It doesn’t sound like Trey Parker and Matt Stone will ever make their big deepfake movie
Their original concept was very "timely" before the pandemic, but not so much anymore
Aux News Unknown
Everyone has picked up little hobbies over the pandemic, like reading, or gardening, or Gunpla, but South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone got really into making elaborate deepfake parody videos for a while there. It started as a web series called Sassy Justice where Peter Serafinowicz played a reporter for a news station in Wyoming who was deepfaked to look like Donald Trump, leading to… basically just that one joke but with different famous faces. Parker and Stone later revealed that they had actually started a whole deepfake-based production studio called Deep Voodoo, and they had been planning to use the tech to make deepfake movie about a guy who looks like Trump getting involved in some kind of shenanigans.
Days after they opened the studio, though, COVID-19 started making its Gump-esque back-and-forth run across the country, forcing them to go remote and put the movie on hold. Now, in a new interview with The L.A. Times, Parker and Stone make it sound like the movie is even more on hold than it was before. “It was very timely,” Parker notes, “and the timeliness of it has passed. We’d have to majorly rethink it to do it now.”
Parker also says that the movie “of course” involved this fake Trump “just naked and getting run through the wringer and everything,” which is “why it was so funny and so timely,” so it makes sense that they’d have to rethink it now that he’s not running the country and he’s not in front of everyone’s face 24/7. Maybe they could go back and do another season of That’s My Bush! instead? The Dubya years have retro appeal now, probably.
Anyway, Stone says that Deep Voodoo is still hanging on, at least, with Kendrick Lamar apparently using it for a recent video. He also notes that Trump “could be running again,” which… would at least make this movie idea timely again. So that’s… good. (No offense to Parker and Stone, but can we just establish that we hope this movie is never timely ever again?)
67 Comments
They should make a movie about how their Gen X nihilism and “triggering is a virtue” zeitgeist helped lead directly to Trumpism and the reemergence of fascism in America.
Maybe you should make that movie so you can explain how it took almost 20 years for South Park to “directly” help cause Trumpism.
The current GOP playbook is South Park mockery to a tee. I don’t know how you can look at their “troll the libs” strategy as anything but Cartman writ large. It is an oversimplification to blame South Park entirely, but it’s willfully blind to not see how the two intersect.
Cartman was never presented as a good guy.
And?
If they thought Cartman was supposed to be a good guy they were massively missing the point.
I don’t know about that. But one of Cartman’s primary traits is saying whatever awful shit comes into his brain and not caring about the consequences. Even relishing in the aggravation he causes. When you ask Republicans, both politicians and voters, what they LIKE about Trump, they will always mention that he says what he thinks. Freeze Peach absolutism as a preemptive defense against being a fucking jerk is their M.O. and I think that has been emboldened by the popularity of South Park’s messaging, especially the popularity of Cartman.
Rush Limbaugh was already a big deal before South Park, so I think they already liked that kind of thing.
True! But Rush was not embraced by pop culture at large the way SP was. And he wasn’t really a comic voice. Maybe his army of chode followers laughed at him but SP has a huge cultural impact specifically in the arena of comedy. The problem as I see it is that SP began its comic journey as humor punching up and speaking truth to power. But over time it BECAME the power and began punching down. There’s a marked difference to me between mocking white liberal guilt in the first season with the Aniston rainforest character and 15 years and millions of dollars later taking shots at college kids for wanting relief from bullying (the show absolutely did not understand the concept of “safe spaces”) and fucking date rape (the consent forms bullshit was egregious).That said, they still manage to be funny and incisive a lot of the time. It’s just that they miss the mark as often as they hit and if you dare to say so you get dogpiled.
Republicans made Rush an honorary member of Congress when they became the majority in ‘94, so he was THE power by the time South Park was created. I don’t think the fact that South Park is less hated by liberals than Rush has much bearing on whether conservatives liked him. Also, from what I remember the peak of South Park being popular among conservatives was in the mid-2000s(the term “South Park conservatives” got thrown around sometimes). That was followed by two terms of Obama, and by the time Trump came along I think South Park was no longer a conservative darling. In fact, the year he won South Park did a story arc in which their Trump stand-in character begged people not to vote for him. They also did a story arc about how damaging online harassment can be, whereas the more stereotypical edge lord approach would’ve been to mock the “snowflakes” who are the targets of such harassment.
