South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut

It seems almost unbelievable that when this came out, South Park had been airing for less than two years. It’s even harder to believe that it came out in 1999, well over a decade ago.

I’ll leave it until I write my thoughts on the full series, which will be when it finally ends for good, to talk about how I first got into it, remarkably early and certainly before its popularity exploded over here in the UK (I’m so 90s hipster), but movies get separate entries, and this one definitely made enough of an impact to deserve it. South Park was still young in 1999, still fresh and rebellious and admired for the political edge Drawn Together so inadequately tried to criticise in their direct-to-video movie. Timmy wasn’t a character yet, and Butters was barely more than a face in the background (a fact Parker and Stone remark on when they gave their audio commentary for this film in 2009).

But it also marks about the time when South Park got a lot smarter. The first episodes that were so anarchic and bizarre now mostly seem to be trying too hard or to fall flat, but this film showed just how far Parker and Stone grew from anal probes and lame cliffhangers about Cartman’s parentage. The film built on many of the show’s ideas and was chock-full of moments to please fans, but it was also very clever, very varied and satisfying in terms of basic narrative.

When the South Park boys get mixed up in a debate about censoring a comedy film, their parents as ever take things to extremes and decide to wage war against Canada, because that’s where the film came from, and because it’s easier to attack a scapegoat than to question whether it’s actually their parenting at fault. Adding – fittingly, given how it happens – fuel to the fire, Kenny dies emulating something from the film, but this time we see him in the afterlife and meeting the angsty Satan, as ever locked in an abusive homosexual relationship with Saddam Hussein – as the one suffering. The parents manage to succeed in getting the stars of the offensive film condemned to death, so Stan and Kyle decide to form a resistance movement to rescue them. Cartman’s potty-mouth leads him to be subjected to a ‘V-chip’ not for the TV but for the head, which shocks him when he swears to correct his behaviour, Eric Idle’s short turn as the doctor who implants the chip making up a little for his bewildering turn in the previous year’s Timmy to the Rescue (Timmah!). All these plot strands come together at the end in a rather contrived way revolving around prophecies of Hell breaking free, but it cannot be denied that it is awesome when it does, especially with Cartman featuring in one of the best of the show’s numerous anime pastiches and Mike Judge showing up to give Kenny a voice just for a moment or two.

The film probably has the best pastiche soundtrack of any comedy film. The remarkable thing is that it not only imitates Menken numbers and the soundtrack of Les Misérables, it does it to a level of quality about on a par with them. James Hetfield pops in for an anonymous vocal cameo that presumably because of legal wrangling couldn’t be on the soundtrack and he pretended for a few years he didn’t do, the extremely silly ‘Kyle’s Mom is a Big Fat Bitch’ from the series gets fully expanded and ‘Blame Canada’ even got nominated for an Oscar – complete with a performance on awards ceremony night by Robin Williams (losing, inexplicably, to Phil Collins’ dreck from Tarzan). The medley that grows out of the Les Mis parody, including the great couplet ‘They may cut your dick in half and serve it to a pig/And though it hurts you’ll laugh and dance a dickless jig’, is inspired and should’ve been the one that won that academy award.

This was made while South Park was a rising star, and long before anyone was bored of it. And it shows: it’s clever, confident, full of ideas and absolutely hilarious. Miles better than The Simpsons Movie and a little better than Beavis and Butthead do America, it’s very probably the best movie adaptation of a TV animated comedy there’s ever been.

Drawn Together – season 3 / movie

Since I wrote my impressions of the first two seasons of Drawn Together, there has been a third, news of cancellation and then a direct-to-DVD movie. And there, barring a revival, ends the Drawn Together story, to the regret of few. There were great ideas in Drawn Together and some funny jokes, but mostly it became tired and strained and extremely repetitive.

Season 3 was more of the same, 14 new episodes in much the same mould as the previous series – we had episodes in which Ling-Ling had to take part in cockfighting in Mexico, in which Foxxxy is finally reunited with her father and in which Wooldor gets a TV show that turns children gay. So yes, more of the same – overdone jokes about minorities, inconsequential character-based plotlines and lots of gross-out humour. About the only bit of variety went back to what made the show interesting in the first place – its basis in animation tropes – and gave us ‘Drawn Together Babies’, which of course involved killing a babysitter and hiding the body and lots of tiny children in sexual situations. It would seem, judging by the last episode, that the cancellation of the series came as a surprise, but frankly, it was for the best – Drawn Together ran out of ideas early in season two. It was still worth watching because there were occasional funny moments and highly quotable lines, but generally the stories didn’t provide many laughs. Only incidental moments that were funny, from discovering what Captain Hero’s nemesis’ modus operandi really is, or Totoro showing up to play piano for Ling-Ling. But the complaint I had about the first seasons stands – it’s not enough to just portray a bunch of characters with the stereotypes of minorities and/or the mentally ill. You have to make the audience empathise with them, and you have to have some decent jokes beyond hoping that outrage at political incorrectness makes people laugh.

