South Park
The Beginning
The first time the four main characters of South Park, four boys named Stan, Kyle, Kenny and Cartman, appeared in a video clip, was when Trey Parker and Matt Stone made “The Spirit of Christmas: Jesus vs. Frosty” (1992). In this short video clip, the boys already looked a lot like the characters they would create to make South Park, the one difference being that Cartman was called Kenny at that time and Kenny had no name. When Brian Graden, Fox network executive, saw this clip, he commissioned Parker and Stone to make a second one as an animated Christmas Card. This time it was called “The Spirit of Christmas: Jesus vs. Santa Claus” (1995) in which Jesus and Santa Claus fight over the meaning of Christmas. This animated short was widespread throughout Hollywood and the internet and became such a success that the duo was offered the possibility of developing it into a series. Given that Fox did not want to distribute it because of the presence of Mr. Hankey, a talking piece of feces, Comedy Central picked up the offer. The very first episode called “Cartman gets an anal probe” was aired on August 13, 1997.
Ownership and Market
Today, the show is still aired on Comedy Central. This channel however, has gone through a number of ownerships since South Park’s first episode made it to the screen. When the channel was first created, it was owned by Time Warner, the same company that owns HBO, a well known premium cable television network, and called The Comedy Channel. In 1991, two years after the creation of The Comedy Channel, Viacom launched a rival channel called “Ha!”. Both channels were exclusively devoted to comedy and were huge competitors up until their merge two years later. Consequently, Viacom bought Time Warner’s share of the new channel called Comedy Central, thus owned solely by Viacom. The part of Viacom that oversees Comedy Central is called MTV Networks, being the owner of many TV channels such as MTV, Nickelodeon and VH1.
Policies and Controversy
In general, South Park does not seem to be under any kind of censorship or pressure from either Comedy Central, MTV Networks or Viacom. The show has been attacked by many conservative groups for its controversial topics and insulting content, proving that the series has produced a long chain of satirical episodes that have not been banned from the screen by any of its controllers.
Nevertheless, Comedy Channel has banned two episodes of South Park that contained a depiction of Mohammed. South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone had received serious threats, murder being one of them, from several members of an extremist Islamic website, warning them for naming or portraying Mohammed in their show. Even though Comedy Channel had never banned any of their episodes before, they did so partly for episode “200” and wholly for “201” in April 2010, not risking a terrorist attack against their headquarters. Upon visiting the website of South Park Studios, following message can be found while trying to watch episode “201”:

Additionally, episode “200” has also been banned from the website. Parker and Stone did not agree with this decision and instead chose Jesus to make fun of: “Banned by Comedy Central from showing an image of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, the creators of “South Park” skewered their own network for hypocrisy in the cartoon’s most recent episode. The comedy — in an episode aired during Holy Week for Christians — instead featured an image of Jesus Christ defecating on President Bush and the American flag.” (Leonard). The consent of both creators is also expressed by a statement Cartman made in episode “200” about Family Guy:
“It’s simple television economics, Kyle. All it takes to kill a show forever is get one episode pulled. If we convince the network to pull this episode for the sake of Muslims, then the Catholics can demand a show they don’t like get pulled. And then people with disabilities can demand another show get pulled, and so on and so on, until “Family Guy” is no more…“
(Eric Cartman, South Park Episode “200”)
Afterwards, Comedy Central stated that “[i]n light of recent world events, [they] feel [they] made the right decision” (Leonard), referring to the riots and attempted murders as a result of the publishing of Mohammed cartoons in a Danish newspaper.
Characteristics
Production Process
Costing no more than 350.000 dollar to produce one episode, South Park has one of the lowest production costs of all shows running today. Its simple production process allow one episode to be created within six days, allowing the South Park team to react immediately to current news topics. Nevertheless, the team is known to work six days around the clock to get the job done. According to Parker and Stone, this is also what makes the humor so good and pure, being very spontaneous as a result of the short creation time of both the script and the animation itself. The South Park Studios, in which they work with a team of 70 people (October 2007), are located in Marina Del Rey, California. Every staff member has its own function, but Parker and Stone are involved in every step of the production process. Consequently, they write most of the script, help to work out the storyboards and animations and voice many of the male characters, a.o. those of the four main characters. Mona Marshall and April Stewart voice most of the current female characters. To make their voices sound like a fourth grader, they use special sound techniques to deform their own, normal voices they use in the recording of the dialogues.
Animation Style
The very first episode of South Park was made using a simple animation technique: stop motion. Parker and Stone are both huge fans of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, on which they have based their technique. The figures and backgrounds in the first episode “Cartman Gets an Anal Probe” were made out of cardboard cut-outs, as were the ones used in “Jesus vs. Frosty” and “Jesus vs. Santa”. Starting from the second episode, the animation technique changed to computer animation, requiring far less production time than stop motion. The first time they switched to this technique, the cardboard figures were scanned and re-drawn with the computer before they were transformed into digital characters. Nevertheless, each script is first translated into a series of handmade storyboards (drawings made with Photoshop) before they are re-designed into a computer animated clip.

