Last week, South Park made the decision to bring back the creature known as ManBearPig, and in doing so, address the unfortunate implications of his 2006 debut. Now that the show had firmly stated that yes, ManBearPig/Global warming is real, the primary question would be whether or not anyone in town would believe the truth, or want to do anything about it. As you might expect, progress is slow on that front, which is pretty much given away by the episode’s title. Indeed, no one has gotten cereal about the threat of MBP, and while the boys manage to break out of prison, the rest of the town is still just wondering if they should start to worry.
The point about global warming skepticism is laid on a bit thick here, especially since Trey and Matt clearly had doubts about it themselves, but I did enjoy the talkshow segment Should I Start To Worry, where the point ultimately goes back around from being heavy handed to somehow being funny again. It was a bit reminiscent of episodes like “The Biggest Douche In the Universe,” where the public’s willingness to completely ignore the obvious truths being laid before them in order to continue believing what they want to believe is played for laughs. While South Park’s politics have evolved over the years, one of its most firmly held beliefs is that people are idiots, and that was fully on display in “Nobody Got Cereal.”
At the end of last week’s episode, we saw Stan’s Grandpa look on in horror as the kids were hauled to jail, realizing it was the deal he had made with ManBearPig years ago that created the predicament they’re in now. At the time, I was hoping it would be something specifically related to his character, and perhaps a callback to a past episode. Instead, Grandpa represents all elderly people (I guess he’s just the one really old guy in town?) and how their past desires to drive cool Trans-Ams and eat boutique ice cream created the environmental desire we face now. I still would have enjoyed it more if Grandpa had played a more specific role, but this is admittedly the most logical way to explain the rise of ManBearPig, considering the obvious metaphor being made. What works here is that despite initially being sorry, Grandpa becomes more and more defensive as time goes on. It works; he’s always been a crank, and he’s not going to stop now, especially not when the young whippersnappers are calling him out.
As for Al Gore, he returns in the episode, in ways that are equal parts funny and confusing. First, he pretends to appear as a ghost, when he’s really just using the magic of projection. Then, he begins to seemingly talk to his own ghost, and even makes a movie starring a ghost-like version of himself. It’s all disorienting, and suggests that the combination of searching for MBP, and having no one believe him have caused him to go insane. I’m curious to see if they go back to this, although considering the eventual resolution, it wouldn’t surprised me if he’ll be abandoned for the final three episodes. The bits with Gore were amusing enough, but it feels like they couldn’t really find a way to advance the plot with him, and just kept him around to make jokes. As he repeats the same advice over and over, it slows the pace of the episode considerably. For a moment, I was worried we’d be in for a repeat of season 20, where it would take an entire episode for a single part of the story to be advanced. Thankfully, once Gore disappeared, it set us up for a strong ending.
Inspired by both Gore’s words, as well as Stan’s reminder that mankind is basically doing his work for him, Satan goes to fight ManBearPig, and loses badly. The Satan-MBP scene is incredibly well done, and ranks among the most cinematic moments in the show’s history. When MBP strikes the final blow, we get a nice callback to the early days as a teary-eyed Kyle says “dude, this is pretty fucked up right here” for the first time in God knows when.
Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny hide out in the school, based on Kyle’s reasoning that they won’t be caught, while Stan finds them because he figured it was the most obvious place to look. They get caught again, and Cartman gives Kyle some actually-deserved-for-once ribbing about picking such a poor place to hide out. It initially appears that this episode will end the same way as the last one, with the kids going to prison because no one wants to believe MBP killed everyone. This time however, Sgt. Yates has a change of heart, mostly due to having to start a new game of Red Dead Redemption 2 because his wife kept playing without him. He lets the kids go, and allows them to make a deal with ManBearPig. Unfortunately, instead of ice cream and cars, he now wants people to give up soy sauce and RDR2. I’ll be honest; the soy sauce thing I don’t get. That he would want them to give up the game seems like a reference to Rockstar’s poor treatment of workers who were rushed to finish it, and the fact that most people didn’t consider boycotting it for a second. The soy sauce thing is pretty random, though. At any rate, it’s a no-go, and the boys enter into re-negotiation with MBP, with the clause that he’ll comeback five years more terrifying than ever. Grandpa laughs in the background, satisfied that people today were just as susceptible to greed as his generation was.
The ending here was a nice (and perhaps unintentional?) call back to Season 8's “Pre-School,” where the kids keep getting Trent Boyet thrown in juvie, figuring five years down the line is too far-off for them to care about. What I’m mostly wondering here is where the show goes next. There’s three episodes left, and based on the language of the contract, MBP is at least temporarily gone (to re-appear in Season 27?). Where do we go from here? I have to imagine the final three episodes will focus on the success or failure of Tegridy Farms, as well Mr. Hanky probably attempting some sort of comeback after his exile to Springfield. There’s certainly quite a bit to play with. I won’t lie; I figured MBP was going to be a big part of the rest of the season, but if this was the resolution of his part of Season 22, it was a satisfying way for him to go out.
Stray Observations
- It’s fair to assume Trey and Matt have been playing quite a bit of RDR2, right? They reference a lot of very specific qualities of the game. To a certain extent, the last two episodes have brought back nice memories of “Make Love, Not Warcraft.”
- “That’s why I always came on your Grandma’s tits!” I didn’t manage to catch Grandpa’s entire speech, but it was by far the funniest part of the episode, especially since they had been playing everything very straight at that point.
- So, will Yates and Maggie get a divorce? Or will we see any more of him this season? I’m certainly curious to see if they can work things out.
190 Comments
Since they’ve said some dubious things in the past, I think it’s completely fair to assume the most selfish motives possible for the change in their position on climate change.
I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. I never took Manbearpig as a serious allegory for climate change from Trey and Matt. It was more of their usual hyperbolic nature to make fun of Al Gore. A super goofy idea to make fun of a super goofy guy.But now the writing is on the wall, and I think they’ve had a moment where they realized that Al Gore was crusading for something that turned out to be more important than they realized, and equating climate change to a mythical monster for a joke probably sent the wrong message, so they course-corrected.Of course, I could be wrong, but I don’t think Try and Matt are awful people, as much as they are walking embodiments of Gen X.
I’m squarely Gen-X, and all my peers and I always gave a fuck about real shit and were super earnest, even as our comportments and our musical passions might have been seasoned with more than a soupçon of nihilism.
Yeah, but that would mean they sit around ruminating on old eps, and there are a LOT of eps. And Manbearpig was a long ways off, and sorta random and kinda funny and had legs in their video game. Seems like a weird thing to sorta apologize for when they could do more with that one ep of showing celebrities and saying GUILTYGUILTYGUILTY.
On the one hand, I suspect that anthropogenic climate change is probably real. On the other hand, I suspect that betting on a future technological fix is the best gamble of all the available possibilities. Not ideal, but the best available way forward to my way of thinking. Seems as if SP might be of the same mind.
