South Park

South Park is a Peabody Award and Emmy Award-winning American animated television series about four fourth grade school boys who live in the small town of South Park, Colorado. more...

Home
Animation
Animation Art
Animation Characters
Aardman Animation
Betty Boop
Diddl
Dr. Seuss
Felix the Cat
Garfield
Hanna-Barbera
Other Animation Characters
Peanuts/ Snoopy
Pink Panther
Popeye
Sesame Street
Smurfs
South Park
Spongebob Squarepants
The Simpsons
Tintin
Tom & Jerry
Toy Story
Warner Bros.
Winnie the Pooh
Japanese/ Anime
Other Animation

The series was created and written by Matt Stone and Trey Parker, and has been distributed and aired by Comedy Central since 1997. The series is known for its characteristically blunt handling of current events and its pop-culture parody.

Since its premiere on August 13, 1997, 153 episodes have been produced in over ten seasons. Two more seasons are planned, with an option for renewal at the end of Season 12. In recent years, each season has been aired in two halves, in spring and in autumn.

Origins

South Park began in 1992 when Trey Parker and Matt Stone, then students at the University of Colorado, met in a film class and created an animated short called Jesus vs. Frosty. The crudely made film featured prototypes of the main characters of South Park, including a character resembling Cartman, but referred to as 'Kenny' and an unnamed character who resembles Kyle bringing a murderous snowman to life with a magic hat.

In 1995, FOX executive Brian Graden, after seeing the film, commissioned Parker and Stone to create a second short film to send to friends as a video Christmas card. Titled The Spirit of Christmas, it more closely resembled the style of the later series, and featured a martial arts duel and subsequent truce between Jesus and Santa Claus over the true meaning of Christmas. This video was later featured in the episode A Very Crappy Christmas in which Stan, Kyle, Cartman, Kenny and Mr. Hankey "save" Christmas for the town. The video was popular and was widely shared, both by duplication and over the Internet. This led to talks to create a series, first with FOX, then with Comedy Central, where the series premiered on August 13, 1997. A clip of the short can be seen in the opening sequence of South Park within a billboard; Jesus vs. Frosty can also be seen on an old television.

Evolution

South Park's early episodes tended to be shock value-oriented. Although satire had been used on the show occasionally in its early and middle years, it has become more evident around the eighth season; with episodes involving Michael Jackson visiting South Park ("The Jeffersons"), the boys seeing The Passion of the Christ ("The Passion of the Jew"), blue-collar workers in South Park losing their jobs to immigrants from the future ("Goobacks"), and an episode featuring a "Paris Hilton" toy video camera ("Stupid Spoiled Whore Video Playset").

The pilot episode, "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe,” took three months to make and was produced using construction paper and traditional cut-out animation techniques. Current episodes duplicate the original, amateurish look using modern computer animation tools - first PowerAnimator, then Maya (which Parker and Stone have described as "building a sandcastle with a bulldozer" on a VH1 special, Inside South Park). This allows for a short production schedule that enables the creators to respond quickly to current events. For instance, the December 17, 2003 episode ("It's Christmas in Canada") depicts the capture of Saddam Hussein a mere three days after his capture by U.S. forces, even referring to the "spider hole" where he was found. In the case of this and the Elián González episode ("Quintuplets 2000"), the creators stopped and changed production of an episode to focus on these events. Another example is the "Trapper Keeper" episode which originally aired just eight days after the 2000 Election and featured a kindergarten class president election being delayed by, among other things, an undecided girl named "Flora,” an obvious reference to the undecided vote-count in the state of Florida. AWESOM-O was made in three days, which is the shortest amount of time in which an episode has been made.

Read more at Wikipedia.org