Every background, character and object is represented in basic geometric forms and colors. Furthermore, all characters look more or less the same, mostly differentiating in hair, proportion and clothing. They are rarely shown from more than one angle and are often standing on one line next to each other while having a conversation. Using this simple creation style, the production time takes up no more than six days, making it easy for the team to respond instantly to topical events.
Distribution
As mentioned before, South Park is first aired on the American Comedy Central channel. Besides The United States, the series can also be watched in India, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Russia and several European and Latin American countries. In some of these countries, the comedy show is aired on channels that are divisions of MTV Networks, in others it is often bought by an independent channel. In Belgium, the show is broadcast on TMF.
Next to the television broadcastings, all seasons and episodes, except for episode “200” and “201”, are also legally and free available online. In 2008, Comedy Central decided to lay out the episodes on the South Park Studios website, creating a huge amount of streaming activity within a week.

Topics and Themes
South Park is a satirical, humoristic series about the lives of four fourth grade boys and everything that happens around them in a little town called South Park. The storylines of the episodes often find their origin in actual events, mainly recent ones, but are also frequently based on nothing but the imagination of its two creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Except for political statements and lessons in moral, the series often provide us with senseless, though funny conversations and actions of boys who act like boys. At the end of almost every episode, one of the characters, often Stan or Kyle, launches a monologue about what he or she has learned that day. Consequently, next to the often offensive and controversial content, the series offer a lesson in moral to its viewers and intentionally criticizes the American way of life through this monologue. Sometimes, this is a deliberately wrong moral lesson, especially introduced to make the audience stop and think about the twisted events of the episode and what its supporters are saying. On top of this, we see everything through the “innocent” eyes of the children, making the adults in the town look stupid, senseless and often more twisted or untrustworthy than its youngster. To conclude, we can safely say that the creators of South Park want to make their audience aware of some popular and present world issues. Michael Cust illustrates this point by mentioning some of the show’s targets in comparison to The Simpsons.
“Unlike The Simpsons, the humour of South Park doesn’t restrict itself to basic social scruples. It instead revels in the offensive humour of the 16–25-year-old male demographic. Sex jokes, faecal jokes, gay jokes, oriental stereotypes, religious parodies, and racial slurs are all fair game. There are no sacred cows. The show portrays everything from cat orgies to God as a small green furry reptile.”
(Cust)
Although it is an animated series, it is certainly not intended for children, given the often adult topics, the obscene language, the offensive storylines and many more grown-up aspects. Parker and Stone themselves declared not to have created South Park for kids, but for adults who like to have a good laugh at everything that goes wrong in the world. Furthermore, Dave Rael states that South Park “criticizes most everything that can be criticized, and does it in a no-holds-barred frank and humorous fashion. [It] responds to the public's perceptions about authority through humor. South Park reinforces our distrust with authority and their attempts to regain our trust”.
Let it be clear that South Park does not leave anything or anyone out. It laughs as much at the Holocaust as it does at Saddam Hoessein, Mohammed, Jesus and Tom Cruise or any other celebrity, religion or conviction. Nevertheless, Brian C. Anderson claims that Parker and Stone are not fully objective concerning their political satires. With this statement, he voices the thoughts of many other people who have interpreted some of South Park’s episodes as conservative as he did.
“The new media have nourished a fiercely anti-liberal comedic spirit, whose anarchic, vulgar archetype is Comedy Central’s brilliant cartoon series South Park, depicting the adventures of four foulmouthed fourth-graders. As we’ll see, this spirit leaves no politically correct idol standing. South Park has mocked – with scathing genius – hate-crimes laws and sexual harassment policies, liberal celebrities, abortion-rights extremists, and other shibboleths of the Left.”
(Anderson)
Anderson illustrates his statement by mentioning two South Park episodes, one of which includes the North American Man-Boy Love Association, “the ultra-radical activist group advocating gay sex with minors.” The other one tells the story of the gay teacher Mr. Garrison, who is trying to get fired because of his sexuality in order to receive a considerable amount of money by suing the school afterwards. When nobody condemns his extreme behavior with his sex slave, Mr. Slave, except for the children who are shocked by his actions, he yells to all the people of the town:
“God damn it, don’t you people get it?! I’m trying to get fired here! This kind of behavior should not be acceptable from a teacher! […], just because you have to tolerate something doesn’t mean you have to approve of it! If you had to like it, it’d be called the Museum of Acceptance! ‘Tolerate’ means you’re just putting up with it! Jesus Tap-dancing Christ!”
(Mr. Garrison in South Park Episode “The Death Camp of Tolerance”)
According to Anderson, this confirms his opinion about the political tendencies of the South Park team. However, citing the Los Angeles Times, Trey Parker describes himself as a registered Libertarian, suggesting that he is no stranger to the principles of liberty (April 4, 2001). In general, the duo seems to believe in the power of ‘freedom of speech’ and especially the power of humor, from which nothing and no one gets away.