I mean there were lots of characters repeating the phrase “the town is burning down” and I don’t think it’s unrelated to the raging wildfire season California has had + the Camp Fire is in the news
Yeah, I kept expecting them to have all the characters walking around in the smoke-filled town giving their dialog through dust masks, which has become a common California image the past week.
Unfortunately, instead of ice cream and cars, he now wants people to give up soy sauce and RDR2. I’ll be honest; the soy sauce thing I don’t get. That he would want them to give up the game seems like a reference to Rockstar’s poor treatment of workers who were rushed to finish it, and the fact that most people didn’t consider boycotting it for a second. The soy sauce thing is pretty random, though.
I think you’re thinking about it way too much. I’m pretty sure they just picked two random things people enjoy.
People enjoy soy sauce right?
Yeah, that was my read as well. I think the intended point was that people are now aware that climate change is real, but since doing something about it would require some superficial sacrifices*, they would rather just kick the can down the road, even if the consequences are massively more catastrophic.
*In popular theory, at least – my understanding is that in reality, most of the greenhouse gases are released by industry rather than individuals, so fixing it is more a matter of changing how factories, etc., work, rather than normal people changing how they get to work or what they eat. But I digress, and could easily be missing important data myself.
Re: *That’s pretty spot on for the most part. But individual consumer emissions are still a huge problem as consumption drives manufacturing. Animal farming for meat is a massive contributor of CO2 emissions and there’s only so much you can do towards making that process more efficient before you seriously have to look at reducing your overall meat consumption. But that’s ultimately not where the largest contributions come from so it’s not as important as other things. It’s definitely worth considering though, since there’s still not a lot of political will to hold manufacturers feet to the fire over this issue.
individual consumer emmissions are also dependant on the industry and policies. It’s a simple political question, if you decide to ban less energy efficient products or cars; people won’t use them. In France we had a ban a few years ago on grocery stores and supermarket giving plastic bags (you can either bring your own, use paper bags, or buy reusable bags). the effect of this simple little policy are real and mesurable. now imagine governments stop catering to lobbyists and multiply that by a thousand and you got something.(edit: I see on wikipedia that this plastic bags ban also exist in some of the US states, so you know what I’m talking about)
As for meat, of course you won’t ban it alltogether, but there are probably regulations that are possible there.
Quick jump in: 12.5B Tons from Fossil Fuels6.7B Tons from Transportation4.7B tons from AgricultureYou could pretty much completely offset any more serious climate changes IF we just stopped using fossil fuels. I mean, really 1 & 2 are pretty much the same thing, just one is specifically power plants and the second is individual cars and trucks but also major ocean vessels and cargo ships/trains/trucks.So yeah, we can totally farm up all the bacon we want if we just switched to wind farms.
Yes in the short term. No in the long term. Unless we figure out someway to recapture all that carbon all we’re doing is pushing back the slide into a runaway process. As it stands though, eliminating fossil fuel use within the next twelve years is extremely improbable. Combining the slow efforts of governments and industry with individual consumer action is going to be the quickest and most effective way of getting to non-disaster levels of emissions outside of teleporting to some fairy tale world in which corporations with a vested interest in the status quo aren’t constantly pushing back against regulation.
/eyerollYes and again, agriculture is a minor contributor compared to fossil fuels so obsessing over cutting down meat consumption is a low grade attack vs. shutting down coal and oil power plants.
“shutting down coal and oil power plants”Wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up faster.
Changing the way you consume food is something you have power over right now.
No, I don’t…I mean, you understand that this has been pointed out repeatedly now. Fucking personal choice is meaningless when i’m 1/8,000,000,000ths of the total. Even if we want to consolidate it to exclude the poorest and assume I have first world power i’m still 1/2,000,000,000th of the total. It is up to us to press for legislative changes and not simply demand I cut back on bacon consumption so Fucktwat Energy can keep running a coal plant because the cheap fucks are too lazy to buy renewable energy sources and implement them.
You don’t have control over the food you consume? Are you in prison?“It is up to us to press for legislative changes”How well has this been going? Seen any signs of BP going under anytime soon? Twelve years is the estimate before we’re on the road to completely fucked. Do you seriously believe that the world is going to meet the necessary goals for avoiding that fate in a timely manner? We’re talking altering the infrastructure of just about every country practically overnight. It might be possible if everyone was onboard. But again, there are vested interests in the status quo who bankroll many politicians and government officials. In the US, one of the largest consumer countries in the world, roughly a quarter of the population don’t even think there’s a problem. That’s about half of the voting population who don’t want to make any changes in the name of preventing further climate change. We’re relying on these industries becoming unprofitable in order to make any kind of change. That’s not going to happen quickly.What demand? It’s a choice to look at how you contribute to the warming climate and do what’s in your power to do about it. If you don’t give a fuck then you don’t give a fuck. But stop using the fact that there are bigger contributors than you to excuse your unwillingness to reduce your contribution to the problem.
You managed to own yourself hard enough for me not to read the rest of your inane comment.Go look up if boycotting is effective, dumbass.
maybe – I’m not up to speed on textiles/material science enough to know if we could switch over to bamboo/cellulose/whatever but if you scrap item #1 in your list the whole petro-chemical industry side of things leaves a lot of gaps to fill…like something to replace what currently keeps my bacon separate from the rest of the stuff in the re-usable bag I’m hauling back home from the farm/store…not disagreeing with you as such but boiling it down to fossil fuels = power stations + vehicles might be an oversimplification.
Actually that was literally what that measurement was. I pulled that from a stats page that was literally measuring power plants. But thank you for your input.
damn – I’ve got to admit I was pretty much hoping that the arithmetic went the other way…if the vehicle-based figure accounts for transportation-type fuel use & the agriculture figure is net of any machinery/equipment+naturally-occuring byproduct/consequences it sounds like there’s a pretty big number missing to cover industry/manufacturing/petrochemical stuff, which isn’t overly reassuring but might be worth putting a figure to…I think the kind of climate change skepticism I may be guilty of is a degree of cynicism about the utility of singling out carbon as a solitary element to use as a metric for our efforts to mitigate trends in a mind-numbingly-complicated nested set of inter-dependent variables…not least because a lot of the talk about offsetting & tradable carbon credits/allowances seems specifically designed to be an exercise akin to the rearrangement of deck-based furniture on a vessel well-known for coming off second best in a difference of opinion with an iceberg…so I don’t intend to scoff but I thought the increasing number of qualifiers the south park talking heads introduced before “time to worry” was a pretty solid running gag despite not feeling particularly immune from being on the wrong side of the punchline…in any case now I have a new set of uncomfortable numbers to go with the ones that told me that if the chinese adopted a north american diet there wouldn’t be enough fresh water on the planet to raise the quantity of grain necessary to support the required livestock…& the ones that pointed out that, if you remove the tax/duty portion of the price a litre of evian costs you more than a litre of petrol, at least in the UK…so I guess everything’s fine & we’re all just worrying about nothing…best of luck with it all…& don’t be shy about it should you find a workable solution.
