Does anyone else miss the vibe of South Park's first couple of seasons...

Does anyone else miss the vibe of South Park's first couple of seasons? I'm not going to say those episodes are the best ones or anything, and I'm well aware that Matt and Trey want to distance themselves from them, but I kinda miss when the show had a surreal edge to it. In some ways, it was almost like a sci-fi/supernatural comedy, and the plot was mainly about just really bizarre things happening in South Park as opposed to being about whatever news story happened that week.

Does anyone know what I mean?

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yea i get what you mean, especially with episodes like under pants gnomes or that one Y2K episode with Jesus. Those surreal ass episodes are definitely classics, but the show easily could've gone stale real quickly if they stayed with the sci-fi elements in every episode.

Nope.

The show would've gotten stale sure but now that this "current event of the week" is getting old quick--and desu I don't want to be reminded of current events in the real world when I watch South Park whether or not they're taking "my side"--maybe we could have more scifi/surreal elements again next season
Wishful thinking I know

I do. I wish it would return to tv and movie parodies and more off the wall episodic bullshit.

Definitely. This "LOL literally Drumpf" shit has REALLY gotten stale. The Garrison episodes are pretty much unwatchable. I hope Trey and Matt try something new for season 22.

I get what you mean.
Coming from someone who likes south park, some times it just doesn't age well. Not really in a mean way, that's just what happens when you write an episode about the news of the week. Modern south park feels like a snapshot or photo of the world at the time the episode airs, but these older episodes feel more timeless in way, even if they're "worse".

> matt and trey want to distance themselves from them

It's completely understandable that you'd want to distance yourself from juvenille plots about anal probes and move onto more mature ideas like Wario raping Strawberry Shortcake, trans women's testicles being donated to athlete cartilage implants, and characters named PC Principle.

We've truly come so far.

South Park has become bland. It's opinions are mainstream and not challenging in any way. They've gotten up their own ass, like they promised they never would.

Both of the games had tons of stuff like this though.

>not liking newer episodes

literally redit the opinion

There are things I do like about the new episodes.
I like the continuity.
But I don't like how current events are at the forefront.
Keep the continuity but give us more original stories again that aren't rooted in what's going on in the real world.
And cut out the focus on the adults.

Yeah the first season of South Park was amazing back in the day. It was the funniest most popular shit.

>stories again that aren't rooted in what's going on in the real world.

but south park is like that since the beginning

too bad they completely run out of ideas after it and season 2 is the worst one

Season 1 is literally just Twin Peaks: The Animated Series

There was the occasional episode, like Mechastreisand or Pink Eye that didn't focus as much on current events or trends and leaned much more heavily on pop culture parody. They may have had those elements as an aside, but such episodes were really more about being absurd, insulting, or just ridiculous. That said, such episodes were the minority even early on. Most episodes touched on something relevant to the day in more than just a coincidental way. But to say there wasn't a clear difference in the way such things are prioritized would still be disingenuous. South Park is MUCH more on message these days, and making a statement is just as if not more important than the joke.

lmfao. trey and matt have their heads stuck so far up their butts sometimes. they seemed to realize that south park was just a silly comedy early on, but after the film, they actually started believing they are intellectuals with completely mindblowing insights on everything that is happening in the world, and that they totally need to give their opinions on everything. the episodes they make fun of family guy are two of the funniest ones for me, because they criticized family guy for the exact same kind of shit they were doing themselves. but when they do, of course it's totally smart and awesome.

they should stop believing in the meme that they are smart social critics and just stick with the randumb humour

tell me: do you think that if hillary x drumpf had happened in 2004 they would have handled it like they handled it now?

You're right but I didn't mind how similar the premise was to X Files or Twin Peaks. It's a shame that M&T cared about the similarities, which I think they admitted was the case. I think such concerns are unimportant and limiting. I hope they do whatever is funny and not worry about that at all.

Season two is pretty fucking bad but it picked back up during season 3.

No. But I think it would have been focused on more than Bush and Kerry, who they clearly saw as boring generic candidates not even worth naming.

Drumpf isn't even a focus of the episodes, it's LOL literally Randy!" that's pissing me off.

I meant the dumb arc that was going on in the background with Mr.Garrison during season 21.

>122 robo bebes
>team has no more left cause another dude was also requesting her
>gonna need to scumbag teamhop in order to finish it

god damn it

Nani the fuck?

His transition to becoming Trump in season 19 was pretty funny, but afterwards the joke was really run into the ground. I thought Matt and Trey were better than to reuse the same joke for three seasons straight.
No, we're not counting Kenny dying

No. I miss the vibe of seasons 5 through 8.

But they at least stopped with Kenny dying and gave him a little more depth with Mysterion--they actually made him feel more like a main character
Garrison never was so the joke with him and how dragged out it is even worse imo

With the way Splatty Tomato ended, it really feels like they're banking on an impeachment before or during s22.
Or that one user was right about them wanting to kill Garrison off in that episode and the talk about killing the president was a tongue in cheek reference to CC stopping them.

They can't honestly find Garrison-Trump that funny, right?

