Set in a Colorado mountain town that gets destroyed on a regular basis and is populated by the dumbest, most vulgar characters imaginable, South Park is an anarchic animated sitcom that owes more to the spirit of Monty Python than to its comparatively tame predecessor The Simpsons. The show's origins go back to a 1995 Christmas video "postcard" called The Spirit of Christmas that a Fox Studios executive had commissioned at the previous Sundance Film Festival for $2000 having seen the work of film-makers Trey Parker and Matt Stone (Cannibal: The Musical). The adventures of Stan, Kyle, Cartman and Kenny became an instant ratings and merchandising smash and the foul-mouthed eight-year-olds have expanded to the cinema screen (Bigger, Longer and Uncut), found their way to the MTV Movie Awards and allowed the show creators/(song) writers/voice-artists to pursue equally anarchic comedy at the box office with Baseketball and Orgazmo. Constantly pursued by a censorship outcry, the series has survived several copycat cartoon threats and even the death of its lead female vocal-artist during its third season. Perhaps the show's biggest controversy has always been that--despite a disclaimer before every episode--under-aged children still see it. But lured by a universe full of Cheesy Poofs and Cookie Dings, where no-one's afraid to badmouth school bus driver Miss Crabtree and where it's OK to vomit from being in love, it's no wonder that children of all ages can't help but love it. Seriously. --Paul Tonks Series One: The animation may be old-style in the pilot show "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe" but audiences hadn't seen anything like these 20 minutes of bleeped expletives, alien abduction and rear-end insertions before. It set the style most episodes would follow, with the children turning to the school Chef (voiced by Isaac Hayes) for help only to get a dirty song instead, a regular death for poor white trash Kenny and a moral lesson being learned at the end. An overnight success, the show drew in surprising cameo voiceovers: George Clooney provides dog growls for Sparky in "Big Gay Al's Big Gay Boat Ride", "The Chick from Species" (Natasha Henstridge) is Ms Ellen in "Tom's Rhinoplasty" and The Cure's Robert Smith (Trey and Matt being big fans of the band) is himself in the Godzilla spoof "Mecha-Streisand", in which a hate campaign against Barbra Streisand was begun. Other series highlights are Chef reliving Michael Jackson's Thriller in the first Halloween special "Pink Eye", the beginnings of a TV legend in "Mr Hankey, the Christmas Poo", and the cliff-hanger finale of "Cartman's Mom is a Dirty Slut". --Paul Tonks
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