Matt and Trey know Cartman is a piece of shit and not to be emulated. The GOP loves pieces of shit and aren’t emulating anyone but themselves. It’s not Southpark’s fault America’s worst people didn’t get the joke.
Matt and Trey have also talked about Cartman slowly becoming their favorite character. And I think if you pay attention to the evolution of the show, Stan and Kyle (mostly Stan) get played more and more for joyless moralizing scolds and Cartman, while still clearly a jerk, gets the benefit of being played for laughs. The show wants you to laugh at Cartman’s antics and be put off by the others’ moralizing. There’s something to be said for taking the piss out of self-serious self-righteousness but SP treats it all as worth mockery. Which is a visible strain in the modern GOP.
So true, trolling and sarcasm did not exist until Parker and Stone invented Cartman.
Not what I said and you know it.
AV Club has posited this theory before: https://www.avclub.com/south-park-raised-a-generation-of-trolls-1798264498
It did take 20 years to get to Trumpism. It just was not caused by South Park. It was Newts’ contract With America.
They did a whole season about that.
Ah yes, cartoons determine elections. Video games cause gun violence and rap music leads to teenage pregnancy, too.
South Park was largely popular in the 90s.
So how was it “their Gen X nihilism and “triggering is a virtue” zeitgeist helped lead directly to Trumpism and the reemergence of fascism in America”?
South Park *premiered* in 97. Its rise is much more an aughts phenomenon.
The movie came out in ‘99.
A cartoon on Comedy Central getting a movie a couple years later that competed successfully with The Phantom Menace…
It was still popular in the aughts. But it was a phenomenon in the 90s.
And getting back to the OP, you’ve said the GOP playbook intersects with South Park. That’s not the same as saying South Park directly helped lead to Trumpism. Trump didn’t need to steal from Eric Cartman because Trump was this stupid before South Park was even a thing. South Park mocks society, also around before the GOP weaponised it.
South Park catalyzed society’s base instinct. It wasn’t exactly novel at the time to mock elections with a shit sandwich vs a douche, as I’ve been hearing “the two parties are both the same” since I started paying any attention in 2000. But it sure activated a lot more people who would otherwise remain politically oblivious to be galaxy brained Independents who know just enough to not trust anybody who believes in anything. It’s not that I think Parker or Stone actually think people who have convictions about anything are stupid and deserve to be mocked, but that their tack of “you have have to make fun of everyone” is so insipid and banal that it led a whole generation to think that.The Terry Schiavo episode is a perfect example of this. In the end, everyone was wrong, and the only right belief was no belief at all. I know they did this several times, though honestly I stopped watching ages ago, so I can’t really remember other instances. The nihilism was the joke, of course, but you can’t count on your viewers to recognize that. Ask Rage Against the Machine how well you can count on your fans to understand the message.Also, I personally made it well into my twenties and about a decade of watching South Park before I even realized antisemitism was still an actual thing, and not a historical footnote that we can all laugh about now because it’s over. Cartman’s antisemitism was just a funny joke to me for a long time, and it’s still a funny joke for a lot of actual antisemitic folks who are both more abundant and more emboldened than they have been in say, a few generations.
their tack of “you have have to make fun of everyone” is so insipid and banal that it led a whole generation to think that.
Maybe some people in a generation, but a whole generation? No.
A lot of people were “activated” by South Park? No. There have always been people that think they’re “galaxy brained Independents who know just enough to not trust anybody who believes in anything”.
The nihilism was the joke, of course, but you can’t count on your viewers to recognize that.
Yes you can, because most people know you have to do at least something to make things happen. That’s just reality. South Park isn’t.
Cartman’s antisemitism was just a funny joke to me for a long time
Cartman was never portrayed as an aspirational character. If you laughed along with him then you were missing a lot, which is again not South Park’s doing.
I literally meant a whole generation. Literally every person born between one arbitrary meaningless date and another arbitrary meaningless date. Not one person within that fictional range of time escaped the insidious influence of Trey and Matt.You know, an entire generation of people was born after WWII, because the troops came home and immediately fucked all the women they could find. But actually, you’ll find that some people born between 1945 and whenever were in fact not fathered by soldiers. Millions of them, even. And, not to blow your mind here, but none of them actually literally went Boom. Not as babies, anyway.
