What do you think of the early seasons of South Park...

What do you think of the early seasons of South Park? Matt and Trey have openly admitted that they are ashamed of just about everything before season 4, even advising people to throw away their DVDs of season 2. Are they really that bad? I kind of think they have a unique charm to them because it was at the time where the focus of the show was less about topical jokes about whatever was going on in the news and more about weird shit going on in the town.

They're not wrong. Some of the early season episodes are pretty wonky. They're still funny, but there's still a lot of kinks Trey and Matt haven't gotten out yet. It's around season 4 or season 5 when the show really finds its groove.

>Chickenlover
>Not great

I prefer the first 4 seasons over the past 2 or so seasons.

Original South Park is way better. The show was always supposed to be about real kids (who are assholes) doing dumb shit or going on adventures.

Most of the later seasons are REALLY Flanderized and it's become way too much radical centrist propoganda.

Context is key. I was in high school when the first season dropped, so I was kind of the target demographic. The impact of that show was crazy. Beavis and Butthead was off the air, Simpsons was still in its prime, but the consensus was KOTH and Futurama was a little too brainy. When those early SP episodes came out it felt like you were watching some sort of contraband. It sounds ridiculous, but just the idea of KIDS saying NAUGHTY WORDS in a CARTOON was like a revelation.

They also predated LOLSORANDOMXD humor, so a lot of that BARBZILLA stuff that seems super hacky now hit home in a big way at the time. Like, you absolutely couldn't pay me to watch any of that crap now, but at the time, if you were a teenager, it felt like they were making exactly the show you wanted to see.

Early seasons Good, Season 3 is the best of all the seasons even, it got more "sophisticated" later on, but i wouldn't say that is necessarily better though, just different, on purely technical level the early seasons are objectively worse for obvious reason, but that's also what gave it the charm, but i would take Seasons 1,2,3 over Seasons 18,19,20 any day.

>radical centrist

South Park was the Monty Python of animation. It played with your expectations and you could never predict it. The episodes, characters and quotes became extremely memorable as a result.

Post season 3 it became more structured and stopped being unique. Gradually the absurdist comedy became more about repeating something mildly interesting for the entire length of an episode.

This.

Pluse some of the episodes were legit funny even if they weren't muh topical satire. Matt and Trey need to relax.

According to Wikipedia, the reeason the show lost its supernatural focus was because they wanted to avoid being compared to X-Files, which is a really weird reason, especially considering that show went off the air decades ago.

Trey is obsessed with being super-special and not at all like other shows. Entire episodes have been dedicated to how south park is absolutely nothing like the simpsons or family guy when it totally is.

It's not even centrist though - South Park now, as it is, seems more to be championing the cause of not giving a fuck and being proud of that fact.

Before it at least tried to come across as having an idea that there needs to be a balance between two extremes, 'cause then you get caught up on either side and become like those they parodied on both sides of the aisle. It was trying to at least advocate for rationality, remind you not to get swept up in the sensationalistic aspects of either end. But now, (and looking back on it there's something of a subtle undercurrent in the earlier seasons of this as well) it's found some way of being just as bad as leaning on one end of the alignment pool over the other. They seem to want to say that you shouldn't get involved with anything, at all. Because that shows you care, and caring is in of itself a negative quality, something to be mocked in of itself, not for whether it's being done towards constructive or destructive ends. It just humps the middle ground to the point where it's just hanging off from it and does nothing. It's proud of that fact. It's championing the cause of just being complacent, as though just pointing out that things are fucked in general and that's it is deserving of praise or some kind of prize.

And yeah, for the most part its humor just doesn't hit hard anymore because you can get that sort of shit anywhere now.

>reeason

They just said they hated those seasons to be punk.

Really they treat their seasons like albums and that they reflect their personality/ attitude at the time.

Bitch it was a typo.

Name episodes of South Park where they champion that. Because even in episodes like Douche and Turd, they don't say you shouldn't vote, but that you should have the choice whether or not to vote, and that people goading you to vote for two people you don't like is stupid.

What episodes told people that caring is in of itself a negative quality?

Sounds to me you just didn't like the last season and rightfully so, but your just reaching for reasons to keep being angry.

Fuck these people who keep trying to peg the show into a bite-sized buzzword to be dismissed.

At this rate when Fractured But Whole comes out we'll be having people calling Matt and Trey "marveldrones" or some shit.

>but your just reaching

*but you're just reaching

>*but you're just reaching

but you're just reeaching

Trey and Matt said the only episode from the first three seasons they actually liked is Terrance and Phillip in Not Without My Anus, mainly because of how pissed off it made everyone.

