Getty/MoviePix

Orgazmo isn’t Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s best movie (that honor belongs to South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut, or maybe Team America: World Police, or possibly Cannibal! The Musical — they’re really talented), but it does have the best stories. Last year, we told you about the time Parker and porn producer Farrell Timlake allegedly switched personas to mess with Carrie Fisher, Richard Dreyfuss, Timothy Hutton, and Buck Henry, leading to sentences like, “And at a certain point, I just make like I’m so turned on, like I’m so overcome with how hot the action is, that I unzip and drop trou and jump into it.”

There’s also the time the South Park co-creators wanted to mess with a “TV crew from Germany that were doing a feature on us and we wanted to do like a surrealist art kind of thing and keep pushing the boundaries,” Timlake said. “And we had Matt Stone walking into the middle of an orgy – he was completely naked except he had a book of poetry in his hand – and kept walking in the middle of it and just start saying, ‘Dead bird, dead bird, dead bird.’ Then he’d walk out, served no other purpose other than that.”

Like I said, the best stories. Here’s a new classic.

“We dosed at the AVN Awards… these are porn’s equivalent of the Oscars, except saying there is way more cleavage would be an understatement. But they do have similarities, like an endless parade of people you don’t know and you don’t care about standing up and saying stuff that only is going to be interesting if they piss everyone off saying it. So we are tripping balls (you know, being a Deadhead had its privileges), and Trey and I decide we are about to win every single award. We would take a few steps toward the podium already busting out our speeches to anyone that would listen.

But wouldn’t you know it? Someone else would always win that Best Bottom in a Gay Gang Bang or whatever, and we would have to storm back to the table, disgruntled losers due a win. Then the next ones would start getting announced, and again, we were back on our way up to certain triumph for Best Dildo Mold Makers or whatever.” (Via Cracked)

Timlake also claims he, Stone, and Parker dropped acid before a Sundance panel about “how film would be in the future.” There were other filmmakers on stage, too, and while the professionals were “trying to sound earnest and professional and visionary,” the Orgazmo gang was “going into spoken word poetry.” Making a movie with Trey Parker and Matt Stone sounds fun.

(Via Cracked)

We’re extremely close to the start of season twenty for South Park, which is pretty crazy considering the general lifespan of other animated television series and the controversial nature of the show. Trey Parker and Matt Stone have managed to keep the show chugging along despite everything, and they’ve done it while maintaining a high quality. The show has definitely transformed since those earlier seasons, but the spirit is still there and it’s obvious when you watch this classy video put together in honor of season twenty.

Going by the numbers with South Park is a pretty profane task, but it’s nice to relive some of those good moments back to back. Also, Cartman has taken a lot of dumps over the years. A lot more than I actually figured you’d need to show on a television series.

I will argue that some of those Randy Marsh arrests likely happened in the Bat Dad episode, so the numbers might be a bit skewed for the span of the series. But the rest is great, especially that one gay fish swimming around with Kanye West. It’s easily the best way to get excited for the new season, though you should’ve been excited for it already. There’s a whole lot of subject matter for the show to cover.

(Via South Park)

Comedy Central

South Park is still watched by over 8 million people weekly, after 20 years and over 250 episodes, including last night’s 20th season premiere. For the 20th anniversary, Hollywood Reporter compiled a long, fascinating oral history with Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and several other people related to the show, including Isaac Hayes III, the son of the late Isaac Hayes, aka Chef.

The whole article is worth checking out, but the part with Hayes particularly surprised us. His father shouted a jovial “Hello there, children!” and dispensed questionable advice to kids as Chef for the first nine seasons of South Park. He quit the show via a statement after the Scientology episode, “Trapped In The Closet”, aired in 2005. Afterward, Jerome “Chef” McElroy fell in with the wrong crowd (the “Super Adventure Club”) and things didn’t go so well for him.

Comedy Central

Comedy Central

Comedy Central

(The scene gets even more brutal from there.)

But now Hayes’ son is telling a new and depressing side of the story:

“Isaac Hayes did not quit South Park; someone quit South Park for him. What happened was that in January 2006 my dad had a stroke and lost the ability to speak. He really didn’t have that much comprehension, and he had to relearn to play the piano and a lot of different things. He was in no position to resign under his own knowledge. At the time, everybody around my father was involved in Scientology — his assistants, the core group people. So someone quit South Park on Isaac Hayes’s behalf. We don’t know who.”

Matt Stone told THR that Hayes asked them to pull the episode but it had already aired, and that, “It was pretty obvious from the conversation that somebody had sent him to ask us to pull the episode.”

Hayes’ son went on to reiterate that he didn’t think his father wanted to quit the show, saying “My father was not that big of a hypocrite to be part of a show that would constantly poke fun at African-American people, Jewish people, gay people — and only quit when it comes to Scientology. He wouldn’t be that hypocritical.”

(Via the Hollywood Reporter, hat tip to Vulture)

Comedy Central

South Park‘s 20th season premiere episode, “Member Berries,” was rife with great moments lampooning recent things like Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protest and pretty much anything said or done by Donald Trump. Which shouldn’t be all that surprising, as creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker have always enjoyed ridiculing the latest controversies peddled by the news media — especially since they literally wait until the last minute to write and produce most episodes. As demonstrated by New York Times writer Dave Itzkoff’s recent write-up of the pair, the behind-the-scenes struggle to finish “Member Berries” was no different.

