TVSquad

The first time I saw South Park, it was the original "Christmas card," Santa v. Jesus, that was floating around the Internet in 1996. I was living in Buffalo, and my roommates, who were also my bandmates, and also network administrators, had downloaded this new cartoon. As I remember, it took a while to download, more than an hour, possibly two. We watched it before band practice, several times, standing around the guitarist's computer in his room, all of us laughing our asses off.

It was crude in every way - the animation, the language, cheap shots at Brian Boitano for no discernible reason. Of course, rehearsal was repeatedly derailed that evening as we spouted all the wonderful new expletives we'd just learned, and accused each other of ham lust. When it was announced a few months later that Comedy Central had picked it up as a show, none of us could imagine how they would get away with it. It would have to be a completely neutered version of it to even make it on the air.

Turns out, we were wrong. South Park premiered, and it was the same thing we'd seen, just with the cursing bleeped out. I certainly wouldn't have guessed then that it would have lasted 13 seasons. Watching the past couple of seasons, I'm glad it survived. It's still one of the most brutally funny shows on television, and one that somehow manages to appeal to friends of mine across the political spectrum, probably because Trey Parker and Matt Stone tend to attack stupidity at its source.

The reason I started thinking about this was that the official South Park Studios site just posted the original un-aired construction paper series pilot, which you can see here. It looks a little fuzzy (the paper causes shadows), and doesn't differ too much from what ended up airing, other than a couple of minutes of extra footage. But it's a fun look back at the beginning of the series. And you can also watch a version with special crew commentary from producer Eric Stough and SouthParkStudios.com creative director Chris "Crispy" Brion.