Wednesday's new episode marked the end of, I believe, South Park's second three-part story. The first being the Imaginationland Trilogy. The Cartman's Dad plot was only a two-parter right?
Either way, while the Coon and Friends Trilogy certainly isn't being talked about as much as Inception was, I still feel inclined to debate with myself on it and let you guys be voyeurs to my inner arguments.
Jekyll: South Park's Coon and Friends Trilogy is the perfect example of why South Park is quite possibly the best and most complete show running on television today.
This trilogy incorporated so many facets of single episodes of South Park into one three-part narrative. The first episode really highlighted Parker and Stone's ability to lampoon current events (The BP oil spill). South Park's satirizing of current events is what sets the show apart from other animated comedies and other shows in general. South Park practically wrote the book on how to parody current events. I mean, seriously, having BP drill on the moon to alter the tides and fix the oil spill in the ocean...perfect. It's South Park taking the event to the utmost extreme, yet in a way, it almost seems completely believable that if BP had the technology, drilling on the moon wouldn't be totally implausible. South Park is great at mocking just how ridiculous things are by tweaking them just a bit.
While using a major current event as the backbone of a plot is typically the pattern South Park uses, Stone and Parker always fill their episodes with numerous smaller pop culture references, both past and present. Without focusing hardly any of the three episodes on Lebron James they completely made him look like an idiot, or a genius for being able to the Lebron James tactic get out of anything. That's the beauty of South Park. There's always two sides.
Of course, there were many other references throughout the trilogy. Double rainbow. Justin Bieber being killed in what I could only call a vintage South Park moment. Come on, South Park is like the Roman Colosseum in the way it kills celebrities. The audience asks for more blood and deaths of famous people that they hate, and South Park always delivers. Obviously Cthulu and other H.P. Lovecraft references were used throughout the trilogy.
But while South Park always does pop culture parody well, the Coon and Friends Trilogy was really great because of characters and their development. Captain Hindsight was a great character that subtly made fun of people who thought they were these great heroes for calling out BP's oil spill, among other issues and problems today, after the fact.
And come on, how fun was it to see all the South Park kids as superheroes. Stan as Toolshed. Clyde as Mosquito. Kyle as The Human Kite. Or did I hear Human Kike a few times? Seriously, Human Kite was hella witty. I need to rewatch the episodes, but I think it was only Cartman who called him Human Kike.
What I was most impressed with was Kenny as Mysterion. You would think Kenny's gimmick really had nowhere else to go. He was a character that always used to die in every episode, but still show back up next week. Recently though, they've done away with the "OMG, you killed Kenny gimmick," instead, having Kenny be just another one of the boys, which, in a way, kind of makes him the most boring of the four characters.
But with this trilogy, Parker and Stone brilliantly made Kenny's death and rebirth his superpower. A gift and a curse. I think it was really one of the more intriguing and original things South Park has done with one of their main characters for awhile.
Cartman was, of course, Cartman. The evil, manipulative asshole, who believed everybody else was the manipulative evil asshole. And bringing in Cartman's recurring hatred for hippies, San Francisco, Jews, and other liberal type things was nice touch.
I even liked what they did with Mint Berry Crunch. Don't act like you saw that ending coming. Having Mint Berry Crunch really have powers was a pretty decent, although ridiculous twist, with that guy coming down in that beam of light to tell Mysterion and Mint Berry Crunch their origins.
Plus, I need to mention the style the trilogy was done in. It did a good job of replicating the gritty and realistic comic book/superhero word a la Neil Gaiman, Frank Miller, or Alan Moore.
It was just well done overall. Don't forget that you were so disappointed when the second episode ended without finishing the story because you thought it was only going to be a two-parter. When a story makes you anxious because you can't wait until next week to see how it ends, it did a pretty good job.
Hyde: Yeah, the story was good and made me want to see how it ended. Kenny's character was really good. But that's about all I can say for the Coon and Friends Trilogy. The trilogy did the typical South Park things, but then didn't follow up on half of them or undid most of them.