When Itzkoff visited South Park Studios on Monday, September 12 — just two days before South Park was set to air on Comedy Central — Parker and Stone only had 12-and-a-half minutes of what was supposed to be a 22-minute episode. During the next 48 hours, the team filled in the remaining nine-and-a-half minutes, but not before a series of last-minute mishaps nearly sank their efforts:

“Member Berries” was broadcast at 10 p.m. on Sept. 14, but hardly without last-minute incident. That morning, South Park Studios suffered a system crash, and the episode’s audio went missing for an hour and a half.

When the episode was transmitted to Comedy Central, it had a mystery six-frame sync problem that was finally fixed and delivered one hour before airtime.

The 20th season premiere episode wasn’t completed, technically, until the final hour before it aired. As executive producer Anne Garefino put it, “Trey’s like, ‘I think from now, we should think about getting the show in earlier.'” She apparently responded to Parker’s quip with an appropriate remark, but Itzkoff concludes, “South Park would have to bleep out” what the 19-year veteran of the show said to her boss.

(Via New York Times)

SAN DIEGO – Earlier this evening, I sat in on the packed Hall H panel for South Park's 20th season with creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, with Chris Hardwick serving as moderator. Here are 20 big highlights from the wildly-entertaining Q&A.

1. The creators of Pokemon Go basically stole their idea (kind of).

“We did an episode called 'Chinpokomon' where the kids were just buying dolls, and the dolls had a chip in them that could track where the kids were and send all the info to Japan so that they could control America and bomb Pearl Harbor. I'm like, they ripped off our fucking thing!”

2. The studio wanted to make South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut PG-13.

“The reason to do the movie was to make it R-rated. We had a big argument with the studio [because they wanted to make it] PG-13. And we're like, 'we're not doing PG-13.' Because you know, we do that on the show!”

3. “Simpsons Did It” has turned into “South Park Did It.”

“This has literally happened in the past two years many times. We'll both sit there and we'll go, 'oh and then this could happen and this could happen.' And like a couple hours will go by and…it's like 'dude, somebody did this.' And it's like 'no, we did that ten years ago. Shit, we did that already!'”

4. They've wanted to quit the show every single season.

“The middle of every season I'm like, 'we're fucking done…fuck this, we can't do this anymore.' And then the season ends and it's like, 'oh, that was pretty funny.'”

5. Parker is turning into Randy Marsh, a.k.a. his dad.

“I remember the first five, even probably ten years, I would do Randy and I'd go in the booth to record him and I'd do an impersonation of my Dad. And now, I just do my voice…that's just me.”

6. They're still taunted about arguably their worst career moment.

“That still will happen, we'll walk down the street together and someone will go, 'Baseketball!'“

7. The 1999 Academy Awards, where they celebrated their Best Original Song nomination by wearing dresses and dropping acid, is pretty much a blur.

“We don't remember much from the Academy Awards. We just remember coming down off the acid and sitting there in the seats going, 'dude.' And at that point, it was really like, 'please don't let us win. I don't wanna go up on the stage right now.' And luckily Phil Collins won and we went and had spaghetti.”

8. The makers of Warcraft actually helped them with their Warcraft-themed episode “Make Love, Not Warcraft.”

“To be able to put it in our show…it was so much fun. Warcraft, they helped us make the [episode].”

9. Trey Parker has a hilarious Elon Musk anecdote.

“It's pretty funny…about two months ago, I played D&D [Dungeons and Dragons] with Elon Musk. That was really fun…the best part of it was, before we were playing, I was like, 'we shouldn't spend a lot of time doing character creation cause we're gonna start at level 1.' And it was basically like, I was just emailing, and I'm all, 'if you just wanna tell me sort of what class of race you wanna be, I'll do the sheets'…and maybe 20 seconds later, an email came back: human paladin.”

10. The famed “Woodland Critters Christmas” episode came out of a period of extreme writers' block at the very end of Season 8.

“We're like, fuck…we did Team America and we did all these episodes and we're gonna miss [the season order] by one episode? We're gonna have to call Comedy Central and say sorry? And you know, it was like, 'let's just put some stupid fucking thing on.' It was Christmas time again, or whatever, and we were like, 'let's just do a fucking Christmas Critter orgy.'”

11. They love writing for the show's female characters, including Stan's on-again, off-again girlfriend Wendy.

“There's episodes that have been Wendy-focused, when it's from her point of view, that we actually really enjoy writing.”

12. Like almost everyone, they thought Donald Trump's run for president would be a flash in the pan when they built an entire episode around him last season.

Stone: “At the time, we were just kinda like, yeah, this Donald Trump thing is pretty funny, let's make fun of that before it's over. We were worried that that was gonna be one of those episodes we'd look back and be like, 'why'd we do a whole episode about that?'”

Parker: “Unfortunately we've already raped and killed him.”

13. The celebrity target Stone felt most righteous about: famous “psychic medium” John Edward.

“That John Edward [episode]…”The Biggest Douche In The Universe.” That was something we really felt like, fuck that guy. That's really fucking bad. You know, there was kind of no equivocation…that's a really cruel thing [he does].”

14. One of Parker's favorite recent memories: taking his stepson and young daughter to the real Casa Bonita in the Denver suburb of Lakewood.

“My favorite thing I did was a few months ago was I took my stepson and my three year old daughter to Casa Bonita. To see Casa Bonita through her eyes…for her to go through Black Bart's Cave and be like, 'woah, it's huge!' Was just the greatest thing ever.”

15. Speaking of Casa Bonita: Parker came this close to buying it.

“We found out about two years ago that Casa Bonita was for sale. And I was like, 'I am fucking buying Casa Bonita.' But by the time I read [about it], a company had already swooped in and bought it.”

