| South Park is an American animated series created by Matt Stone and Trey Parker. Sometimes, the name is interpreted also as "Saut-park" or "Sauce-park". The South Park animated series is aired by the cable television channel Comedy Central from 1997 onwards. The story is about the adventures of four boys and their friends, living in a small town South Park in the State of Colorado. The serial derides the American culture and current world events and also subjects set of deep beliefs and taboo to criticism by means of parody and black humor. “South Park” is aired late in the night and categorizes itself as a cartoon film for adults.
The show is famous for covering current world events. Work on each series is done in two stages: At stage 1, the authors conceptualize the general concept and plot and on stage 2, less than a week prior to premier airing, they modify them with details, which allows them to react to news quickly.
South Park began in 1992 when two students Parker and Stone from the University of Colorado, created an animated short “Jesus vs Frosty”. Prototypes of the future boys from “South Park” participated in this crudely made film and contrary to the latest cartoon films, the future Cartman was called Kenny though the prototype of the future "Kenny McCormick”, the boy in the orange parker, also participated in “Jesus vs Frosty”. Two practically identical looking boys became prototypes the future Stan and Kyle. The plot of the cartoon film is that four children wear a magic hat on a snowball, which revives and tries to kill them. Two of the heroes die, whereas the well known phrase in the future “They killed Kenny!” resounds about one of them.
Executives of the “Fox Broadcasting Company” saw this film and in 1995, Brian Graden entrusted Parker and Stone to create a second short film so that he can send it to his friends as a video Christmas card. The cartoon film “Spirit of Christmas. Jesus Vs Santa” was already closer to the stylistics of the future series; the characters looked and spoke the same as in the first series of “South Park”. The episode contained a hand-to-hand duel between Jesus and Santa Claus over the true meaning of Christmas. Later on, this short film was used in the episode “A very Crappy Christmas”. The video fragment quickly became a hit and received wide circulation including over the Internet; in particular, George Clooney made 30 copies of the cartoon film and sent it to friends. This led to the idea of creating the series, at first with Fox then with Comedy Central, where the series was aired for the first time on August 13, 1997.
All possible films, books, and television shows were casually parodied in each and every episode of the series from the very beginning; constant parody moments are a distinctive features of "South park” to date.
The musical theme for the series was written by Primus: Stone and Parker are the big fans of the group and they sent a letter to Les Claypool with a request to write a theme along with a copy of "Spirit of Christmas”. Later on, Primus appeared in the episode “Chef Aid” and their song “John the Fisherman” can be heard in the episode “Guitar Queer-o” in season 11.
Most parts of the events in the series takes place in the invented city South Park, Colorado, which is situated approximately 80 miles to the southwest of Denver; though many cities in the USA have the name “South Park” but the South Park which is actually situated in Colorado State is a city-museum. The city Fairplay in Colarado state served as the base for naming the series “South Park” and also those cities of Colorado where Parker and Stone have grown. Very little is spoken about the history of the series “South Park” in the episodes, however, it is possible to figure out from the episode “Chef Goes Nanners” that the flag of South Park, till recently, was depicting four white figures hanging a black one (the flag is changed in this series painting the figures in different colors for the sake of political correctness). It’s always snowy in South Park with rare exceptions. In the episode “Die, Hippie, Die”, it is possible to see the map of “South Park”. It is known that “Middle Park” and “North Park” are situated very close to South Park (in literal translation of "South Park"); these cities were mentioned in several episodes.
Among numerous locations in the city is the hospital “Trip to Hell”, bus stop, at which the main heroes often meet, entertainment park and Starkov pond, which children use as a skating rink. In many episodes, the action takes place in the Elementary school of South Park where the protagonists go to school.
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Fans of ever-popular South Park series now create South Park spoofs of famous movies. Here's one example of The Matrix Spoof.
