SOUTH PARK: SEASON NINEParamount Home Video
Not Rated
STARRING:
Trey Parker and Matt Stone
THE VERDICT:
“South Park” keeps its edge while satirizing everything from global warming to gay marriage.
FEATURE: 3/4
EXTRAS: 2/4
For a decade, the crudely drawn, potty-mouthed kids of “South Park” have taken shots at pop culture, sacred institutions and public figures with precision, a killer instinct and a penchant for well-played fart jokes. Season nine of the iconic Comedy Central cartoon is fresh to DVD, and while it’s less consistent than some benchmark seasons, it still has enough solid laughs and standout episodes to find a place on collectors’ shelves. Its mix of juvenile humor and sharp satire, guilty laughs followed by intelligent ones, remains addictive.
The season opener “Mr. Garrison’s Fancy New Vagina” is fairly typical of the form, a good litmus test for first-timers. Grade school teacher Mr. Garrison has a sex change (replete with fleeting but graphic footage of a live-action operation), seemingly so he can gay-bash and sleep with men without the guilt he felt as a homosexual.
“Oh, boy, I can’t wait ’til I get my first period!” he exclaims.
Irreverence, offensiveness and scatology aside, though, the episode makes a smart point about America’s national crisis of self-identity and how science and the media have converged to utterly tempt and confound individual needs for unique identity. Most episodes take a similar approach, broaching subjects as serious as euthanasia and gay marriage in indirect ways, always hidden beneath a ridiculous story premise for viewers who care to look.
Series creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone add morals to their stories that steer clear of the series’ otherwise trademark glibness, and the messages are more adult than you might expect. “If you devote your whole life to avoiding something you like,” Stan posits, “then that thing still controls your life and you’ve never learned any discipline at all.” More often than not, the morals are pleas for open-mindedness, tolerance and intelligent debate. Parker and Stone champion the notion that no side of an argument has the market cornered on absolute truth.
The “South Park: Season Nine” box set contains three-discs with fourteen 22-minute long episodes, a few Comedy Central ads and quick clips and, as has become tradition, brief “commentary-minis” at the top of each episode from Parker and Stone. The extras are minimal, but it’s great to hear whatever small glimpse into the process the creators will divulge.
They talk about backlash against controversial episodes, explain how they slipped the epithet “fag” past a censorship board and take occasional potshots at people who annoy them (Parker: “Don’t be like Adam Sandler and have no ideas.”) Plus, it somehow makes episodes even more endearing when one learns they started based on memories of Denver’s first Macaroni Grill or stemmed from the premise “How can we get a dead whale on the moon?”
Standout episodes include the Emmy-winning “Best Friends Forever,” which starts as a send-up of devout video-gamers before incrementally morphing into an examination of the Terry Schiavo incident; the Emmy-nominated “Trapped in the Closet,” which finds Stan the new prophet of Scientology and follower Tom Cruise hiding in a closet and refusing to “come out”; “Bloody Mary,” a stupefying bit of blasphemy about Mr. Marsh’s struggle with alcoholism and its not-so-pleasant effect on a Virgin Mary statue; and “Two Days Before the Day After Tomorrow,” a keenly observed riff on Hurricane Katrina and “The Day After Tomorrow” in which the boys inadvertently flood a city by crashing a speedboat into a beaver dam, followed by overblown media coverage, delayed government response and misplaced blame on the encroaching terror known as global warming.
The show’s satire through example isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and sometimes the line between crass and needlessly crass is overshot by a mile, but it wouldn’t be “South Park” if it played it safe. Its nothing-sacred approach still hits plenty relevant bull’s-eyes, perverting cherished institutions and Middle American values and mining an endless pop culture grab-bag for everything they’re collectively worth. Here’s to hoping Parker and Stone never flag in their quest to break down walls and enlighten the world through poo jokes.