Reception
The target audience of South Park, as mentioned before, is adults between 18 and 34 years old. According to Nielsen Media Research, who took a close look at Comedy Central’s viewer profiles in 2007, the audience they reach the most (63%) are men between 18 and 49 years old. However, 23% of the audience watching South Park is below 18 years old, as pointed out by Jeff Lenburg (328). The average number of viewers is 3 million per episode, being one of the most successful shows on Comedy Central, now and before. It has helped Comedy Central to become what it is today: an important, big and popular TV channel.
The reason it appeals mostly to young men, is the presence of a considerable amount of toilet humor. Next to the intelligent goal of the series, being that of morally educating its audience, the humor is often based on jokes about butts, feces, sex, etc. This kind of humor, mostly dealing with bodily functions, is known to be more popular with men than with women, explaining the higher number of manly fans of South Park. Nevertheless, the series seem to appeal to all kinds of audiences because of its general nature. Given the fact that they ridicule everything, no one is spared, but no one is truly insulted either, because everyone knows that Parker and Stone do not target one particular group to make fun of. The language is obscene and often offensive, as are many of the topics, making the show unsuitable for children, but everyone above 16 years old should be able to laugh at South Park’s crude messages.
Next to a large amount of fans, the show has also been praised by the press and rewarded with several Emmy awards and numerous other prices. South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone receive most credit for the wit and simplicity they treat the serious topics of the series with. As Rita Kempley expressed: “Although some will see this rude, crude comedy show as the work of Satan himself, others will see the sharp, wildly funny social satire behind the profanity and potty jokes”.
Nevertheless, both South Park and Comedy Central have been the target of numerous acquisitions by several organizations and groups. First of all, a number of American schools have prohibited pupils from wearing South Park-related T-shirts when the series first became popular in the late 90’s. Secondly, the conservative group Parents Television Council accuses them for being bigoted and blasphemous, having South Park in mind, as well as The Sarah Silverman Program, Halfway Home, and the annual Roast special, which are other Comedy Central series. They believe the series are extremely inappropriate for both children and adults. Having “rewarded” South Park several times for being the ‘Worst Cable TV Show of the Week’ and ‘Worst Cable Content of the Week’ they express their worries for future generations.
After thirteen seasons, South Park has lost none of its capacity to turn any subject into fodder for its “humor.” But even more depressing than the show’s utter tastelessness is the fact that it has become a favorite with young children. When in the future scholars document how our culture collapsed into ruin, one tiny, obscure footnote should be reserved for South Park. (Parents Television Council, 2009)
“From South Park and Ugly Americans to The Sarah Silverman Program and Comedy Central’s various “roasts,” have all used such subjects as child molestation, racism, and the Holocaust as subjects of humor; and mockery of anything and everything, no matter how serious, carries through even to its “news” programming. And if the current generation is taught to laugh at child molestation and shrug off genocide, how many future generations will there be?” (Parents Television Council, 2010)
Furthermore, they condemn the humor itself for being “heartless and disgusting”.
“South Park’s creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, proudly boast that they are “equal opportunity offenders”; but when did the word “comedy” become synonymous with “heartless” and “disgusting”?”
(Parents Television Council, 2010)
Beside the numerous protests of all kinds of parental organizations, several Christian activist groups have also expressed their complaints about the series. Especially the depicting of Jesus, who is a frequent visitor in the series, shooting and stabbing other characters and not being able to perform miracles, has offended the Christians. They also complained about the negative way their children will be influenced by the series, losing their moral sense. The response of Stone to their acquisitions was that "[kids] don't have any kind of social tact or etiquette; they're just complete little raging bastards. Parents who disapprove of South Park for its portrayal of how kids behave, are upset because they have an idyllic vision of what kids are like” (Lim). Other groups that have expressed their dislike for the series are the Jewish community, Scientology and some parts of the British press about the episode where the Queen commits suicide.
Despite all their efforts, no protest groups or activists have ever succeeded in banning the show from the screen or adjusting any of its content, with the previously mentioned Mohammed issue being the only exception. South Park, now coming up with its 15th season, has managed to keep most of its audience, to achieve attention all over the world and to create true freedom in all areas for the artists who produce it.
Fan Response
The interview with Joke Sweron, a big fan of the series, confirmed all the above positive statements about the series. She likes it for its smart humor, its satire on certain topics and its simple, but artistic animation style. The toilet humor sometimes gets too much for her, but that doesn’t stop her watching and loving it. Her favorite character is Kenny, admiring the different ways he gets killed in every episode up to the last one “Kenny dies”, where he really dies. She did however, as a European, react strongly against the ban of the Mohammed episode and the problems the parental associations of America have with the comedy show. She admires South Park for addressing and mocking every subject, so she thinks that Muslims should not be treated differently than all the others that have preceded them. About the American parents, she thinks that they take the series too serious, which is not its goal at all. She does agree on the show not being for kids, but that is an obvious fact which they should think of themselves when their kid is watching television. People are not innocent, so the Americans do not have to pretend that they cannot watch something that laughs at life as it is.

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[ 1 ]. Animation technique to make an object appear to be moving by its own by taking a photograph every time it has been moved, creating a “movie” by playing the photographs rapidly after one another.