How would you lie to me, mother? Lie right to mylace…how can I trust you? How can I trust anyone ever again, mother?”
Eric Cartman, B. to his mom in the season premiere of “South Park”
One of my favorite moments of any ‘South Park’ ever is in this episode,” said Trey Parker, speaking of the fourth-season premiere of Comedy Central’s outrageous animated series, which goes into homes Wednesday at 8 p.m.
It’s a scene that Parker and co-creator Matt Stone say is perfect in explaining the mindset of the most flamboyant of the four foul-mouthed, rude third graders who reside in a bizarre, fictional, snowy mountain town.
In the scene, Eric Cartman, the fat (“I’m not fat, I’m big-boned!” he usually screams), most obnoxious and crudest member of the quartet, has just been told by Ms. Cartman that there is no Tooth Fairy. It’s a blow to the kid, and not just because he’d found a heinous way to make a boatload of money.
“When he says, `I guess that to make it in this life I can only trust myself … well, myself and Willinkins Bear, of course,’ that is Cartman in a nutshell right there,” Parker says of the reference to the boy’s stuffed toy.
“He’s just the most thought-out character,” Parker added. “You don’t know what he’s going to say, but everything he says is like, `Yep, that’s Cartman.’ “
Cartman, Kyle, Stan and Kenny–the kid whose hood covers everything on his head except his eyes, reducing his speech to a series of unintelligible muffles, and who dies horribly in almost every show–are all back in new episodes. And they’ll be around for at least another season, as Stone and Parker are signed to 2001.
But while they’re knee-deep in work — they were still refining Wednesday’s show a little more than a week before its debut, while working on the series’ second episode at the same time — one had to figure that for them, the end is in sight.
Not necessarily.
“It’s going to end at some point, but right now we’re just sort of leaving it open,” said Parker, 30.
“For a while we were like, `Well, maybe let’s go another year.’ But we just know that when it gets to be, `All right, we only have five more episodes to do of “South Park” ever,’ we’re going to be like, `Wow, that [stinks].’ So we’re just sort of leaving it open right now.”
Who can blame Parker and Stone for still being so stoked about “South Park”? It’s been such a success for them — and a lightning rod for controversy due to its salacious subject matter — since its premiere in 1997.
It’s a success that was heightened last year with the cartoon’s mostly favorably received big-screen, boundary-breaking debut, “South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut,”. . . which will forever be known as the Academy Award-nominated “South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut,” thanks to its Best Song nominee “Blame Canada.”
As befitting their reputation for the outlandish, Stone and Parker appeared at the Oscars dressed as Jennifer Lopez and Gwyneth Paltrow, respectively, while Marc Shaiman, who wrote the song with Parker, wore an outfit that made him look like their pimp daddy.
“It’s just a [freaking] awards show,” Stone said in a telephone chat a couple of days before their Oscar debut.
Parker, who hails from Ft. Collins, Colo., and Stone, a Houston native who moved to Littleton, Colo., when he was young, have been having fun together since they hooked up as film studies classmates at the University of Colorado in Boulder in the early 1990s.
Soon afterwards, they created the amateurish cartoon short “Frosty vs. Santa Claus,” which eventually led to “South Park’s” forerunner, “The Spirit of Christmas.” That featured a battle between Santa Claus and Jesus, and became a guilty pleasure when it was passed around by Hollywood types, eventually leading to Stone and Parker being wooed for their services.
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But even with all the success, it comes as something of a surprise that Parker and Stone are still excited about producing “South Park,” after some 50 episodes and a movie.
Stone, 28, admitted “it’s definitely not like every single minute of doing it is, like, awesome . . . but I don’t think it was that in the beginning either. For me, I don’t think we’ll ever run out of stuff to make fun of.”
Although some may debate it, a reason why “South Park” hasn’t been dismissed out of hand is because the comedy isn’t there just to shock (though there are cases when it is simply shock humor). Arguably the laughs come from a specific point of view. Stone and Parker don’t, for example, employ some talking excrement as a character just for snicks. Mr. Hankey is a clever, damning indictment of that syrupy, feel-good mentality that some cartoon characters are supposed to convey.
Aside from there being so many characters to write for, Parker and Stone say the thing that keeps the show fresh for them is coming up with ways in which to generate the laughs without them becoming pointless.
“Some of the most satisfying stuff is when you know you did something totally funny that, when people weren’t noticing it, was getting into their brain and making them think,” Stone said.
Parker added that there isn’t anything in Wednesday’s episode, that “really is just shock.”
“I think that almost everything has to do with plot,” he explained. “This is a plotty show. There’s definitely [stuff] going on, and so I don’t think there’s really anything in [Wednesday’s] show especially that is [shocking]. I mean, I would like for someone to try to tell me this is just shock and no point to it, and I think I can justify why it isn’t.”
This season will be interesting in one respect: how it will cope with the death of Mary Kay Bergman, who did the voices for virtually every female character on the series, including Ms. Cartman, Kyle’s mother, Stan’s mother, sister Shelly and his vomit-inducing girlfriend Wendy Testaburger. Bergman committed suicide last November.
Parker and Stone went without female characters for the final five episodes of last season. “She was a friend of ours, and we didn’t want to immediately replace her,” said Parker, who voices Cartman and Stan. Stone is behind Kyle, and does Kenny’s muffle.
Wednesday’s episode features a performance artist named Blue Girl as Ms. Cartman. The producers are still looking for vocal performers to do the other female characters. “It will probably take four or five women to replace Mary Kay,” Stone said. “She was so talented.”
That is one of many elements on Parker and Stone’s plate to keep them busy. But one project they won’t worry themselves about is another “South Park” movie.
“On one hand, it was so cool to have done [it],” Parker said. “But I think that movie is so much the quintessential `South Park,’ that I don’t know how we would make another one that would define it better.
“I think in a way, for posterity’s sake, you almost want to be like `Here it is.’ In 40 years, if people want to know what `South Park’ was all about, they should watch that movie. That’s what it was all about.”
Parker and Stone also are creating original animated shorts for Shockwave.com, joining several entertainment producers in providing content for the web site, including directors David Lynch, Tim Burton and James L. Brooks, and Marvel Comics’ Stan Lee.
But after the failure of their movie “BASEketball,” the duo isn’t planning an appearance in another film, and they’ve abandoned writing a sequel to “Dumb and Dumber.”
But they’ll gleefully continue to turn out episodes of “South Park” at least until next year. Just don’t ask what’s happening this season.
“We don’t know yet,” Stone said, laughing. “That’s what we’re working on. You have any ideas?”