For example, the last episode closed up most of the storylines. But there was no conclusion to the BP oil company, which I'm okay with, but I'm not okay with Captain Hindsight not being in the last episode at all. Clearly a major oversight.
Like you said, Captain Oversight was that perfect character that South Park creates, that insults half the people watching their show without them knowing. And they really underused him. While you and I both picked up on how the character made fun of people who complained about oil drilling only after the spill, Parker and Stone didn't do enough to nail this point home. I really think South Park went soft with this character and didn't nail people for being hypocrites like usual.
I thought the last episode was really underwhelming though. I liked the twist with Mint Berry Crunch, but Stone and Parker wasted several minutes recapping what had happened in the story (so far) with those comic book panel montages. Which they did several times too. At least three. They could have used those minutes to not just summarize the ending. Seriously, seeing Mint Berry Crunch save the world and beat Cthulu was summed up in still frames. Kinda lame. Kinda a cop out.
South Park has never been a show to dumb itself down for an audience, because it has always been able to work on two levels. There are some times, when you won't get the satire or the references South Park is using, but the show has always been absurd and bluntly funny enough, that at least on the surface it is still enjoyable, while almost every episode still has a deeper, ironic comedy to it.
South Park is one of those shows where if you don't get the joke, they're not going to sit there and explain it to you (like Carlos Mencia) because then it's not funny. I would argue Carlos Menica was never funny, but perhaps that's for a different debate.
Yet, several times throughout the trilogy, Parker and Stone sold out their jokes and just gave them away. A small instance that bugged me was in the third episode. When Kenny is talking to the goth kids and they're disappointed that Cthulu was supposed to bring all this change but didn't deliver. I thought, ah, maybe an Obama joke/reference, and would have been happy if the show had just left it there and made me wonder if that was a shot at Obama or not. But literally, a line or two later, the girl says, "Yeah, it's like Obama all over again." Where's the subtle humor South Park is so good at if you do that?
I thought the biggest transgression of South Park giving their jokes away was the Lebron James thing. The second episode was the first time they parodied the Lebron James, "What Should I Do?" commercial and they made no mention of Lebron James. If you had seen the commercial, you got it. If you hadn't, you just thought it was some weird South Park thing.
To be honest, I hadn't seen the Lebron James commercial, and only found out by reading on article about how South Park had "made fun of Lebron" on a website after the fact. I appreciated the joke more and didn't feel like, "Oh, they should have said something about Lebron so I knew who they were making fun of."
But in the third episode, after they've already done the "What should I do?" bit once, before Cartman does it again, he describes it as "The Lebron James" tactic. I know, these probably seem like really small and petty complaints. But I've always liked South Park in the way that many of their parodies and satires are subtle. It makes you feel more like you're "in on the joke" and not just being told a joke.
What really struck me as odd about Parker and Stone calling it "The Lebron James tactic," was that they found it more necessary to reference Lebron James over H.P. Lovecraft. Honestly, I'm guessing waaaaay more people got the Lebron James joke without having to be told it was about Lebron James than knew Cthulu, the Cult, and The Necronomicon were all fictional creations by horror/sci-fi writer H.P. Lovecraft. Maybe that was the joke you should have clued more people in on.
I'll give you the Human Kite. Really funny.
And one final thing, Cartman's song towards the end of the second episode? That really served no purpose. I really feel if they took out that song and the numerous recaps of what had happened in the episodes before, they could have had more time to spend in the final episode. More Kenny. More Cartman. More Captain Hindsight. Damn it, why didn't you utilize Captain Hindsight to his full potential?
Maybe these are all really small things and I'm trying to nitpick because South Park is almost always so good that to find anything bad, one has to really look deep. But then again, South Park is a show that succeeds because of the small things it does.
Hyde: Yeah. There were a few missed opportunities. And it was a bit un-South Park like to undermine their own subtle jokes.
Jekyll: So it was pretty good, but Parker and Stone should probably just stick to single episodes?
Hyde: Well, I'm not saying that. But yeah, if they're thinking about doing another three-parter again in the near future, I'm hoping they do a little bit better of a job.
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