing about it. While not my favorite season of the show and less funny than the last two, season eight is still a solid effort from Parker and Stone, delivering their now trademark brand of humor to real life current situations.
The first episode of the season Good Times With Weapons was a favorite of mine for it's contrast of humor and serious situation. In the episode, the boys get Japanese weapons and the show uses anime art style conventions to convey when the boys are role-playing with their weapons. Everything is silly and a laugh until they go to fight Anime Butters, when Kenny actually throws his Throwing Star at him and it lands square in his eyeball. Then it cuts back to regular animation to show the severity of what has happened, Butters actually has that Throwing Star stuck right in his eyeball and the rest of the episode is them trying to figure out how to get poor Butters help while not revealing it was their fault. Not the funniest episode of the season, but the combination of an ultra-serious situation with this ridiculous anime schtick thrown on top made me really appreciate it.
In Up The Down Steroid, Timmy and Jimmy are training for the Special Olympics, and Jimmy takes steroids to try and give himself the edge. The episode plays off the tropes of what happens to those who take steroids to get ahead in sports but places it in context of disabled people. At the same time, once he finds out there is a cash prize, Cartman decides he will disguise himself as developmentally disabled to win. What I love most about the episode, besides Jimmy's end rant on how using steroids are unfair to competition, is that Cartman's plan backfires epically when he spends all his time training and researching how to be believably disabled and not training to win the Olympics themselves and falls last in every single competition.
Other highlights include You Got F'd In the A, a You Got Served parody, Awesom-O, when Cartman disguises himself as a robot as a prank on Butters and ends up on a hijinks-filled adventure, The Jeffersons, when Parker and Stone point out what was wrong with how Michael Jackson lived his life and the corruption of cops, Goobacks, where Parker and Stone tackle immigration issues, Quest For Ratings that talks about the real-life problems with making tv shows and movies in this day and age, Stupid Spoiled Whore Video Playset, that talks about the true-to-life and still on-going problem of having socialites like Paris Hilton be role models for young girls and Woodland Critter Christmas, in which Rankin/Bass looking animals are preparing for the birth of their lord and savior, the anti-Christ...the animals are all followers of Satan.
As you can see, a lot of good episodes in Season 8, but it just didn't feel as funny to me as the last couple were. Season 8 was notoriously difficult to make, as yet again it was a season made at the same time as Parker and Stone made a movie, this time being Team America World Police. They felt like they were hitting a wall trying to write episodes, and although it feels like they pulled through and did a good job, it also feels like they could have done better had it been their main project.
No comments:
Post a Comment