Some of the best episodes are the earliest ones, I feel like they were funnier and they acted more like kids. New south park is fucking garbage, I'd say they lost their touch right after the guitar hero episode

That episode sucks though. All the Canada episodes are horrible.

The day the animation became less stiff and they stopped making everything look like construction paper, and inserting too many dramatic musical parts is the day the show went to crap.

Everything western always seems to have a direction it takes, for the better but most of the time worser.

Seasons 5 to 8 were the peak of the show.

I would say 5-11 but let's agree to disagree. However don't tell me season 10 wasn't based.

Speaking of season 10, it's interesting how Trey had so much anxiety before the airing of Make Love, Not Warcraft, thinking it was the worst episode he had ever done and proof that he had "lost it". It turned out to be an incredibly successful and well-received episode and revitalized interest in South Park (as well as moved WoW sales like mad).

I know he also said that Passion of the Christ episode was awful because he thought it got the beats all wrong, and that turned out to be a great episode. I think Trey just has a weird perspective on his own work.

Trust me, as a content creator myself, it's not easy to ignore the personal problems in even your most acclaimed works. After working for over 20 years, I think Trey's gotten significantly more picky over what makes "Good" South Park.

>radical centrist
>"WHY AREN'T YOU ON MY POLITICAL SPORTS TEAM REEEEEE-"

This. I can definitely relate to being ashamed of your own work - I myself am literally unable to read/watch things I make, even if other people loved them.

yeah, I remember in the commentary how Matt and Trey hated wasting so many good plots in the one episode "Marjorine". It comes with the territory of doing things in a short time frame.

Giving a third about this, even getting glowing reviews from someone else means fuck all if you notice a flaw yourself. My experience of it is in theater rather then comics though, so flaws can be shit like lingering on something even just a second to long or too little, it is easy to forget but performances have timelimits so every move, breath and footstep counts, even if those are things that reviewers arn't taking in account when reviewing, and that is not even going into potential backstage stuff, like wardrobe changes, and prop malfunction that the reviewers don't get to see, so it is hard to see their praise as valid even when/if you get it.

But this is also a advantage because it means you are continually trying to improve and it is that exact mentality that let them recognize just how bad S20 was themselves instead of doubling down and trying to keep the serialization, and honestly as bad as it was i can at least respect the attempt they made to try to resolve it anyway.

They're much better than some of the later seasons. At least the episodes were original concepts and not pulled-from-the-headlines garbage trying too hard to be current and make jokes about stuff that doesn't lend itself to comedy

I can echo this. You might make something that other people like, but if it really doesn't align with what you had in your mind, it can still feel pretty disappointing.

I wonder how many South Park episodes are virtually unwatchable now because the contemporary issues they attempted to satirize are no longer relevant.

A lot actually.

4-8 was the best seasons.

It starts earlier then one would think, "It hits the Fan" is probably the first one that really shows how the political climate changed since swearing really isn't big deal anymore, even if the moral turns out to be the reverse of what one would expect after Bigger Longer and Uncut, S5 also has "Osama bin Laden has Farty Pants" which well, kinda speaks for itself in the title. and "Super Best Friends" is basically the reverse since it is became too relevant and thus banned.

South park is not centrist. It clearly shows Trey and Matt's libertarian and cynical views. The episode where Big Gay Al is fired from being a Boy Scout leader, the Uber episode, and they rarely do muh both sides arguments. The biggest example I can think of right now is the Feeling Country.

The election episodes are that way because as libertarians they don't feel represented with America's two parties, so it is all the same to them.

>"It hits the Fan" is probably the first one that really shows how the political climate changed since swearing really isn't big deal anymore

I remember when it was a really big deal that they were allowed to say "shit" on TV, let alone so many times, yet now I hear it on TV pretty frequently.

Do recent episodes of South Park even bleep that word anymore? I'm behind several seasons.

They don't bleep shit.

>They don't bleep shit.

Do you mean they don't bleep the word shit, or they don't bleep anything?

Ironically, some of the episodes from the '90s have aged better than some of the ones from the 2010s.

this shows how obsessed they are with topical events. S1 and S2 are lightning in a bottle; pure gold. S3 is where they started topical shit (rainforest episode), then season 4 is where topical outnumbers standard episodes (hate crime, chef goes nanners, nambla, etc). by season 9 it was an entirely different show. so of course they'd hate seasons 1-3 since that was the true South Park and everything after is South Park: Current Events. they went from mocking "I learned something today" to actually being serious about it

I miss disconnected simple single episodes
Now every season tries to be some grandiose storyline that always keeps falling flat at the end, it was specially bad last season when it was extremely obvious they were banking on Trump to lose and had no idea what to when he actually won.