Anyway, the conversation was about generations, a nebulous and stupid construct, and as predictable as your ‘Well Actually’ was, I didn’t bother to preempt it because I wanted to show how much I trust my audience to get the joke that’s right in front of them.Moving past that, the problem with you using the words “some” and “most” when referring to a population of over 300 million (and your consequential misunderstanding of my use of “a whole generation”) is that “some” of a whole lot of people is still a whole lot of people. In fact, even if “most” people know that nihilism isn’t a workable political strategy, that would not necessarily mean that, say —to pull a random number out of the ether— 62,984,828 million people don’t in fact believe that it is.
That last bit was a joke. Actually, so is most of the rest, in case you hadn’t caught on, but I wanted to be explicit about that bit. I don’t think every one of those people is a nihilist. Just, you know, most of them.
hilarious.
Anyway, the conversation was about generations, No, the conversation was about the OP’s use of specific words, which I questioned. You then used specific words that I disagreed with. I also disagree that generations are a stupid construct, and that some of a lot of people is still a lot of people – it’s a minority, and I meant a relative few people remarkable by how few of them there are.
That you also failed to convey your joking intent is not my problem.
No, sorry, when I said I was being explicit, I was implicitly saying that you didn’t get the previous joke because you are not very bright. It was very much a problem of reading, rather than one of writing.It’s ok, though. Jokes are tough if they’re not about singing turds or whatever. You can feel free to continue liking South Park and being oblivious to actual things happening. I’m not going to cancel it, I promise.
yeah, piss off now
What’s actually insipid is your strange insistence that a cable cartoon that peaked popularity-wise back in the 90s is responsible for corrupting a “whole generation” (by the way, I like how you sidestepped using the word “Millennials”, which would’ve made you sound even more out of touch than you already do). Speaking as someone that happens to be part of that generation and watched those early seasons as a kid, I can’t help but roll my eyes at your knee-jerk assumptions about us in a collective sense.This show’s detractors generally tend to show this exact same superficial understanding of it, inevitably citing the same episodes from almost twenty years ago (Douche and Turd, ManBearPig, both of which the show itself has renounced in recent seasons). The show’s outlook has generally evolved for the better over time, but you admit yourself that you stopped watching long ago, so why even bother chiming in from such an uninformed perspective?If you’re looking for a more logical scapegoat for how we got where we currently are, the obvious one is the rise of social media radicalizing people and giving bigots a megaphone, ultimately allowing for a Trump presidency. But since almost all of us use at least one of these platforms to some extent, I guess it’s much more convenient for moralistic scolds to “blame Canada”!
Let’s face it: the cat playing piano competed successfully with The Phantom Menace…
Yeah, and at the time it was thought by many culture writers to be *too soon* to make a movie. That the show *existed* in the late 1/3 of the decade puts your contention in doubt but I don’t want to haggle over a stupid technicality that is mostly beside the point.That said, I also hate having this discussion about South Park. I never should have jumped in. It always boils down to me getting told off by stans who, like the show, refuse to see how media consumption affects the social landscape. So whatever, you win, okay?
This is just weird. I’ve had two discussions here about this, the one with you now telling me you hate having this discussion and lumping me in with stans telling you off (I’m not), and another in which they told me they were joking (they weren’t) and it’s my fault for not getting their jokes. It’s ridiculous and just makes me want to dismiss all these conversations.
Is it really so hard for people to just have conversations about a topic without making it personal? You made some good points in some of your other posts, but I don’t really want to discuss them with you now.
Is it really so hard for people to just say “maybe I’ve exaggerated” or “I meant to say…”. I’m not even expecting you to say “I was wrong” (this is the internet after all), but you can be cool about it. I was curious about your pov and thought there might be a better way to express it. It wasn’t about me winning anything.
But it seems Kinja Caffeine Spider has the right idea here. The only thing social media is good for is cracking jokes. Conversations don’t work. I give up.
It’s just some projection, man. You caught some shrapnel from aggravation/weariness that wasn’t aimed specifically at you and I apologize. That said, I don’t particularly want to wade in with the topic more than I have. Some of that is because I think the cause-effect relationship being discussed is tenuous but I also think “tenuous” is not the same as “non-existent” and that’s nuance I hardly see from SP discussions. 9 times out of 10 it’s just that I don’t “get” South Park or whatever.
Fair enough and thanks. I’m sorry if I came across too strong. I agree the cause-effect relationship here is tenuous but it’s not non-existent. Some (though I think it’s fair to say very few) people will be affected by shows like South Park and bring that into their everyday lives. Probably not enough to significantly change an electorate, but that’s just an assumption on my part.
