South Park: Season 7 - Region 1 DVD

Even by South Park standards, season 7 is pretty hardcore. In "Christian Rock Hard," Cartman is so determined to attain platinum album status before Kyle and his band that he forms a Christian rock group. The band's repertoire makes Tom Lehrer's once-scandalous "Vatican Rag" sound like "Oh, Happy Day." But mostly, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone take Cheney-like potshots at pop-culture notables. In "South Park Is Gay!", we discover what is really behind the "metrosexual" phenomenon and the true identity of the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy quartet. In "Butt Out," Rob Reiner is portrayed as a corpulent goo-filled "fascist" willing to the sanction murder (of Cartman) to further his anti-"Big Tobacco" agenda. As you can guess from the title, "Fat Butt and Pancake Head" is a merciless deconstruction of "Bennifer," as Cartman's Jennifer Lopez hand puppet dethrones the real thing, and attracts the amorous attention of Ben Affleck. "All About Mormons" anticipates the Scientology episode, "Trapped in the Closet" (not included here, and if lawyers have anything to say about it, might not be included in a season 9 set, either) with a straight-faced musical dramatization of the Joseph Smith story. "Everyone thought we were making stuff up to be funny," Parker and Stone relate in their mini commentary (optional for each episode). "But we're not. We're not making this stuff up in this show." Which is perhaps why the episode "Cancelled," which posits that Earth exists only as reality-TV fodder for aliens, doesn't seem so farfetched. --Donald Liebenson