Thanks for your long winded input. I’ll fill it with all my other fucks I give. 😀
the long-winded thing is, I guess, a cross I struggle not to bear & entirely fair if intended by way of a critique…but assuming you meant “file” I commend you on being un-miserly enough to keep giving them…& while I do take the point you make in response to constant colors, in fairness to them it’s possible that our individual efforts may not amount to much but it’s equally not unreasonable to suggest that making them may be a better choice than not – sort of like Pascal’s wager but for science instead of God.[not a dig – just a friendly observation…]
“it’s equally not unreasonable to suggest that making them may be a better choice than not – sort of like Pascal’s wager but for science instead of God.”Hey, thanks for having better reading comprehension skills than some.Also, I had a good lol at your carbon tax/Titanic analogy. I, for one, appreciate a bit of verbosity from time to time. Short quips are fun, but they don’t convey much.
the way I hear it compliments on the internet are rare coin, so I thank you for the kind words…& I appreciate a lot of what you’re saying, too…for whatever that may be worth.
Not even all meat, just beef and then cut back on the other stuff. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/08/if-everyone-ate-beans-instead-of-beef/535536/Anyway reducing A/C, heating, car travel, and leaving the lights on are all ways to cut back significantly on the consumer end and if your geography/budget permits, installing solar panels.
seconding the *, this is an actual strategy from big time corporations that pollute the most, trying to shift the blame on individual actions rather than nation-wide or worldwide policies, promising to do something “in the future”, while strongly lobbying for things to stay the same and keep on with the same levels of pollutions. Individual actions effects are negligeable compared to the potential effect of strong legislations and restrictions on corporations.In the episode it’s not made explicit if the target is more indivudal actions or global policies, but the satire is still effective.
Even if consumers suddenly went green overnight (which is extraordinarily difficult due to global capitalism), businesses are ultimately the biggest drivers of CO2 emissions, yeah.
I’m guessing by the time those changes at the industrial level filter back down to the level of consumer level options &/or prices the degree of sacrifice or superficiality might travel some but as far as I follow it I think your point is sound…I actually thought the RDR2/soy sauce thing made a lot of sense as a parallel to the cars/boutique ice cream deal, though – one represents the cutting edge of something that involves technology & has both leisure & business applications while the other (if you take soy sauce in a less than strict sense to be a sort of umbrella term) means you only get one bland variety of something a lot of people eat…& it’s not clear that collectively-speaking there isn’t a realistic possibility that we might be unwilling to clear even that low of a bar…or that if you think too hard about it there might not equally be a valid argument that it’s potentially considerably higher than it first appears, at that…pretty sure I’m overthinking things at this point since I don’t generally credit south park with that degree of (for want of a better word) nuance but they have their moments so I wouldn’t necessarily put it past them- either way I’ll be interested to see where they go next.
I think the sauce thing was referencing China because they are a toxic wasteland of pollution, even though there were no Chinese folk in the episdoe lol still it makes sense considering the topic of the episode. And game addiction is also a huge distraction for the youth everywhere, definitely here in America, who are really gonna have to step it up to save the planet, so that makes sense with Red Dead 2 also. Shit was hilarious though when they were renegotiating the agreement and one of the clauses was “all children in 3rd world countries will suffer” or something along those lines hahaha fucked up.
the joke was the demands are pretty insignificant compared to the stakes, and still.
“Just plain rice?!”
…was maybe my favorite line of any South Park episode ever.
It’s like the biker episode from a few years back, pretty sure a guy on a motorcycle drove past their office one day, so they thought he was an asshole. The soy sauce is probably some Chinese food had too much.
I hate this reviewer.
I agree no specific symbolism was necessary for the gag. I think the author just saw “Trans Ams=petroleum products” and “ice cream=mass refrigeration” as two of the main initial causes of global warming, and was looking for equally clear symbols in the other two. If you want that, you could say that “soy sauce=soybeans=unsustainable factory-farming practices that introduce a ton of chemicals and fertilizers into the environment” and “RDR2=cloud computing=massive amounts of power needed to maintain online servers,” but I don’t think it needs to go down that far.
glad to see I’m not the only one who overthought the potential metaphors on offer…
Given that one of the hardest affected sectors of Trump’s chinese tariffs is Soy Bean crops (apparently, we provide most of the world’s supply, and China buys most of it?), I have to assume that the soy sauce thing is a reference to that, somehow. I can’t track the analogy perfectly, but I’m sure it’s related.
I don’t think they thought about it at all, which is the AV Club way.
Every single joke now has to have an underlying message about society. Exactly what year are you living in?
RDR2 was being played and referenced throughout the show. the soy sauce I agree was random.
RDR2 was being played and referenced throughout the show.
Really? I didn’t notice that RDR2 was a recurring theme throughout the two episodes. It must have been a really subtle Easter Egg or something.
The farming industry, notably those farming soy beans, have a heavy carbon footprint, and thus are contributing a great deal to climate change.
Trey and Matt once, infamously, wrote an entire episode parodying the film Inception by watching a Youtuber’s synopsis instead of the film itself.
I’m not saying they didn’t research how manufacturing soy sauce impacts the environment, I’m just saying that it’s much more likely they chose some random thing that should be quite easy to give up but would be a deal breaker for the citizens of South Park.
I mean, it’s basically getting across that a lot of stuff we’re fond of is ultimately a luxury that has unseen costs to the environment. We don’t necessarily need to know what those costs *are*. If there’s been a cultural shift, it’s that the current generations do acknowledge that those costs are likely to exist, even if they’re hidden from us.
Soy sauce has been mentioned before, in Gluten Free Ebola:Garrison: (on what caused him to be quarantined in a Domino’s):”it was Soy sauce…sneaky, sneaky soy sauce”Methinks Trey and/or Matt is “addicted” to soy sauce
So they want to admit they were wrong about global warming, but still can’t resist mocking Al Gore for being right? What a couple of fucking assholes.
Also feel like they’re fairly responsible for a lot of the popular sentiment against climate change especially in the mid 2000s
Also feel like they’re fairly responsible for a lot of the popular sentiment against climate change especially in the mid 2000s Ahaha, either they’re insanely conceited enough to think they had anyhting but the most minor of minor impacts on how people might refer to Al Gore, or other people are insanely dumb enough to think that.
Um, no. Sorry, but South Park making an episode that made you mad was not momentous enough an event to shift the totality of discourse about global warming in the United States.
It didn’t make me mad. I love the episode as an episode of a television show I like, but the sentiment of Manbearpig is and was really popular amongst young people as a response to concern over Climate Change. I personally feel like it gave a bunch of people a shorthand to dismiss everything.Of course i think Matt and Trey were criticizing something a little more complex than just like saying Climate Change doesn’t exist, and there’s SO much to criticize Al Gore for, but yes I do believe that South Park is culturally relevant enough to influence general American thought about an issue
Its not that relevant.less than 5% of the population of the US have probably seen that episode.
