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.

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.

TV Rewatch - South Park - Season Two

So here I am, back again with a review for the second season of South Park, the end of the material I was completely familiar with, and even then I had only seen the first half a decade ago. After this point, I've only seen maybe 10 episodes and the movie throughout the next 15 seasons. Overall, I really liked this season, even if it wasn't as spotless as the first season.

The season started a run of seasons that expanded from the initial 13 episodes to 17-18, which of course means more content per season than before. While at times it does seem like some jokes don't land as well as they could, the season overall was still a fun, raunchy romp through the city of South Park and all it's inhabitants.

One of my favorite bits of the season is actually a continuation of the plot from the finale of the first season. In the last episode of the first season, Cartman is on a quest to find out who his real dad is, and the episode plays on tropes from soap operas about who his dad in town could possibly be. They're just about to reveal who his dad is when they say it'll be concluded in 4 weeks when the next season returns. The joke is that in four weeks, the day the season came back was April Fool's Day, and so they recap what happened in the first season finale and then do a whole episode all about Terrance and Phillip that has nothing to do with the plot. Then 3 weeks later they bring back the second episode of the season which actually concludes the story, and it doesn't even make a whole lot of sense but they promised they'd answer it and they did.

Throughout this whole season there are still a multitude of solid episodes, from Conjoined Fetus Lady, Summer Sucks, Chef's Chocolate Salty Balls, Clubhouses, and my particular favorite, Chef Aid. Each one has some sort of actual message about our culture as it is and really brings home the point they're trying to get across while still being absolutely ridiculous and overblown. In my favorite episode of the season Chef Aid, Chef finds out that Alanis Morrisette has come out with a new hit song that it turns out Chef had written in the 70's and goes to a record company executive merely to have his name put on the credits on the song, not looking for any money or anything. In response, the comically evil Record Exec. sues Chef for harassment, hires Johnnie Cochran to win his case and Chef must pay the record executive 2 million dollars. Unable to come up with the money, the kids go around to all these music legends that knew Chef back in the day and ask for their help. In the end, everyone from Elton John to Meatloaf to Ozzy Osbourne show up in South Park to play a benefit show for Chef to raise the money, and in the end he wins. The great part of the episode is that all the musical characters who are there to help Chef are the actual people. Elton John, Rancid, Meatloaf, Joe Strummer, Ozzy, Rick James and others are all playing themselves in this 20 minute animated cartoon and they even sing the songs they're singing. As someone who is a big music fan and understands the fight artists have with record labels like this, it really connected with me on that level and then I was also just impressed with how many famous musicians they actually got to appear on the episode.

The episode I liked the least was definitely City on the Edge of Forever, which plays like a clip show episode. While some ideas in the episode were still funny, it just felt too forced overall, trying to make fun of a clip show while kind of being one limits the jokes you can do, and at the end of the day I was real tired of Ms. Crabtree's voice before halfway through the episode.

In the end, the season did a lot of try and expand the world of South Park. Bringing in all the parents more, as well as introducing more kids into the world of South Park and not relying on the same gags over again.