16. Making Team America was so excruciating they'll never work with puppets again.

Stone: “I don't think another puppet movie is in the cards…one puppet movie's enough, yeah. We were very proud of it, and it's a cool movie, but it was excruciating. The puppets are like that big, and they don't do anything […] we really dug a hole for ourselves.”

17. Having to find new ways to kill Kenny eventually became a creative obstacle.

“It was fun and it was awesome and it was fun, and it was rebellious at first…and then it got to be like homework.”

18. Sean Penn wrote them an angry letter after seeing the trailer for Team America — only to unintentionally reinforce their perception of him.

“Sean Penn wrote us this angry letter that we were reading, and we're like, 'is this a joke?' Cause he was saying shit that we were making fun of him [for] saying…if you haven't seen Team America, Sean Penn, all he does is he goes, 'I've been to Iraq!…You wanna talk about Iraq? I've been to Iraq!'…but then the last part of [the letter], Matt's reading the thing, and it said…'You know, I've been to Iraq.'”

19. A woman from the audience asked a question in character as Tweek.

I'm not kidding!

20. Parker took a selfie with the packed Hall H crowd.

Photo Credit: Kevin Winter/Getty Images

South Park Season 20 premieres September 14 on Comedy Central.

South Park: The Fractured But Whole was supposed to release this month, but it was delayed till next year to “make sure the game experience meets the high expectations of fans” in the words of Ubisoft. Now Ubisoft has released a new trailer, and Butters has released the gerbils.

Just as 2014’s South Park: The Stick Of Truth parodied fantasy and RPG tropes, South Park: The Fractured But Whole gives the same ribald send-up to superhero movies and crossovers, with some help from a cat named Scrambles and a new kid in town (you, the player) who is blessed / cursed with “farts that stop time or something.”

Here’s the latest synopsis, via Ubisoft:

Evil stirs in the town of South Park and The Coon has sworn to clean up the trash can of society. When the Coon and Friends investigate the disappearance of a local cat, they discover the threat is far greater than any of them realized. Allied with the mysterious New Kid and his magical butthole, will the intrepid group of Super Heroes be able to harness their amazing powers and save the town?

South Park: The Fractured But Whole comes to Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC on (hopefully) March 31st, 2017.

(Via Ubisoft US and Birth Movies Death)

South Park: The Fractured But Whole is a game that looks awesome but kept getting delayed, simultaneously pumping up anticipation then not offering release. The first delay was explained as a means to “make sure the game experience meets the high expectations of fans,” and it appears they’ve finally perfected this parody of superhero movies and crossovers. Ubisoft just dropped a new tasteless trailer and announced the release date.

The game comes to Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC this October 17th. Assuming they don’t delay it again. Which isn’t safe to assume at this point, but they’d also be crazy not to release this in time for the holidays and the time of year people are most likely to be stuck indoors buying video games about magical farts that stop time instead of, say, speaking to our families and spreading good cheer (overrated).

Here’s the synopsis, via Ubisoft:

Evil stirs in the town of South Park and The Coon has sworn to clean up the trash can of society. When the Coon and Friends investigate the disappearance of a local cat, they discover the threat is far greater than any of them realized. Allied with the mysterious New Kid and his magical butthole, will the intrepid group of Super Heroes be able to harness their amazing powers and save the town?

South Park: The Fractured But Whole will reportedly also come bundled with a free copy of 2014’s surprisingly good South Park: The Stick of Truth, and preorders come with some type of “bonus Towelie content” that we’re hoping is weed. (It’s not weed.)

(Via Ubisoft US)

“South Park” will enter the rarefied air of two decades of longevity, as Comedy Central’s latest renewal will keep Trey Parker and Matt Stone in business for another three years of no-holds-barred juvenile satire beyond its current deal.

[Parker and Stone] have closed a new deal with Comedy Central for three more seasons of South Park. The pact will keep the series on through 2016, extending its run to 20 seasons. Parker and Stone will continue to write, direct and edit every episode of South Park, as they have since the series’ premiere in 1997. [Deadline]

I’ve been trying make myself have an opinion about this, but I just can’t conjure one up. Parker and Stone are absolutely fearless and should be celebrated for creating some of the edgiest satire on TV over the years, so in that regard this is great. On the other hand, I don’t find “South Park” as funny as a lot of other people do because I tend to get annoyed by the characters’ voices and the lousy animation. Yes, I understand that’s part of the show’s charm. Yes, I understand that the lousy animation allows for quick reactions to current events. Stop telling me why it’s great and let me have an opinion, okay? Why do people still try to change my mind about a show that I’ve watched on and off for the last 14 years?

The news that Comedy Central ordered three more seasons of South Park was predictable. Since its premier in 1997, the South Park brand name has been one of the most valuable on television. And yet, as the legendary show continues to plod along and churn out new episodes, the question has to be asked: should South Park have ended a long time ago?

In its heyday, South Park was the funniest show on television. Early episodes of the series were groundbreaking, equal parts disgusting and insightful. Like nine-year-olds that just learned the word “fuck,” series creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone made a show that seemed to be vulgar simply for the sake of being vulgar. There were messages to be had, but only so much of the show’s humor could be derived from the immature back-and-forth’s between Cartman and Kyle.

All good shows eventually hit a wall, though, a fact that South Park has been trying to fight through for years. To say that there’s been a drop in quality over the past five seasons is like saying that LeBron James could perform better in the fourth quarter. The random, zany antics that made earlier episodes so funny have been replaced by a series of episodes dedicated entirely to societal fads. A large part of what makes comedy so engaging is its unpredictability, something that South Park has been missing for years. Parker and Stone have boiled it down to a formula that reads something like “current event + Eric Cartman = Ratings.”