I’d probably peg myself as an agnostic when it comes to their level of influence but my guess is many of the people who liked to use/reference the original manbearpig episode to buttress their denial of climate science didn’t watch the episode before deciding to run with that ball & I can see how the writers deserve some flack for providing the crutch whether they meant to or not…& it’s a long time since I watched it so this could be way off but I thought the creature was at some point described as half man, half bear, half pig & was intentionally both monstrous & logically inconsistent at the same time – so I figured their position to be more along the lines of “if it’s such a dire threat how come you can’t explain it to me without appearing to contradict your own description” which fit with at least some people’s assessment of “an inconvenient truth” & didn’t seem to require them to be in denial of climate-change themselves necessarily…but that may just (have) be(en) me trying to preserve my ability to enjoy watching south park by doing mental gymnastics.
Cereal. “Cartoon shows make people deny climate change!!!” ….but video games don’t make people violent.
Youre insane.
It wasn’t them, it was Rush Limbaugh. I was there, man. Parents listened to that crap all the time. He was the first to plant doubt. Other right wing radio guys were actually ok with the Kyoto protocol early 2001
“What a couple of fucking assholes.”I mean, is it really a surprise that a pair of libertarians (even if slightly reformed) want to have their cake and eat it too? At least they’ve made some progress. Even if the damage they’ve done by instilling their values into their younger viewers from way back when has already been done. With any luck some of those same viewers are still watching and are having a major identity crisis right now.
Ouch, someone’s been lied to.
Yes, Matt and Trey are assholes. New to South Park?
kinda like how Liberals still treat Michael Moore… weird how that works
They aren’t mocking him for being right, they’re mocking him for his persona/character etc. I mean sure they’re assholes but they’re funny assholes and Gore is eminently mockable.
dude… even people who are right can offer plenty to make fun of them for…Al Gore was right but an inconvenient truth was still a hyperbolic mess
I think it’s pretty reasonable considering Al Gore’s over the top presentation of what the results of global warming would be. Al Gore is kind of a ridiculous person. That doesn’t make him wrong, but the way he presented the issue was a bit sensationalized. I think that is what they are poking fun at now.
It’s like they are comedy writers or somethig…
Al Gore deserves to be mocked. Even if you’re some super environmentalist, admit Gore has done more damage to the environment than any 200 people reading this. His Tennessee home uses more electricity in one year than the average home does in 21 years. What a great use for all that Al-Jazeera money, right?
Why? Al Gore is a piece of shit.
“Do you know who my mentor is? It’s me! Al Gore!”“Hello Al Gore”
just plain rice?
Sometimes it’s the small things that make me laugh the hardest.
I don’t feel like going back to watch the same episode again tonight, so it might have been Kyle this episode, but wasn’t it always Stan that said “Dude this is pretty fucked up right here?” Just asking.
Why does everything have to be a metaphor? I don’t think giving up RDR2 has anything to do with referencing the developers work conditions. It seemed pretty clear to me that literally everyone in South Park is playing the game so giving it up would be a tough sacrifice for them to make.
Why does everything have to be a metaphor? Because people like John Hugar can’t just watch a cartoon and understand it’s a cartoon. Everything has deep meanings that tug at the heart strings of our nation. Welcome to The Woke Club.
yeah, unfortunately, I don’t think the thinking behind that joke was this deep either.
That’s too advance for an AV Club blogger to follow.
Yeah, it’s a thing that we love that doesn’t really provide any tangible benefit to our lives. But we’re still unwilling to give it up, in order to gain something in the future, because then we would lose the instant gratification we get from playing it.
I think this writer was looking for deeper meaning where none existed. I mean, who wants to eat just plain rice?
Not sure if this is a hot take or not, but soy sauce is one of the worst sauces to use on rice. Give me tempura sauce or, better yet, eel sauce on rice, and then we’re talking. Even a number of chicken broths work better too.
just rice with sauce is a sad sad meal anyway. (but I’ll take fish sauce + soy sauce + sesame oil thank you)
I like to put butter in my rice.
Mmmm with some pepper and a pinch garlic salt and youre on youre way to a FINE meal…
Inside the rice grains?
Have you ever tried city chicken without soy sauce? Not good.
Eel Sauce? What kond of hipster food voodoo is that? (I’m kidding, I bet its probably delicious but they might want to take another crack at that name)
Does salsa count as a sauce?
Chicken broth on rice is fantastic, and a staple of many SE Asian countries.
I went with the assumption that the “plain rice?” line implied the deal was less specific & more shorthand for rice is henceforth universally bland…but I take your point.
“I’m just saying that I wasn’t thinking about the future because your father was supposed to be nothing but dried-up crust on Gram-Gram’s titties.”Line of the season right there! Didn’t expect this arc to end so early, but I’m glad it didn’t wear out its welcome. As both a cereal apology to Al Gore and a reminder that climate change deniers can go fuck themselves, this two-parter did its job damn well. Don’t let us down with these last three episodes, Matt and Trey!Also, the mere visual of Satan flying up to heaven was too brilliant for words. I hope he finds a way to overthrow God and make Him his bitch.
I hope this isn’t the last we see of Satan. The show’s portrayal of him as “really not such a bad guy when you get to know him” has always been pretty entertaining, particularly when he has a character like Saddam to play off of. For that matter, what’s Jesus up to these days? I would get a kick out of it if they showed him hosting his old cable access show again. This season has been heavy on callbacks to the early years, so why not?
Was it really a cereal apology to Gore? They still made him look like the douche that he is and he totally wrote off Kyle once he even mentioned that some of his predictions never panned out, which they haven’t.
Lets see how far down this hole we can go….:IS he a douche?? I seem to remember him making fun of himself on 30 Rock. “A whale is in trouble!! I must go!!”
It was a cereal apology as far as him being right about global warming. All the other stuff about him being a self-righteous douche still holds up.
It was at least an admission that he was right.
So now Satan is in heaven? Oh the theological implications. 😂😂😂😂
Saddam is too, he was sent there as punishment. I hope they get back together
I’m definitely a Saddam/Satan shipper. Screw Chris.
“You know why I don’t like you, Chris? Because you’re the kind of guy who, if someone didn’t like him, would take him for a walk in the park and ask him why.“
Oh god I forgot Saddam was still in heaven with the Mormons…. That would be fucking amazing, if he starts like harassing Satan or something once he gets to heaven too lmao
Who just lets it dry up?
I’m not one to criticise a journalist’s approach to, uh, journalism, but I find the AV Club’s South Park coverage to be just, like, so weird. The first-name basis with Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the attempt to reverse-engineer a cogent ideological statement out of every episode, the way you discuss theme as though the plot, character and, y’know, jokes are incidental to it. It all reads like one of those weird Rick And Morty Reddit blogs where it’s less about treating it as a piece of mass-media television with some thought provoking questions and subversive humour, and more about proving to the reader that you get it on a deeper level than they would without your help.