“Its rise is much more an aughts phenomenon.”
I guess the movie that came out didn’t happen because of the IMMENSE popularity of South Park before “the aughts”?It happened because South Park WASN’T popular yet, is what you’re saying.
South Park was largely popular in the 90s
SP’s peak popularity was in the 00s and what Russia and Cambridge Analytica did in 2016 was almost verbatim to the Bush v. Kerry 2004 playbook of South Park
SP’s peak popularity was in the 00s Just saying it doesn’t prove it. I gave you evidence it was in the 90s. What’s your evidence it was in the 00s?
Russia and Cambridge Analytica did in 2016 was almost verbatim to the Bush v. Kerry 2004 playbook of South Park That doesn’t prove it “helped lead directly to Trumpism”.
Occam’s razor time. Either the Trump administration deliberately copied South Park or enough people were actually conditioned or something by South Park to bring about the reemergence of fascism in America. Or the Trump administration just tapped into a side of America that’s been there longer than South Park ever has.
TV can have an effect on people, but what you’re suggesting is obviously more conspiracy theory than reality. There’s enough problems with reality already without having to invent stuff or blow small possibilities out of all proportion.
Funny you should mention 2004 since that election had the highest voter turnout in over 30 years.
Mayne they could include a scene about liberal American’s inability to blame anyone but themselves for Trump’s victory?
I think you’ve got your “generations to vilify for how things aren’t like they used to be” mixed up there boomer
Thanks for the stupidest take I’ve seen in months, and that is a high bar given the stupidity of the Internet.
Thank you for thinking of the children.
How did you write all that without understanding Gen-X, nihilism, zeitgeist or any of the other nonsense you popped in there?
This is fucking dumb.What cartoons made people love Hitler, again? Was it Steamboat Mickey?
Ho boy, this was only half-serious but okay, fine.1. The implication from some of you that something can’t possibly lead to something else a *whole* 20 years later! is flat out absurd. lmao2. SP was a huge cultural phenomenon in an era with much less content in total. It was a language and a meme before you really had the word meme in Web 2.0 for a large segment of the population who were 15-30 then and 35-50 now.3. Its overarching idea for a crucial decade in the US was that everything was a douche vs. a turd and anyone who participates and cares about things is an effete nerd.4. That weaponized coolness of cynicism still poisons minds to this day
Young people were never cynical and happily participated in our two party political system before South Park came along.
Beware using critical hyperbole about beloved properties. You will get flamed. Obviously.
Disagree, much like Chapelle (recent controversy aside) they very much were the lets just make fun of everyone. I also believe they are firmly on the left side of the aisle as well.
Yes, Allsiderism is one of the main mental poisons. Thanks for bringing that up.
Well to be fair if your going to poke fun/paradoy stuff its much better to be all inclusive. And IMO South Park has been like that, granted I haven’t watched it in MANY MANY years, our local cable provider dropped Comedy Central for quite a long time. I think that’s what made the Chapelle’s Show so good, at the time he is viewed in a much different light these day, he wasn’t afraid to make fun of or jokes about people.
Are there non-racists who still enjoy their work? Or non-libertarians? Cause I’m 1000% sure you have to be both to get their jokes
I still like them, but to be fair I’m pure evil.
1000% sure, yet totally wrong
I still love Book of Mormon and Base-ketball. Team America was also great.
How is the comedy of Kat Williams like sickle cell?
I miss building Gunpla.
More Serafinowicz in general is needed.
Thanks, Millign000.
Thillign000.
Read the other day that there was an entire other set of Look Around You series 1-type scripts that were rejected before they wrote series 2. Which was great, but…
WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH. More shorts would’ve been nice. Would love the chance to read them some day.
I would love to see more Look Around You. That second season was perfect. The scariest photo callback in the final episode might be the hardest I’ve ever laughed at anything on TV…
…and Preparation Heche too?
Threparation Heche.
I tried to say that aloud and spat all over my screen.
RIP Fred Sassy, I guess 🙁
Good. Deepfakes are just creepy, invasive and simply not funny to me. Make another musical or do a proper live-action movie again.
The guy doing Cruise is pretty good, and The barely aware George Lucas is funny, but for me the genial Ewan MacGregor is the best.
But then how am I going to not see it?!