In a perfect world, South Park would have ended at least five years ago. After 10 seasons, the same old song and dance becomes stale and uninspired. The same reason that The Simpsons has become a punchline is the reason why Chappelle’s Show, Arrested Development and Community will always be considered masterpieces: television shows have a shelf life. Even before Steve Carrell left The Office, the show had more or less lost its touch. Same with Scrubs and same with Weeds.

Hell, Stone and Parker seem to realize as much. They willingly made fun of their show’s own staleness with the “You’re Getting Old” episode to conclude the first half of season 15. And years ago they made an episode making fun of how much ground The Simpsons covered in its ridiculously long run (Season 7’s “Simpsons Already Did It”). The two know that their show is losing steam, but hey, they’re getting money. So as long as that stays part of the equation, we’ll keep seeing more South Park episodes, for better or worse.

(Click to enlarge)

THQ and Obsidian are collaborating to make a South Park role-playing game for the Xbox 360, PS3, and Windows PC. The picture above (reversed version after the jump) comes courtesy of Game Informer, who have an article on the game and an interview with Trey Parker and Matt Stone in their January issue (out this Thursday). Here’s what we know about the game so far:

• “South Park: The Game” lets you play as a new kid in South Park, befriending the well-known characters and protecting the town.
• Parker and Stone are writing the script, performing the dialogue, and overseeing the development of the game, making this the first South Park game they’ve had an active role in making.
• The current plan is to release the game in the second half of 2012.

A tipster at NeoGAF claims to have an advance copy of the magazine and released these unconfirmed details:

• The player’s character will be silent and “fully customizable”.
• The player “has a smartphone that acts as the primary game menu and has a facebook-like app show the number of friends you have and your current standing with the various kid factions.”
• “Eric Cartman will greet your character and help you decide your class, which are wizard, paladin, adventurer, rogue, and a fifth unconventional class made up by Cartman.” I’m going to take a wild guess that the fifth class Cartman would make up is “Jew”.
• “Obsidian is using the Dungeon Siege III engine.”
• “Many elements of the combat system are like Paper Mario and the Mario & Luigi games.”
• “There is a Final Fantasy Materia like system in the game to augment weapons with various abilities like fire, poison, and electricity.”
• “Parker and Stone gave Obsidian 15 years of assets used during the show and a detailed list of approved textures and colors.”
• “Critical hits, cash rewards, experience, and consumables are in the game.”
• “Sodas are health potions and Tweak’s coffee is a haste item.”
• There will probably be no unskippable cutscenes because Parker hates them (as well he should).
• More at NeoGAF.

An anonymous tipster (who is totally not my cat) also gave us these details:

• Game disc consists of 50% man, 50% bear, and 50% pig.
• Kenny pelts will be the primary form of currency.
• Game will not suck as hard as the previous South Park games. *fingers crossed*

[Sources: Game Informer, NeoGAF via RockPaperShotgun, BusinessWire]

(Click to enlarge)

Last week we noted that the South Park RPG in development sounds hella cool, and we also had a list of unconfirmed details about the game. Now Game Informer’s interview with the game’s lead designer Matt MacLean confirms that the combat system will be similar to Paper Mario, with properly-timed inputs giving you advantages in the battle. He also said the kids would use weapons believable for kids to find, like wooden swords, flaming tennis balls, gardening implements, and ninja stars.

Previously they said players could pick one of five classes: wizard, paladin, adventurer, rogue, and “a fifth unconventional class made up by Cartman”. Last week we guessed that fifth class Cartman would make up would obviously be Jews, and MacLean confirmed in the interview that this is the case. He describes Jews as paladin/monks who are a “high risk, high reward character. The closer he is to death the more powerful his abilities become.” Add that sentence to the list of things that, if taken out of context, could totally get him and me fired.

MacLean sums up the game’s combat system:

The essence of the combat is kids being kids. When we showed Matt and Trey an early build, one of the comments was, “I want the kids to bleed more. I want the kids to cry more. I want these kids to really just treat each other like crap.” Because that’s what kids do; they’re really rough with each other. I think that was one of the things they certainly wanted out of combat, was kids being little bastards. [transcribed from the full interview available at Game Informer]

They want kids to bleed more, cry more? What are they, an assistant football coach at Penn State? I’m joking. That’s just a joke. We like to have fun here.

If you’re reading this website there’s a good chance you’re a fan of the comic stylings of South Park — along with the other works of Trey Parker and Matt Stone. As you may have heard, Parker and Stone created a critically-lauded and Tony award-winning Broadway show that lovingly pokes fun at Mormons called The Book of Mormon. I have seen this show. I attended a performance a few months ago with expectations that were through the roof. The show still somehow managed to exceed shatter all expectations.

You need to go see The Book of Mormon.

You may be wondering if I, or my demanding UPROXX overlords, are being paid to implore you to go see this show. No were are not. So why am I imploring you to see this show? Put simply, because works of creative genius of this magnitude sadly don’t come around very often in life, and I think it’s important to a) treat yourself to taking them in when they do for the sake of having an enriching life experience and b) reward the people who worked so hard to create such works (Parker and Stone reportedly spent 10 years developing/honing TBOM). Theater experiences like this one only come around once in a generation. It’s that good. And since I just found out through a friend that a national tour is kicking off later this summer, I felt it my duty to spread the word.

Seriously, go see it. Drive a few hours if you have to. It’s still cheaper than flying to NYC and paying for a hotel room there. You can thank me later.