Christ, this is so spot on. This writer has no business covering TV shows.
I don’t know if that’s entirely fair but there may very well be a valuable conversation to be had between the writer and the editor about what the goals of this coverage are, and whether this approach is the best one.
Eh, this writer takes a beating in the comment section every week, but I actually don’t think he’s that bad. It’s no secret that The AV Club (in its current, crappier state) doesn’t know how to wrap its head around the fact that South Park isn’t interested in filtering its humor through a purely liberal sensibility like most comedies on TV, and prefers to show the stupidity of both sides (hell, just saying those last two words, I can already hear the angry typing of so many keyboards). To his credit though, the critic they’ve got actually does a decent job of grading the episodes based on their objective quality, rather than on whether he agrees with the show or not. Sometimes he tends to do some mental gymnastics to try to find messages in the show that just aren’t there, but he still seems less blatant about awkwardly shoehorning his own ideological perspective into the reviews than a lot of his colleagues on this site. The AV Club’s never had much luck with reviewers for this show, though…I seem to remember their disastrous “South Park Classic” coverage written by a pretentious Barbra Streisand super-fan who gave up about halfway into season 2.
You know why that take angers us? Because even if both sides had an equal claim to “stupidity” (we don’t, and it’s not close), the conservative version of stupid is really fucking dangerous, whereas the liberal version isn’t at all.
Which, in itself, shows a fairly severe lack of comprehension.
Stop smelling your own farts asshole. Your side is the violent fascists seeking to prevent the other side from existing. See I can use hyperbole too!
Ah yes, the first angry keyboard speaks up.
…but there’s still stupidity there to be mocked if all one sets out to do is mock stupidity.
you have no idea how much your comment proves their point
“does a decent job of grading the episodes based on their objective quality”
LOL objective quality
What was even the point of posting this? Natureslayer, buddy, you strike me as someone who seriously just needs to get a life, rather than wasting your time lamely trolling the comment section of a show you don’t like. “LOL”
The word “objective” needs to be officially retired. When the whole gamerdipshittery debacle was underway, all you heard from the morons was “critics should strive for objective reviews!!” Then critics and lefty types rightfully pointed out that no one is or should aim to be objective when criticizing media…then a bunch of idiots when on to make a YouTube career being media critics and people ate up lefty criticism of media to the point that anyone who offers an alternative opinion (not necessarily rightwing) is “wrong” and “doesn’t understand media/criticism.”Discussing media just reveals everybody thinks their opinions are facts, everyone else’s differing opinions are wrong and they’re dumb for having differing opinions, and people only dismiss the word “objective” when it comes to criticism they don’t agree with. Blah.I’ve gotten to the point where I just fully abhor analysis and criticism. Everyone thinks they’re are smart just because they fucking “found the meaning.” No, you rewatched and/or refamiliarized yourself with the work, read other critics/critical take’s stupidity, looked at the general reaction, and then released your wretched interpretation upon the world. It’s like people have made a habit of finding the meaning in media, feel smug they have and never actually consider whether the “meaning” they found is worthwhile. Maybe to them it is, but it’s not fact that must be foisted on the rest of us.
just curious…given that your comment more or less seems to tick the analysis & criticism checkboxes but you managed to put it out in black&white rather than gray I’m guessing that “abhor” has a narrower focus than the immediate full-stop might suggest…or maybe you’re as fond of irony as I am…either way, I think on balance I’m sympathetic to your point.
It is used rather narrowly, in this case, or else I’d be engaging in masochism.I just sort went off an a wild rant about something I’ve been considering for awhile because of the comment I replied to. Really, don’t take any of it seriously or as seriously as I took it. I’ve admittedly only reached a point where I’m fed up of critiques and interpretations and analysis and all the other shit I seen online about media. It’s just, gosh.I like to analyze and interpret work too; I encourage people to do it. There’s just this sense, recently anyway, that we’re not really analyzing or interpreting and then discussing. It just feels like we’re all trying to form consensus about media, every piece of media. It’s like in the widening of our media landscape our viewing of it has narrowed. You’d think all this critical theory would open up discussions about film but it’s really constricted it instead. Things must be viewed political, understood political, and discussed political first. Once a particular view has gained mass acceptance, we cannot diverge from that.
It’s a long time since I read it but I think Simone de Beauvoir had a running theme in Les Belles Images about how the sort of people who tended to regurgitate second- (or third-) hand opinions culled from what historians might call secondary sources as though they were original thoughts deserving of personal credit in general & the ones who spent thousands in an effort to look as though they sourced their wardrobe from flea markets in particular were all “completely unique & exactly the same”…I realise hanging out with the father of existential angst may have had a downbeat effect on her worldview & she wasn’t talking about the here&now of it all…but at the very least you’re in good company.
“The word “objective” needs to be officially retired.”You misunderstood the objections of GamerGate pretty severely. A critic is not giving you legitimate criticism on a game when said critic is being paid with money or sex to lie about it. You’re trying to just say “well, everyone has opinions!” and pretend this means legitimately defended arguments don’t actually exist. It reads like undergraduate-level thinking.
I was talking about what is an absolutely trivial aspect of GG that simply relates to an issue I have with this review. That “event” was comprised of far more important issues and problems than discussions about objectivity in gaming. And anyways, it isn’t even limited to GG; you see claims of objectivity or the lack of it pop in recent reviews/criticisms/comments about media from left or right, and it was something lurking in gaming communities well before GG. I distinctly remember old IGN reviews were people bitched that a low score by a reviewer was result from them not understanding “objectively” good mechanics.And no, I am not saying “legitimately defended arguments” don’t exist. I’m saying the prevalence, the abundance of interpretation/analysis of media now is suffocating and is ruining discussions about media (particularly film).Take that hideous, stupid word “subtext.” Some dipshit academics came up with it to actually suggest there is an equivalent to the text, meaning something literal, about what the text actually means; that their interpretation is them identifying the “subtext.” It’s a stupid dipshit tactic left-wing teachers came up with to monopolize and distort conversations about media. Everything can be analyzed with a lens because all works contain insightful depictions of culture, masculinity, femininity, society, class, and everything else that can be imagined. Unsurprisingly, this is a looked at through a distinctly left-wing perspective. When they expose the “subtext,” the academics are supposedly looking at media as a product of society and what it says about society intentionally or not. In reality, they’re borderline psychotics taking a interpretation and turning it into a delusion. But they can engage in the delusion; I don’t care. Maybe their analysis is interesting, and I might even agree with it. But it’s deeply upsetting to see the primary way we engage with media become picking it apart rather than feeling it, and feeling media is the entire fucking point of engaging with it. Take a piece of media and treating it like a math problem is fucking boring, stupid, not remotely legitimate, and reductive of the work. Blah.
“I actually don’t think he’s that bad”If you can’t respect yourself then no one will respect you.
