Biography
Despite being on the air for 18 years, South Park still remains a show that is not only funny but features razor-sharp satire that continues to make the show fresh and relevant.
First premiered on August 13, 1997, the show was created by Colorado natives Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Parker and Stone met while attending the University of Colorado in a film class and began to bond over their love of Monty Python. The two created a short called The Spirit of Christmas, which featured prototypes of what would be the South Park characters, and began of the internet’s earliest viral videos and started to pass around to different television production companies. Parker and Stone were asked by Fox executive Brian Graden to created a Christmas card he can send to his friends and this would developed into Jesus vs. Santa
The two shorts, along with the pilot, were all made using paper cutouts and stop motion, when the show got picked up, this changed to computers. Another interesting note is that the show takes 1 week to produce, because of this, it makes the show the most timely out there as suppose to shows like Family Guy and The Simpsons takes a year to produce.
The show is also the most controversial, one of the most famous incident was with the episode Trapped In The Closet, which poked fun at Scientology. When the episode aired, Tom Cruise threatened Viacom, which owns Comedy Central and Paramount, to back out of his promotion for Mission Impossible III with a rerun of the show was not pulled off the air, also, Issac Hayes, which voiced the character Chef, left the show due to the show’s depiction of the religion, which Issac Hayes is apart of, despite the show poking fun at religion before. Hayes released a statement stating:
There is a place in this world for satire, but there is a time when satire ends and intolerance and bigotry towards religious beliefs of others begins,
Stone respond by saying:
that he “has no problem – and he’s cashed plenty of checks – with our show making fun of Christians, Muslims, Mormons, or Jews.
He added:
[We] never heard a peep out of Isaac in any way until we did Scientology. He wants a different standard for religions other than his own, and to me, that is where intolerance and bigotry begins.