Here’s a promotional interview with Parker and Stone about the show (and you can watch an extended interview with them on Charlie Rose about the show here)…

AP Photo

“The Book of Mormon,” having won nine Tony Awards in New York, is now spawning a national tour, making its official West Coast premiere at the Pantages Theater in Los Angeles on Sept. 12. In previews, the show is as polished and fine-tuned as you might expect a Broadway show to be — though even jaded Los Angeles audiences are likely to be at least a little surprised by exactly how many times they hear not only the F-bomb, but jokes about sex with babies, sex with frogs, genital mutilation and dysentery (complete with enthusiastic pantomimes of all of the above).

That it all comes across as good, if not clean, fun is a testament to the creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker (also of “South Park” fame), who took some time following a preview performance to talk with journalists about the award-winning (and gleefully crass) musical. They revealed why they’re not surprised Mormons like the show (even going so far as to place three full-page ads in the Playbill), the presidential candidate they’ve invited to see the production, any why they didn’t worry about offending sweet little old ladies who come to Saturday matinees.

How exactly did a character get a running joke about maggots in his scrotum?
Trey Parker: Before we even knew it would be a show about Mormons, [we said] let’s write a musical about maggots in the scrotum. No, it actually is funny. That line started as, the song used to be called “The Bible is a Trilogy,” and it’s now “American Prophet.” And it made movie references. And that was part of the thing. And it was kind of a joke that the third part of a trilogy is always the best movie, like the third “Matrix” was the best, which is a great joke. And so it ended up being that the African guy kind of stepped forward and said, “Can you imagine if ‘The Matrix’ had ended after the first one?’ And the African guy actually said, [singing] “I actually thought the third one was the woooorst one,” That was this thing that we had for the longest time. We finally decided, oh, it can’t be the bible is a trilogy; it doesn’t make sense with the story anymore, so we changed it but we thought, awww, we lost that other thing. What else can he come forward and say? And that was it. It’s a totally different joke.

You also have a warlord character by the name of General Butt Fucking Naked in the play, which is clearly a riff on General Butt Naked in Liberia, who ultimately became a preacher. Did that play out in real life after you wrote the character?
Trey: We had the warlord really from the beginning
Matt: He was based on Joseph Kony, and luckily we toyed with just making it Kony, it is in northern Uganda where he’s done his deeds, and now after the whole Joseph Kony thing this year [the viral video “Kony 2012”], we’re so glad we didn’t do that, because it sort of changed the context of it, but that’s who it’s based on. But the warlords in Liberia had such colorful names, but we just ripped off his joke, basically.
Trey: What’s better than Butt Naked? Butt Fucking Naked!

Do you have any plans for a movie?
Trey: We don’t have any. The only thing is, when we first started working on it 7 years ago, we kind of toyed with it being a Broadway show or being a movie, since Matt and I knew how to make a movie, we said, well, let’s just make a movie, because we can do that pretty quickly. We stuck with it, and after we saw the first few workshops with an audience, we said, nah, this would be pretty cool as a stage thing. So it did, as we were doing scenes, I was kind of visualizing it as a movie, because that was what I knew. I think it would be a pretty difficult thing, but also it would be a pretty different animal once we were done with it. But we don’t talk about it too much right now, but it’s very possible.

Any interest in doing another musical?
Trey: I don’t know. These are hard.
Matt: And what we’re learning is that they’re never done. Not done done done. With “South Park,” we finish the show, we send it off to get downloaded, it goes on the air, and the next morning and half the time if you asked me I wouldn’t be able to tell you what it was about. We are so good at wiping the hard disk and being done… a theater thing just is not like that.

There are so few people who have the power to put an original work on Broadway. Do you feel any responsibility to do more for that reason?
Trey: No, we don’t think it’s our responsibility.
Matt: We want to do the movie remake thing.
Trey: Movies are really great, we realize.
Matt:  We’re proud of that, that it’s a whole original thing, but it’s a load of work. We honestly don’t have any plans.
Trey:  We don’t even know what we’re doing for “South Park” in three weeks.

You’ve tackled television, movies and now Broadway. Is there any other medium you’d like to try?
Trey: Painting. We’re doing a video game. That’s a bitch so far. It’s just another whole new can of worms. It’s 400 pages instead of 40, that’s the main thing. But with this, it was really cool. It’s such a community, and learning how all this stuff works. We got schooled, quick. It was a great learning experience, but thank God we had really awesome people around us who knew what they were doing. It was fun, but it was very scary. We thought this will be fun, but if we can get this thing to run for a year on Broadway, we can say it’s a success.

Do you plan to do anything else with a Mormon theme? You’ve been exploring the topic since “Orgazmo.”
I hope we’re done. It was another thing we connected over when we met in college, we both had this fascination because we both knew Mormons growing up and my very first girlfriend was a Mormon. We thought it was fascinating and goofy and wonderful and all this stuff, so it did kind of eke it’s way in all the time, so we did decide to do our big blow out big Mormon thing.

Has Mitt Romney, America’s most famous Mormon, seen the show yet?
Matt: He’s been invited. He’s said he’s going to come when he has time.
Trey: If he gets elected, it’s because of us.

And if he doesn’t get elected?
Trey: It’s because of us.

Have you been surprised by how eagerly the Mormon community has embraced you?
Matt: We’ve been telling people since the very first interviews we did for this thing… before it was on Broadway and no one had seen it, we’ve been fielding that question for two years, saying they’re going to be totally cool with it, you watch, that’s the way Mormons are. They’ve just proven themselves. They’ve just put a nice little period at the end of the whole musical.
Trey: No matter what they do, they will out nice us, guaranteed.

Did you consider adding a Mitt Romney joke to the show?
Trey: This show is much bigger and more important than the President of the United States.