Something has been bugging me about the AV Club reviews of South Park all season, and you pretty much nailed it. It reads like someone paying more attention to the reactions on Twitter than to the actual show.
the attempt to reverse-engineer a cogent ideological statement out of every episodeSo what is the reviewer supposed to do every episode? If he’s not going to look for some kind of theme or ideological statement, is he supposed to just regurgitate the funny parts and call it a day? I wouldn’t be interested in reading that. “The part with Grandpa talking really graphically about sex to his grandson was funny, and the part where Kyle chooses to hide in the most obvious place was funny. The end.”
The creators are partly to blame for this analysis. They’ve frequently moralized and that’s resulted in people searching for the “meaning” in every episode. I get people instinctively want to understand media/note the patterns/interpret it, all that jazz. But…you’re not smart because you figured it out. Is it even worthwhile to “figure it out”? I like thinking about these things too but to obsess about them and to really try to nail it down like a film’s a math problem you can solve is just odd. Discussing this stuff is fun, and we’re always going to do it; importantly though, it’s not the end all of media. Media analysis is just fucking dumb half the time. Analyzing a specific work, alleging there’s “connections” there to the our culture and society that one can examine so as to figure out various social systems, is impossible. Media’s often disparate, fragmented, ambiguous, inexplicable, and well…uh. I hate this overboard analysis culture going on in the US right now. It’s because stupid fucking literature teachers taught people for 12 fucking years how to interpret books and not how to write. Reading and writing go hand in hand and interpretation will follow from those, but it’s flipped now. It’s like everyone just fucking cares about interpreting work. Boo.
Do you think that film criticism can ultimately be reduced to a choice between those two approaches, or something?
Whenever someone says “Well what do you think should happen?” you know they’re immediately going to go for reductio ad absurdo.
reduction to him that is absurd?
Do you think that film criticism can ultimately be reduced to a choice between those two approaches, or something?No, but then again I don’t find the reviews weird at all. I don’t see a fundamental difference between how this reviewer talks about the show and how prior reviewers have done it, nor do I see a fundamental difference between this review and other reviews on the site. I don’t think it’s weird that he refers to the showrunners as “Matt and Trey.” You’re saying there’s a difference, and you seem to be saying he should just stop trying to find any kind of ideological coherence or theme and just talk about what’s funny. If that’s not what you meant, then fine, but that’s how I interpreted “[it’s weird to] attempt to reverse-engineer a cogent ideological statement out of every episode,” and “[it’s weird to] discuss theme as though the plot, character and, y’know, jokes are incidental to it.” Speaking of that, how could any review of a TV episode discuss theme without discussing plot, character, and, y’know, jokes? To the extent that’s even possible, I don’t see that in this review at all—the reviewer discusses the theme of ignoring responsibility for global warming within the context of the episode’s Should I Start to Worry? segment, so he’s discussing theme as it develops out of the plot and jokes. They’re not merely incidental to the discussion of theme. He talks about the characters’ abdication of responsibility at the end in terms of the plot development and humor inherent in the populace not wanting to give up Red Dead Redemption 2.
He criticizes the episode’s use of Al Gore, and I agree with him. Having the character first pretend to be a ghost but then actually talk to his own ghost which somehow has become a separate character doesn’t make a lot of sense. And it does seem like toward the end of the episode the character just kept repeating the same things over and over without really contributing very much to anything actually happening. Which would be fine if the things the character was repeating were funny.There seems to be a lot of “STOP LIKING WHAT I DON’T LIKE” going on. Sorry that I like these reviews.
Hey man, you do you. To be entirely frank I wasn’t even looking to slag off this guy’s reviews (hence my opening with a semi-apology, of sorts), all’s I said was that it’s a weird approach. And I think it is. I don’t really have a bone in my body that says “Stop liking what I don’t like” unless the stuff you like hurts people. My overall attitude is “if you like a thing then keep doing the things that allow you to experience that pleasure”, ya know? So sorry if I gave any impression to the contrary there.
But to be clear: I absolutely was not saying that he should “just focus on what’s funny”. That would be boring and frankly, would open up even further complaint: if people are objecting to his interpretation of the show’s meaning then limiting his reviews to purely which jokes landed vs which ones didn’t would surely be even more divisive.Just briefly, the keyword is “reverse-engineer” not “cogent ideological statement”. It’s more what I perceive to be a (fairly dogged) attempt to attribute the reviewer’s own constructed meanings to the authors of the text as an appeal to authority, or to shore up the authenticity of the reading, that I find a bit strange.
I have a much longer comment lined up that addresses a few different replies to my original observation and clarifies what I was getting at more broadly, so I’ll ask for your patience in responding to the other stuff you wrote (assuming you’re at all interested, which I accept you may very well not be). I do have further thoughts on all this though.
The basic through-line for those tapping out however is that “criticism” isn’t about finding the ‘true’ meaning as though every text is a puzzle to be solved with a hard-coded solution; criticism refers to the means by which the critic is able to CONSTRUCT meaning from the text; there are different theories by which you can do that. The critic uses a kind of decaf, auteur-lite theory, which is not uncommon, but I think there’s rather been a couple of misapplications of it. He’s neither the first or last person to do it but I guess I’m really arguing for a tighter definition of media criticism in AV Club content like this. I’m sure someone will tell me that’s a pompous demand.
I never thought Id see a headline describing an episode of South Park as “…suspenseful”.
These people aren’t journalists, they’re bloggers. They aren’t held to the same standards as journalists which is why they can get away posting so much misinformation and lies. Or do you think security guards are police?
Many A.V. Club reviews read like the essays I used to have to write to school. Getting a good grade was all about doing what you described. I often feel like I’m reading someone’s homework.
I really don’t think ManBearPig was supposed to be global warming in his first appearance. I think they combined making fun of Al Gore, which was a pretty popular thing to do, with the insanity that is a ManBearPig, and there wasn’t any agenda to it.
To me, the strangest part is where he acts like cartoon creators reversing their own joke is somehow an acknowledgement of anthropogenic global warming that should be meaningful to the world, to the extent that it must be discussed that way instead of as a not-especially-funny episode of a comedy series.Underpinning it all is some idea that ManBearPig is this perfect analogy for AGW and all these points are super solid. Of course, there’s an issue with it, in that the part where the unprecedented environmental disasters springing up out of nowhere and massacring people like MBP does *didn’t actually happen*. This is fine if you just take it as a silly joke, but the review doesn’t want to do that. This is kind of like how the show’s Trump stand-in was wrecking everything, and then in reality the country is not wrecked; again, if you just want to call it Mr. Garrison jokes, fine, but the reviews instead became about Trump and how it was such dead-on sociopolitical commentary, and other wrong things.
No attempt at a close reading of what it means that the supposed stand-in for AGW killed Satan? Golly, that would seem big if we were actually engaging here.
Yes, odd review indeed.
It reminds me of the way the adults reacted to Scrotie McBoogerBalls. To be fair to the author, the South Park subreddit is no better.