At the end of it all, the most interesting thing to say about Drawn Together is that according to Imaishi Hiroyuki, of Gurren Lagann fame, without the Gainax staff watching Drawn Together while in the US and seeing how far Rough Draft could push what could be shown on TV, they would never have been inspired to create Panty & Stocking.

The Drawn Together Movie: The Movie! brought with it a new visual style thanks to being animated in flash by Six Point Harness studio (responsible for crap like the The Ricky Gervais Show) and a storyline based entirely on bitterness about being cancelled. The movie makes big mistakes – not least of which is pretending none of their political incorrectness was meant to be smart South Park-style satire and setting up an opposition between themselves and that show (which took their time slot) suggesting Parker and Stone just tack on meaningless, trite political messages and being funny for the sake of being funny is somehow purer and superior. Though there’s something to be said for the Drawn Together writers being able to recognise their flaws, including those of this film (one gag points out they were lucky to get three seasons and should be grateful), and some of the obvious jokes about Israel, territory and violence (delivered by fan Seth MacFarlane), as well as a series of crude superhero cameos, actually managed to be funny, but trying to get a feature-length plot from shallow, vague ideas about not deserving cancellation just ends up dull. Red Dwarf couldn’t even make it work, so…

Plus using flash doesn’t work for animated pastiche. Despite spirited attempts to imitate cut-out animation and Disney smoothness, from Waltz with Bashir through My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Wakfu to Happy Tree Friends, flash looks like flash. And this never escaped the limitations of the media – a glaring flaw when attempting pastiches.

Drawn Together (seasons 1+2)

‘Does American animation always have to be funny?’ asked a viewer of Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. ‘Of Course it doesn’t,’ came the answer. ‘Just look at Drawn Together.’ A case of rival companies’ cheap jabs, yes, but it has to be said that as a comedy, Drawn Together does fall short.

I thought the premise was a sound one: take the format of a reality TV show, in which a group of people are made to live together and occasionally set challenges for rewards, but base it around various animated clichés. Thus we get a muscle-bound superhero; a Disney-style princess; a rather feminine video game protagonist; a 20s Betty Boop lookalike; a creature with more than a passing resemblance to Pikachu from Pokémon; a black, crime-fighting, ass-whoopin’ detective girl; a crude flash animation pig; and a goofy creature in the vein of Spongebob Squarepants trying to cohabit. Establish the humour as distinctly adult and we have the opportunity for some clever parody and intelligent social commentary.

The writers take a good stab at this, I’ll give them that. Princess Clara and Foxxy Love feud because Clara has been brought up to be a bigot who thinks the black girl must be her servant. Xandir is outed as gay so revels in his stereotype. Ling-Ling speaks mock-Japanese and becomes a send-up of all Asian stereotypes. Toot is soon revealed as the stereotyped past-it bitchy ex-star. You may be able to tell that the humour revolves very much around stereotypes. Not necessarily a bad thing – a lot of Python humour is stereotype-based – but you need to have good jokes to back it up.

Thing is, Drawn Together has an air of desperation to it. One episode revolves around a real-life bad review the show got. Driving through South Park in one of the pastiches, a character remarks, ‘I bet more people would watch us if we lived here.’ The jokes get milked and milked endlessly. Yes, okay, Toot is fat and cuts herself, Xandir is gay enough to wear pink thongs, Captain Hero is a horrible pervert and Foxxy is black. We get it. Now give us some good jokes!

While occasionally the show does hit gold – the musical numbers are all spot-on parodies of such institutions as Disney ballads and 70s band cartoons, Foxxy’s send-up of black stereotypes (‘I’m so mad I’ve been stuck like this for three hours’ was a great line) is well-balanced with her position as ‘the level-headed one’, and the show can be dangerously close to the wire (slave auction scene?) – plus some of the briefer allusions were very funny (He-Man and Panthro from Thundercats shooting up in Popeye’s steroids den), but when there are one or two laughs in half an hour of brain-dead, repetitive, outrageous-for-outrageousness’s-sake guff, it doesn’t work. And having an episode subplot about how fart jokes ARE funny after all doesn’t make them funny.

I was also quite disturbed when they met a fat lesbian who cuts and conforms to many of the other stereotypes mocked in the show and said, ‘You’re not exactly our target audience’. I was laughing at the bigots, at how stupid it was to be so backward, and that made me wonder if I’d got it all wrong. Ah, well.

In two seasons, only one episode was actually really good, the penultimate one in which the housemates enact at great length what might happen when Xandir comes out to them, sending up the usual drama-laden stories of struggling against repression, with most of the cast playing against type. There they hit the nail on the head, because in changing the characters’ personalities for a while, the writers hit on what makes really good satire: rather than having a cast made up of flat and unlikeable characters, make us sympathetic to them first, and THEN horribly abuse them.

There’s apparently more in the works. I’ll watch it, but all the while, I’ll be hoping it’s going to improve.

(originally written 31.7.06)