TVSquad

It looks like some extra goodies are being included with the South Park Season 11 DVD set. Not only do you get great episodes such as "Cartman Sucks", "More Crap" and the immortal "Imaginationland" story arc (I pray the season DVD includes the full commentary of the "Imaginationland" one), but the DVD also includes a 3-song download for the XBox version of the video game Rock Band.

This marketing move makes sense on a couple of levels. First, Trey Parker and Matt Stone are big gamers so they probably got some cool stuff that other gamers only wish they had access to. They even confess their hobby on one of their DVD mini-commentaries. Second, the season includes the episode "Guitar Queer-o", which uses the predecessor game Guitar Hero as central to the plot.

(S12E05) It must be very tough for Trey Parker and Matt Stone to keep outdoing themselves. I don't know which image from tonight's episode was funnier: the mouse with the penis on its back running all over town (and, at one point, singing at the moon) or the photo of Mickey Mouse with a huge erection. It's a tough call.

More after the jump...

(S12E04) The South Park guys are going after the Writer's Guild of America, and it's about time.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone are not members of any of the unions, and they negotiated Internet profit-sharing before it became an issue for the WGA. They have also remained consistent with their dislike of the Hollywood creative elite (including actors and writers, although they are both) and their willingness to take a different viewpoint than the popular media.

(S12E03) To begin, for those unaware, South Park Studios has started to offer full episodes of the show on their official site with limited commercial interruption. I originally reported this in November.

I'll say this: when the South Park team put their minds to it, they can come up with some fantastic animation. When you watch the crudity of the animation in standard episodes, it's easy to forget that they're pretty damn talented at their craft.

(S12E02) The thing that makes South Park stand out above all other television shows is the creators' ability to take an old idea and put a new spin on it with depth and good reasoning. This episode is a perfect example of that.

Britney Spears tries to escape her fame by hiding out in Colorado. Sadly, the paparazzi follow her and through a confluence of events, she blows her own head off with a shotgun. Fortunately, this is South Park and such things aren't fatal here.

(S12E01) After a routine tonsillectomy goes horribly wrong, Cartman comes face to face with his own mortality.

Season Twelve is out of the gate pretty strong. Unfortunately, it seemed to lose momentum towards the end.

Matt and Trey tackle the issue of AIDS...again (they have done so before, such as in the episode mocking Jared from the Subway commercials). They tend to present AIDS as a shock-value joke, but this time their take is slightly different.

Since I've been informed that I'm taking care of the future South Park reviews for TV Squad, I thought I'd jump the gun and review the last season (the second half of Season 11 begins on Wednesday October 3rd). I'm a long-time fan of Trey Parker and Matt Stone's work and, with one exception, I felt every episode of this season was a home run.

It amazes me how quickly the production team of the show can turn around an episode. I feel it is under these rushed circumstances that Matt and Trey produce their best work. The best example of this is the first episode of the season, "The Return of Chef", which was a direct result of the controversial departure of Isaac Hayes from the show resulting from his association with Scientology.

According to an Associated Press story, Trey Parker and Matt Stone (a.k.a. the creators of South Park) are producing a new series for Comedy Central called Kenny vs. Spenny.

The premise is that of two friends, Kenny Hotz and Spencer Rice, who are fiercely competitive with each other and engage each other in performing in stupid competitions (such as who could sell more Bibles) for bragging rights. Parker and Stone are not actually the creators but are rather importing the series from Canada. Comedy Central would finance 10 new episodes as well as show 10 of the originals.

Geeks get treated pretty badly in the media. Thanks to the fact that most people who get above-the-line credit in Hollywood are anything but geeky, when a script calls for a socially maladjusted character, it's almost always a terrible caricature of true geek culture. For years little geeklings only had the likes of Steve Urkel to look up to and that's not right (believe me, Jaleel White, when the geek revolution comes, you'll be the first one guillotined).

The fact that I'm about to become the father of my own little geek-spawn has led me to start looking around the current TV landscape, looking for appropriate geek role models. I was surprised to find so many...

I wonder what is funnier: kids swearing or kids being bleeped for swearing? We can find out this season on South Park (or just watch the movie). This year, the creators are making the uncensored versions of every show available for download on iTunes.

The 11th season premieres on Wednesday, March 7th at 10 pm. Comedy Central is holding off on making episodes available online until the Tuesday following the original air date-- so, a week later. This is probably because there are at least five opportunities to see episodes in reruns each week.

South Park co-creator Trey Parker paid a visit to comedian/magician Penn Jillette's radio show the other day, and you can listen to the entire show by clicking over to the PennRadio site. Don't wait too long, though, because they only list shows for the last few days, and there's no archive of past shows. Parker and Jillette talked about all the craziness that has centered around the show in the past year, but Penn also touched on something that often gets ignored in stories about the show, which is that beneath all the subversiveness and political incorrectness, the show can actually be very patriotic, and very human. Parker talks about Isaac Hayes leaving the show, and maintains that Hayes' constituents in the Scientology community had more to do with shaping the aftermath of Hayes' departure than anyone realizes. He also talks about people who have confronted him about the show, and reveals that often it's liberals, and not conservatives, who take issue with the show's subject matter.

Hell must've frozen over for some people last night when South Park was given its first Peabody award. The Daily Show host, and former Peabody winner, Jon Stewart played emcee at the University of Georgia event in New York. When introducing Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park, Stewart complimented them on their "ability to keep the show fresh and hilarious" after 10 seasons. Parker and Stone reportedly kept their acceptance speeches brief. Parker swore when talking about artistic responsibilities and Stone professed his love for fellow winner, Battlestar Galactica.

The University of Georgia gives out the awards for "distinguished acheivement and meritorious service". Also winning Peabodys were The Shield, Boston Legal, and NBC News for its Hurricane Katrina coverage (Brian Williams personally accepted).

ABC isn't saying what his response is, but the network does confirm that Diane Sawyer will ask Tom Cruise about the South Park controversy during her interview tonight on a special Primetime at 9pm. It is rumored that Cruise had an episode of the Comedy Central show pulled because of references to Scientology.

Cruise is going on the show as part of his media barrage for the upcoming Mission: Impossible III. Perhaps you've heard something about the film (of course, I joke but I'll be first in line to see it).

[via TV Tattle]

Unfortunately, the post title is not referring to episodes of the construction paper cartoon coming to the iTunes Music Store, which I still think that's a little ways out. Instead, this article explains the migration of the animation studio to new Apple Xserve arrays.

GEEK ALERT! "J.J. Franzen, technology supervisor at South Park Studios in Los Angeles, said the show was simply running out of storage space on its digital linear tape (DLT) library and direct-attached disk storage from Ciprico Inc., in Plymouth, Minn. So in May, a new linear tape open (LTO)-2 tape library from Exabyte Corp. in Boulder, Colo. and three Xserve RAID disk arrays from Apple Computer Inc. were installed."