This writer is a child
This review is kinda surface level, like no mention of meaning behind MBP gutting Satan? It was fun watching the fight, but I feel like there’s a point there about how climate change overpowered the personification of human evil. This episode has a lot wrapped up in ~20 minutes
That MBP vs Satan fight was fantastic. Best version of the Death of Superman I’ve seen in a while!
It was Hulk vs Abomination
Instead, Grandpa represents all elderly people (I guess he’s just the one really old guy in town?)Well except for all the other old people in the FREAKIN NURSING HOME. What show are you even watching? Each week you drop three or four things that don’t jive with what was actually on your TV screen.
They did an entire episode a few seasons ago about taking drivers licenses away from the elderly and there were a ton of old people in it. I can’t tell for sure, but it seems as if the writer isn’t really a South Park fan, so much as he is being paid to write about it.
I thought the “short version” of the cop’s change of heart was another… Sgt. Yates has a change of heart, mostly due to having to start a new game of Red Dead Redemption 2 because his wife kept playing without him.I thought the way it went was she played using his saved game, which I think prompted him to start a new one (in the last episode) then she started a new one & made better progress than him so after going on the equivalent of a drunken bender in his now-inferior-but-not-new iteration he’d had an epiphany of sorts about having his head up his ass on a bunch of stuff
Also grandpa won the head bitch position for the nursing home so he does represent them!
“(You) didn’t manage to catch (Grandpa’s) entire speech”? Seriously? This is someone who gets paid to write about something while my thumb stays hopelessly, joblessly lodged up my ass?By the way, the speech was the funniest thing I’ve heard on the show in a long, long time. It was classic coarse, genius SP.
I wondered about that, too. Do they just check out on climactic moments in shows every now and then to keep thing uninteresting? Explains a lot of the TV coverage around here actually.
I’m guessing that the writer was writing notes at the time as there’s no screener for the show and so can’t be seen multiple times beforehand, especially since the review went up an hour after the show ended. You get to keep your thumb up your ass as you focus on the show and don’t have to worry about writing something up immediately after one viewing.
While I do appreciate the sentiment, I would be a little surprised to learn a professional TV reviewer did not avail themselves of the many options to pause and rewind live TV available to the consumer today.
So his deadline doesn’t allow him the 2 minutes it would have taken to rewind the scene and jot down another dozen words?
If you review TV for a living, and are watching live, then a DVR should be required fucking technology (in case you miss something).
I think ‘genius’ is a bit generous, but mileage may vary, I guess.
I watched this week’s Zero Punctuation and South Park back to back, and I’m not sure if Grandpa’s Speech or the Scissoring gag is the more lewd, hilarious thing I’ve heard recently.
That whole bit was amazing.
It’s a grand GMG recap trick, that they only watch things at 2x speed and they only watch it once.It is nice that at least this guy isn’t hate watching it, that something io9 is/was really good at. I think Meredith Woerner was the last recap person there to enjoy the show she was watching.
wow seems south park has made a relevant political satire. I don’t even remember the last time they did.
A soy sauce ban could refer to the impact that Asian countries have on climate change.
First time posting on this show so I am curious to get some opinions on this. I find it fascinating how everyone has turn on this show for being the reason of today’s political climate when three years ago everyone was praising it.
I don’t mind Parker and Stone reevaluating their life’s work, nor do I believe ManBearPig was originally meant to dispel climate change (it was more about making fun of Gore who at times came off as a savior of the world following his oscar).
I can see the criticism in their way of thinking when they were young, but I never believed it was based in nihilism—if it was then they wouldn’t made shows that supported gays at a time it was still taboo (it’s no coincedence that when they did take a side it produced their best episodes). I was apathetic about the world at one point in my life but I grew up.
True, not everybody who watched this show grew up, but how much does TV/film deserve the brunt of the blame? I am reminded of a quote from Roger Ebert:
“I think films are more often a mirror of society than an agent of
change, and that when we blame the movies for the evils around us we are
getting things backward.”Curious to know what everyone thinks.
I think I said in a previous one of these threads that if what someone had told me about them coming out as being pro various stances I wouldn’t agree with were true I’d like to think I could still justify guilt-free watching/enjoyment as an anti-echo-chamber version of the eat-your-vegetables-if-you-want-a-second-helping-of-the-stuff-you-like principle & somewhere else that I didn’t know if you ought to call it as life imitating art or art imitating life (or both at the same time) but whatever it is I can’t honestly say I find it a chore to watch & it makes me laugh pretty consistently so I don’t plan to stop…& I think you make some valid points…for whatever that may be worth.
“A.V. Club to tower, beginning analysis now.”“Copy, A.V. Club, you are good for symbolic analysis.”
Instead, Grandpa represents all elderly people (I guess he’s just the
one really old guy in town?) and how their past desires to drive cool
Trans-Ams and eat boutique ice cream created the environmental desire we
face now. I still would have enjoyed it more if Grandpa had played a
more specific role, but this is admittedly the most logical way to
explain the rise of ManBearPig, considering the obvious metaphor being
made. What works here is that despite initially being sorry, Grandpa
becomes more and more defensive as time goes on.
“A.V. Club to tower, how are we looking here?”“Looking nice and steady, A.V. Club. You’ve got a solid grip on the central concepts. Proceed as planned.”
Unfortunately, instead of ice cream and cars, he now wants people to give up soy sauce and RDR2.
I’ll be honest; the soy sauce thing I don’t get. That he would want
them to give up the game seems like a reference to Rockstar’s poor
treatment of workers who were rushed to finish it, and the fact that
most people didn’t consider boycotting it for a second. The soy sauce
thing is pretty random, though.
“TOWER TO A.V. CLUB, YOU ARE TOO FAR IN, PULL UP, I REPEAT, PULL UP!!!”
He can’t pull up. It’s a Boeing.
What do you think he meant by “environmental desire”? Oh my God—was he…was he trying to type “disaster?”
I think that was the typo, yeah.
The Satan vs ManBearPig fight is an homage to the Hulk vs. Abomination fight from The Incredible Hulk. The shots are almost exact recreations.
my recall of specific shots/panels or which came first isn’t good enough to know whether that trumps the death of superman comparison someone made upthread but I’m prepared to take your word for it…
Its not shot for shot, but certain parts are direct recreations. Watch the hulk clip first, then the south park and you’ll see it.
thanks for that…will wait to watch them on not-my-phone but I appreciate the fact that I can compare the two in the laziest possible fashion…much appreciated…
Oh good, you noticed too! I loved that moment and was super bummed when I read the comments here and didn’t see any reference to it …
I only come to these SP reviews to see everyone ripping on how bad the writer is
Uhhh, if you missed Grandpa’s speech you should re-watch the episode, or at least that part. Hearing him tell Stan that he wasn’t supposed to ever exist is pretty damn funny.
The Satan-MBP scene is incredibly well done, and ranks among the most cinematic moments in the show’s history.That’s because it’s a recreation of the fight scene from The Incredible Hulk where Hulk fights the Abomination. Unfortunately for Satan, ManBearPig was Hulk in this fight.