Was it surreal to win Tony awards for a show that’s pretty edgy?
Trey: We’re in our forties, so we’re not so far away from being Upper West Side old ladies. We’re kind of pre-seniors. I remember having that feeling, watching people at the Broadway show and seeing this little old lady with gray hair and thinking, oh, what’s she going to think? And I’m like, that lady is twenty years older than me. Sad, right? We’re old fuckers. We think we’re these young guys in our 20s being rebels.

So now that you’re older, do you feel differently about “South Park”?
Trey: Because of the fact we still write and direct every episode ourselves, we haven’t handed it off, even if it isn’t a better show it is a fresh show because we want to do something different all the time. And we don’t want to just do Cartman’s fat and likes Cheesy Poofs. It’s funny, it’s like being in a band and having all these albums to look back on and go, oh, that’s where we were in our lives then, and this is where we’re at now.
Matt: The story lines, luckily we created a town, because there are more story lines that are the adults.
Trey: I was all about being Stan, but now I love being Stan’s dad. I identify more with him now.

Is there anything you didn’t want to make fun of in this show?
Trey: The only thing was the polygamy thing, because we wanted to do your everyday Salt Lake City Mormon. And obviously we do the stereotype of that, too, but that’s the misconception among a lot of people, was like, oh Mormons, they’re polygamists. No they’re not, actually. But they obviously have that in their history and there are some fundamentalists who are. Because of “Big Love” and all these things, it was also like joke wise, it’s just been so done.
Matt: I think that’s why probably the main reason Mormons like the show. They’re so sick of that lazy joke. It’s definitely a part of their history and it’s there. But we just wanted to stay away from that because it’s been done. I think they’re so appreciative that there’s something mainstream and it’s not, no, that was 100 years ago.
Trey: And we wanted Mormons to buy tickets and take out ads in Playbill.

What was your reaction to that?
Trey: It was awesome. We seriously, honestly talked about doing that ourselves a year and a half ago. We were like, we should put a thing in the Playbill that says if you want to know more about the Mormon Church… visit your local temple. And we’re like, nah. And they did it. It’s great. The only thing i don’t like, because there’s three pages of it, is one page says… the book is better. I disagree. Definitely act two of ours is much, much better [than the Book of Mormon].

The message of the show seems to be that religion is necessary to inspire people.
Trey: Any episode of “South Park” that’ kind of got a point to it, it’s always the last thing we do…we try not to start with an agenda, we really like more doing a show like this and it showing us… with this, it really was just the fact that to me, to us, the stories of “Star Wars” and stuff like that were just as valid and just as real, and you can say there was no Darth Vader and why would Darth Vader has done this, but it points at something way bigger than that.

If you did do a movie version of “The Book of Mormon,” would you let anyone else direct?
Matt: I think we want to do a movie someday of it, but right now we’re just trying to get our head around it.
Trey: One we decided we wanted to go theater, we made a lot of decisions that were best for the theater version of it. We wouldn’t want to just do this on film. We’d have to really rethink it, but I think we could do it.

So, who’s in your dream cast?
Trey: Justin Bieber as Elder Price.
Matt: A younger cast would be cool, because you’d be much closer. But no ideas really. Except for Justin Bieber, of course.

And if you did make the movie, would it be a musical, too?
Matt: One of our biggest career regrets, looking back, is that we didn’t make “Orgazmo” a musical. It just seemed to crazy, and it was too crazy. But it wasn’t going to hurt its box office potential.

I don’t want to make a habit out of talking about what happened on TV last night, because for one thing, that’s more WarmingGlow‘s bag, but I’d be a slapdash blogger if I didn’t mention last night’s South Park, which included a subplot starring our favorite megalomaniacal billionaire submarine captain, James Cameron, who’s also been known to direct the occasional film when he’s not hunting unicorn on his flying yacht. I won’t go into detail about how Cameron fit into the overall plot, but I’m including below a clip of my favorite bit from the show, where James Cameron pilots his submersible deep below the waves while listening to a Davy Crockett-style song called “James Cameron.”

This was the second South Park episode of the new season and their second home run, as far as I’m concerned. It’s in its 16th season now, and while there were a few rough patches early on, I think it’s possible to make the case that South Park has been funnier more consistently and for longer than The Simpsons (and obviously edgier, but you can’t really fault the Simpsons for not being on cable). Trey Parker is twice as funny and just as musically talented as Seth MacFarlane, but you don’t see Trey Parker being asked to host the Oscars. He’d scare the sh*t out of everyone there, which is probably why his show’s so damn good. But it’s much easier to dole out accolades to shows like Modern Family, because it incorporates a couple gay characters into its stew of old-fashioned sitcom tropes (the bumbling dad, the precocious child, the hilariously-accented foreigner, etc.), than it is to invite something as legitimately subversive as South Park to the party. Last night’s South Park was more important to our nation’s democracy than the presidential debates! Okay, that’s probably the booze talking, but it was pretty good. (*hic*)

Aside from the song, which had me in tears, the part where the crane drops the submersible onto the deck of the ship instead of into the water was nicely subtle.

AP Photo/Chris Pizzello

With Alan Cumming hosting, Matt Stone and Trey Parker on the winners list and Daniel Day-Lewis taking the stage with an Eastwooding routine, BAFTA/LA’s Britannia Awards sound considerably more fun than their parent organization’s February ceremony across the pond. Then again, that’s often the case with awards shows the general public doesn’t really know about — though they’ll have a chance to see for themselves when the ceremony is broadcast this Sunday on BBC America.

The Britannia Awards, which have been held by the British Academy’s Los Angeles outcrop since 1989, aren’t a competitive ceremony, but rather a celebration of a selected handful of individuals — usually mostly British, though not this year — deemed to have enriched the medium. It’s not an award tied to specific films, though they often alight on artists who already have a clear presence in the awards season.

