South Park first hit our screens in
1997 but the first hint of it came much earlier in 1991
when co creators Trey
Parker and Matt
Stone were film
students at the University of Colorado.
The pair created an animated short called "Jesus vs
Frosty". The crudely made film featured prototypical
versions of the kids of South Park, including a character
resembling Cartman but called "Kenny", bringing
a murderous snowman to life with a magic hat. The baby
Jesus then saves the day by decapitating the monster
with a halo. So no difficultly
with possibly controversial themes, even back then!
Executives at the Fox network saw the film, and in 1995
executive Brian Graden commissioned Parker and Stone
to create a second short film to send to friends as
a video Christmas card.
Entitled The Spirit of Christmas,
it closely resembled the style of the later series,
and featured a martial arts duel
between Jesus and Santa Claus over the true meaning
of Christmas.
The video was a hit and was quickly shared,
both by underground duplication and over the then-burgeoning
Internet. This led to talks to create a series, first
with Fox, then with Comedy Central, where the series
premiered on August 13, 1997.
So enough about how it came into being, let's talk about
the characters and find out what South Park is all about.
The four main characters in the show are elementary school
kids, Kyle Broslofski (a Jewish boy, critical of authority
and skeptical), Eric Cartman (An agressive, spoilt, overweight
antagonist), Stan Marsh (A nervous kid but with a strong
sense of justice), and Kenny McCormick (a poor working
class kid, obsessed with toilet humour).
Their adventures centre around the ridiculous nature
of the world we live in, poking fun equally in turns
at the moral majority, extremist groups, and the absurdity
of modern day America.
The show's earliest well-known gimmick was that in every
episode, Kenny would die in some horrible, unexpected
way. After this Stan would say, "Oh my god, they
killed Kenny!" and Kyle would add, "You bastards!" Kenny
would be back in the next episode, the incident forgotten.
For some time (after the 5th season episode "Kenny
Dies"), Kenny had actually died "permanently." In
the 6th season episode "A Ladder to Heaven," Kenny's
soul became entrapped inside of Cartman's body, but an
exorcism performed by Chef's mama in "The Biggest
Douche in the Universe" undid this.
He came back
to life for an unexplained reason in "Red Sleigh
Down" and is now the same regular kid he was before,
except his deaths are much rarer now.
Kenny was killed
by Saddam Hussein in "It's Christmas in Canada," the
final episode of season seven. He was also killed once
during the eighth season, unmasked, by "Mr. Jefferson," an
alias of Michael Jackson, in the episode "The Jeffersons",
and in the ninth season, he was killed by the Chinese
mafia in the episode "Wing," as well as the
following episode, "Best Friends Forever" (in
fact, he dies twice in the latter).
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