I’m surprised this wasn’t in the “Stray Observations” section, but Satan went to heaven. And you know who that means…it’s finally time for Saddam Hussain’s glorious comeback! (Hopefully).
Soooo… Did anyone notice how the fight between Satan and the ManBearPig was almost a shot for shot recreation of the final battle between the Hulk and the Abomination from 2008’s The Incredible Hulk. I just thought that was the funniest thing.
so is Saddam going to take over hell now?
surprised name+comment≠more stars…
Nowhere near as frightful as PuppyMonkeyBaby, honestly.
American Dad’s living Turducken was prettt messes up; especially the news commentary about how much it was suffering
“I didn’t manage to catch Grandpa’s entire speech, but it was by far the funniest part of the episode, especially since they had been playing everything very straight at that point.” ..WTF? Sounds like you just said “I am reviewing a tv show I wasn’t really paying attention to.” I tell you what…I just watched that episode earlier tonight and that speech was epic enough for me to record it on my phone and send it to some of my friends.
With all the callbacks in this episode I half expected the spirit of Brian Boitano to show up to save the day (even though he isn’t dead)
Am I the only one who realized the fight between MBP and Satan was a parody of the end fight in “The Incredible Hulk”…
MBP in a full suit. I have to say, quite dapper! Perhaps in five years he won’t kill with the sheer ferocity and feralness he displayed this season, but perhaps through forced-poverty as a well-off executive of a multi-million dollar company.
RIP Satan. I’m sure he will be back
where is he gonna go, Detroit?
Say what you will about South Park and there are valid criticisms, but no show has covered privilege (naggers episode) gender norms (the Crissy, eat pray queef, notsomuch mr garrisons fancy new vagina) or explicitly supported gay marriage as early or thoroughly as they did.
Did everyone miss the joke with Satan dying and going to heaven? Satan (Red), Satan (Dead), Satan goes to heaven (Redemption).
I hate to be that guy, but I’m not sure South Park has ever offered up a metaphor that is much as a softball in terms of analysis as the bit about giving up RDR2 and Soy Sauce. The entire plot with Stan’s grandpa was Matt and Tre deliberately beating you over the head with the notion that past generations wouldn’t give up modern comforts to prevent a future they wouldn’t have to deal with. RDR2 and Soy Sauce could have been literally anything; they were just two modern comforts that the writers chose for humorous effect.
The visual highlight of the episode was the ass-kicking Satan got from ManBearPig. Very cinematic and actually kind of surprising. The comedic highlight of this episode, that you apparently missed a good part of somehow, was Grandpa telling Stan “Billy” (and again, I love that Stan has just accepted this and doesn’t bother to correct his grandfather) about his younger days of pulling out of Gam-Gam (or Gram-Gram, admittedly I couldn’t tell exactly which) to finish on her titties and not finish inside. However, once she put her finger in his asshole and made him come inside her, it was all over for his good times nine months later. It was coarse, disgusting, hilarious, and needed no visuals because of how it was written, and with Stan acting as a stand-in for us, the audience, it was pretty damn hilarious.
The fight was shot-for-shot the battle between Hulk and Abomination. Surprising reference I’m super sad no one else here seems to have noticed 🙁
Great catch! I haven’t watched that movie in a few years. You’re the first person I’ve seen notice that. Wow.
Literally saw that fight for the first time a week ago randomly on FX looking for reruns of Black-ish. I knew Satan/ManBearPig felt familiar.
Mr. Hankey’s exiled. Ned’s dead. Now Satan’s dead.Disturbing trend of the show culling longtime, if tertiary characters. The contract only runs through 2019. Are we witnessing the start of the endgame?
Uhmmm, no, it’s a cartoon. No one is actually dead. See Kenny.
I was personally very disappointed this season. First episode was garbage and the Al Gore ones were pretty bad. Especially since they wasted another episode on it. They’re going way too much for pointing out social issues. And the ones they are pointing out are the low hanging fruits of social commentary. The school shooting episode was terrible. It’s fine if they want to make those kinds of points but they are doing it at the expense of jokes. Also, this whole redeeming themselves thing about man bear pig is really dumb. I get they feel bad about that episode a long time ago, but they said MBP was imaginary in the imaginationland episode, and they were very clear about that. Is it real or made up? Is it supposed to be global warming or not? It’s pretty terribly thought out “apology” in my opinion. To be honest, this is seeming like the worst season so far, even worse than the skankhunt season
No one else noticed the fight between Satan and Manbearpig was shot-for-shot the climactic battled between the Hulk and the Abomination from “The Incredible Hulk”??
Soy sauce being produced by soy beans. Soy beans are one of the main drivers of deforestation, both for soy products for livestock as well as processed food. The game is both a piece of technology and a social phenomenon.In short, in genius South Park manner, western civilisation just won’t give up its eating habbits nor its lifestyle, sacrificing five more years of precious time and basically the lives of all children in 3rd world countries.So it opts for business as usual. Predictable and quite accurate if one looks around us. I wait for South Park to throw some dirt on the actual rich and privilegded, given the current situation in Kalifornia and how being fuck-off rich saved many celebrities’ houses.
I’m not really understanding the criticisms of the review from you guys. This episode obviously had a message, and was notable for tying into past ‘cannon’ I guess. This board (and website in general) sometimes feels like the Two Minutes Hate. And it’s depressing to read over and over. John Hugar’s a real guy, people. Lighten up, it’s just a review. Think whatever you want, and tell us aka the point of a message board.
This show works great as metaphor, and is trying to. Satan ascending to Heaven was oddly beautiful. It made me think fondly on when South Park would delve into the metaphysics of religion. My favorite depiction of God is South Parks, I think. It’s interesting how God hasn’t made an appearance on the show for years. Jesus has been conspicuously missing for a while as well.
I’m just saying, you can enjoy South Park as good jokes, which it has in spades, or you can appreciate it on some deeper levels. That’s what I want criticism to be, not just ‘Joke wuz funny!!’ and everybody says I agree in the comments.
“That’s why I always came on your Grandma’s tits!” I didn’t manage to catch Grandpa’s entire speech, but it was by far the funniest part of the episode, especially since they had been playing everything very straight at that point.So…you didn’t even bother to watch the entire episode before writing a “review?”
“Satan goes to fight ManBearPig, and loses badly. The Satan-MBP scene is incredibly well done, and ranks among the most cinematic moments in the show’s history.”It was from The Incredible Hulk. They literally did it shot for shot from the ending of that movie.
SOY SAUCE – here’s the reference…Grandpa Marsh and his ilk were asked to sacrifice ice cream because cattle farming was, once upon a time, vilified as the culprit of (the tragically misnamed) global warming. The farming industry, notably farmers of soy beans, have a heavy carbon footprint, and thus are said to be contributing a great deal to climate change.Ergo, the ice cream/soy sauce references. Both are unsustainable industries contributing to ManBearPig and his current/impending reign of terror.