Daniel Day-Lewis, for example, wasn’t recognized for his performance in “Lincoln,” though the timing of Steven Spielberg’s film surely contributed to the decision to hand the Oscar-winning star the Stanley Kubrick Award for Excellence in Film — an award that Spielberg himself accepted in 2000. Curiously enough, Day-Lewis is the first Brit to be given this particular Britannia Award since Hugh Grant nine years ago. In between, Americans to have taken the honor include Denzel Washington, Jeff Bridges, Clint Eastwood and Sean Penn, at the start of his 2008 path to Oscar glory with “Milk.”

Still, the award itself wasn’t why Day-Lewis has nabbed most of the headlines out of the event. The revered actor delighted the audience with a playful acceptance speech in which he dragged a chair onto the stage with him and addressed an invisible Barack Obama — who had, of course, just been re-elected the night before. “I know as an Englishman it’s absolutely none of my business,” Day-Lewis said to the chair, “but I’m so very grateful that it was you.” Parodying Clint Eastwood’s mortifying empty-chair routine may not be the most original gag by now, but if Day-Lewis is to give further speeches over the next few months — and many assume he will have reason to — it’s good that he’s feeling a little irreverent.

Another Britannia winner with a major film now out was Daniel Craig, who accepted the British Artist of the Year award –a neatly timed honor, coming just as “Skyfall” has become the top-grossing film of the year in the UK, and in less than two weeks. There’s a strong possibility that BAFTA will acknowledge the film further down the road, though Best Actor attention for Craig would be a bit of a stretch, so this seems as appropriate a way as any to recognize the current James Bond. Recent winners of the same award include Helena Bonham Carter, Tilda Swinton and Craig’s own wife, Rachel Weisz.

Meanwhile, the John Schlesinger Award for Artistic Excellence in Directing was presented to Quentin Tarantino — the first American ever to take an award that has recently been handed to the likes of Christopher Nolan, Danny Boyle and Anthony Minghella. With “Django Unchained” yet to be unveiled, we can only guess as to whether QT will be accepting any further honors this season. 

 The list of winners was rounded out by “South Park” creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker — whose stage music “The Book of Mormon” hits the West End early next year — who took the Charlie Chaplin Award for Excellence in Comedy, while game designer Will Wright won the Albert R. Broccoli award for Worldwide Contribution to Entertainment. 

The full list of winners:

Stanley Kubrick Award for Excellence in Film: Daniel Day-Lewis
British Artist of the Year: Daniel Craig
John Schlesinger Award for Excellence in Directing: Quentin Tarantino
Charlie Chaplin Award for Excellence in Comedy: Matt Stone and Trey Parker
Albert R. Broccoli Award for Worldwide Contribution to Entertainment: Will Wright

The NSFW trailer for South Park: The Stick of Truth premiered at the VGA awards this weekend, and I can’t even tell which parts are cutscenes and which parts are gameplay. THQ and Obsidian are collaborating to make this role-playing game for the Xbox 360, PS3, and PC. They jammed it full of South Park references from every season, as you can spot in the NSFW video below.

The South Park: The Stick of Truth lead designer Matt MacLean said in an interview that the game’s combat system will be similar to Paper Mario, in that properly-timed button mashes yield better results. He also said the weapons are stuff kids could realistically find or build. Is dog poop on a stick one of the weapons? That was a popular one in my neighborhood, and by “neighborhood” I mean just my house (I fight dirty).

South Park: The Stick of Truth is the first South Park game which Trey Parker and Matt Stone have been actively involving in making. They wrote the script and performed the dialogue, and they are rumored to have provided Obsidian with 15 years of assets from the show to get the details right.

The player enters the game as a customizable “new kid in town” who has no dialogue. Players choose one of five player classes: wizard, paladin, adventurer, rogue, and Jew. That last class was named by Cartman, presumably because Kyle wanted to play a monk/paladin character whose abilities increase as he loses hit points. We’ve also heard there will be a Wii version called the “All Roshambo Edition”. Okay, maybe not.

[Hat tip and a zip-line trip coupon to PC Gamer and Oprainfall.]

Don’t look now, but Trey Parker and Matt Stone just went and got powerful. The South Park creators announced over the weekend that they would be using their own money, along with a sizable chunk from some big-wig Hollywood investors, to create their own production studio.

The new company is to be called Important Studios and hopes to be just that. With an estimated value of $300 million built on revenue from South Park, now in its 16th season on Comedy Central, and the Broadway megahit The Book of Mormon, the studio will have the power and money to approve television, movie and theater projects, including a big-screen version of The Book of Mormon.

On Friday, Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone were putting together the final news release to announce their studio. They settled on this quip: “Having worked with several different studios over the years, we came to realize that our favorite people in the world are ourselves.”

The move was probably a long time coming, since the two now have television shows, movies, and a smash-hit musical under their belts (not to mention a lucrative-as-hell 50-50 deal with Comedy Central for all non-TV revenue), but that doesn’t make it any less of a positive development. I’m all for putting power in the hands of the people who are actually making things, not just the people who count the beans, and this does exactly that. Creative types being in control doesn’t always lead to financial success, but given Parker and Stone’s track record there’s no reason to believe they’ll falter here, and it will give them the heft they need to make (and bankroll) more projects they’re passionate about — which, for those of us whose interest in this venture consists mainly of pointing our eyes at the things they’re creating, is not a bad thing at all.

Or, to put it another way:

Important Studios’ balance sheet will also probably give Mr. Stone and Mr. Parker more leverage when negotiating with other studios. Doug Herzog, president of the MTV Networks Entertainment Group, who brought South Park to Comedy Central, said of the new studio: “Bringing money to the table goes a long way. Money talks.” He said the studio would allow the two men “to pursue their vision in as pure a way as possible. Matt and Trey with a lot of money. Be afraid.”

via NY Times

Photo credit: Featureflash/Shutterstock.com

Oh man, remember the nineties?

With South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone are in the unique position of being able to basically do whatever the hell they want (as famously documented in 6 Days to Air). While this near-total creative freedom produces a stinker of an episode once every three or four shows or so (taking chances on jokes that might not work is what makes it so good), it’s also allowed South Park to become the overall and most consistently comedically relevant show of the last 15 years. Having made a crapload of money on virtually everything they’ve touched, the last thing they need is notes from some studio exec who’ll probably be fired in the next six months. They have enough F-You money now that they could burn it just to keep the rest of their money warm, so it only makes sense for them to start their own studio and continue doing whatever the hell they want. And that’s exactly what they’re doing. These men are goddamned heroes and I will fight you if you disagree.

The new company is to be called Important Studios and hopes to be just that. With an estimated value of $300 million built on revenue from “South Park,” now in its 16th season on Comedy Central, and the Broadway megahit “The Book of Mormon,” the studio will have the power and money to approve television, movie and theater projects, including a big-screen version of “The Book of Mormon.”

On Friday, Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone were putting together the final news release to announce their studio. They settled on this quip: “Having worked with several different studios over the years, we came to realize that our favorite people in the world are ourselves.”

Important Studios will incorporate revenue from “South Park” and “The Book of Mormon,” as well as revenue from future projects. “The Book of Mormon,” one of the highest-grossing Broadway musicals in recent years, received nine Tony Awards in 2011 and has grossed more than $200 million.

That amount continues to grow because the New York production makes $1.6 million a week, according to the producers. A touring version of the show makes about $1.6 million a week, and another production in Chicago grosses $1.5 million a week. And the show is about to go into production in London.

Mr. Stone and Mr. Parker, who created the musical, are the largest shareholders in “The Book of Mormon,” followed by the film producer Scott Rudin and others. Among the first projects that Important Studios is likely to develop is a movie version of the musical. [NY Times]

These guys have been able to work outside Hollywood for basically their entire career, doing it their way and kicking ass pretty much the entire time. I most humbly hope for more of the same.

Though if they really want to make some money, the first order of business should be hiring Awesome-o. Have you heard his pitches? That robot’s a hit machine! He’s like a robot Tyler Perry, only more talented.

[banner picture source: Featureflash / Shutterstock.com]

It’s always great when celebrities gather enough clout that they can do whatever the hell want. Were it not for the success of Aladdin and Mrs. Doubtfire, Robin Williams never would have starred in Jack, and the world would have been deprived of literally threes of laughs. South Park‘s Trey Parker and Matt Stone have already achieved their passion project, a $300 million production studio, and now they’re helping Primus’ Les Claypool and Ween’s Dean Ween (that’s fun to say; it sounds like a British ambulance siren) achieve theirs, by producing a fishing show.

The ex-guitarist of the band Ween and lifelong Jersey Shore fisherman is prepping to shoot a pilot for a quirky TV series about saltwater angling. He’s going to embark on nautical adventures with fellow musician and fisherman Les Claypool of Primus.

“The show is personality-driven,” says Melchiondo, 42, a Trenton native. “The idea is to get the show on after Anthony Bourdain or Tosh.O. It’s a fishing show that you do not have to be into fishing to enjoy.”

When Melchiondo learned that the fishing show got the greenlight to shoot next month, it was a welcome bit of good news. Produced by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the series will fuse sportfishing with music and comedy, following Melchiondo and Claypool as they go out on the water with celebrity guests in different locales, including the Garden State. (Via)

You might assume this is the world’s first comedy fishing show hosted by musicians, because who the hell else would do something so insardine (#fishpun)? Well, in 1991 the great John Lurie, who played music with the Lounge Lizards and starred in Stranger Than Paradise and Paris, Texas, was the host of Fishing with John, in which he’d go on a river expedition with a guest, including Tom Waits, Willem Dafoe, and Dennis Hopper.

What I’m saying is, my dream has always been to see an all-fish retelling of Cannibal! The Musical with revised instrumentation from Primus and Tom Waits, and Matt and Trey have the power to make this happen. Shpadoinkle.

(Banner via Shutterstock) (Via NJ.com)

We all agree “what are you wearing?” is the worst question ever, right? Right. Every time I hear it, it makes me want to jump into my TV and make Kelly Osbourne choke on a dead bat, or force her to watch the five unaired episodes of Osbournes Reloaded. The only time it’s ever been acceptable to ask was in 2000, when Matt Stone and Trey Parker dropped acid and wore form-fitting J-Lo and Gwyneth Paltrow dresses to the Academy Awards.

Or as Parker put it:

We thought of it the week before. And when the day came and we were just so nervous that we decided not to do it…But then we were like, “Let’s take a little bit of acid.” So we did that and of course an hour later we were like, “We have to wear the dresses.” (Via)

The best. But long before they were ingesting drugs at the most prestigious celebration of movies in the world, Stone and Parker were students at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where they famously made the pre-South Park short, The Spirit of Christmas. It was also there that they worked on a short film called First Date, a perfect parody of the kind of shorts Mystery Science Theater 3000 mocked all the time, which was recently uploaded to YouTube. It’s definitely from the early 1990s — at no other point in time would someone willingly wear a Cleveland Indians hat.