Garrison's always been Trey and Matt's pet character because at the beginning, he was the only character going through arcs and personal development. Like outing him as gay, revealing that Mr. Hat was him being insane, booting him to teaching pre-school, bringing him back to teaching the main kids but giving him a boyfriend, making him a woman, making her a lesbian, making him a man, and now making him president. Garrison's the character that Trey and Matt can do anything with without it feeling out of character. He's their Captain Hero, for better or worse.

im a big south park fan
it pains me to hear that matt & trey dont like their first few seasons
its nostalgia but i was first introduced to south park by my older cousins via recorded vhs they had like the whole 1st season and it was the best
plus the older video games like south park 64 and chef's love shack

I like them but they couldn't keep that going forever. 20 seasons of that style would get old very fast.

Fair enough. Everything he's done as president has been entirely in-character, even when he was a blatant 1:1 copy with stuff like with the twitter posts.
The annoying thing is how much focus he's been getting for the last few seasons despite never being particularly funny. Even with all of his past phases and arcs, his issues only got about one or two episodes per season and were irrelevant for the rest of the time.

I really do prefer the older episodes.

Cartman was an obnoxious and rude kid who was still enjoyable, always getting what he deserved, and not a bloodthirsty sociopath with the biggest plot armor of all time.

Matt and Trey weren't fishing for Academy Awards by trying to shoehorn obvious social commentary. Believe it or not, I actually respect Family Guy more than SP or The Simpsons, because the team behind FG knows their show is garbage that only exists to get a quick laugh out of their audience, unlike the other two who got recognized by film snobs and now go out of their way to put in DA FEELS, commentary, parody and mature themes to get accolades from Hollywood yuppies.

Both the children and the adults were dumb, now the children have the minds of adult straightmen and the adults are now overly stupid.

Bring me back my poorly animated show where potty-mouthed children go on adventures.

I only heard this from some user on Sup Forums so take this with the tiniest grain of salt, but I heard that Trey and Matt wanted to move away from the political stuff but Comedy Central forced them to put it in.

>because the team behind FG knows their show is garbage that only exists to get a quick laugh out of their audience
And yet we get episodes like Brian & Stewie, that one with Quagmire's sister, and the recent one with the therapist.

Which are the exception, not the norm.

There are way more episodes of South Park and The Simpsons, if not all of them, that try to do that.

>Family Guy
>no obnoxious social commentary

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I heard they moved away from the supernatural elements because they didn't want to be compared to X-Files, which was still airing at the time. That seems weird to me because I doubt anyone would have compared the two.

[citation needed]

The first 2 seasons were funny but kind of rough, seasons 3 through 8 were fuckin PRIME though. I always liked the topical stuff they did but now that that's all they do the show is really suffering

South Park's been putting messages and social commentary in since season 1 though. Big Gay Al's Big Gay Boat Ride was actually groundbreaking for its time because "it's okay to be gay" aesops were still taboo on TV.

As for the increased focus on that stuff, Matt and Trey said Columbine is what inspired them to become more political with the show.

But they clearly know how the public feels about that, right? I mean, everywhere you can find opinions on the last seasons, most people agree on how it sucks and is definitely not the South Park people love and hate since the beginning.

A lot of the more visible opinions nowadays were in the older episodes, they're just more subtle.
I think it ties into the whole "social responsibility" thing Matt and Trey talked about post-Columbine. There were many kids who couldn't differentiate satire from the serious messages and grew up to be unironic Cartmans.

One thing that stood out to me from s21 was Stan and Kyle shutting down Heidi's complaints about the special ed kids by saying they were their friends and their projects were cool. The show has always treated the disabled kids as friends and as equals to the other kids despite their differences, but a lot of people mistake the cripple jokes for genuine discrimination against disabled people and either get offended or start bullying real disabled children. That one scene felt like them going out of their way to reiterate what should've been obvious.

The only thing I hate about new SP is detailing

SP is supposed to look like shit

it's like classic Lego vs new Lego

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Yeah, that bugs me too. I think the first 8 seasons or so were my favorite. Show started to go down seriously though after Chef left.

exactly, the show could have stayed good then ended

Season 3 might be my favourite season honestly, especially if you include the movie

t. triggered christcuck

I was personally annoyed with how many stupid people interpreted Cartman's prejudice against gingers as being the right line of thinking, which resulted in kids bullying redheaded kids for no reason other than being a "ginger." The episodes were supposed to play into how ridiculous Cartman's prejudices were, you weren't supposed to agree with him.

I have red hair and I found the ginger episodes funny, but I don't think it's cool how many people took the wrong message from them and actually bullied and even physically harmed kids for having red hair.

Well that's a problem. The moment you feel like you have to apologize is the moment you've lost your edge. Now they just do ripped from the headlines stories but add people dying or cussing and whoa hey look at this great political commentary! It does nothing subversive anymore and instead is yet another piece of media parroting the same opinions as 90% of the rest of the media.

Hi Seth

eh im an edgetheist but "lol lets burn the bible" just makes you look like a faggot

The reason the aliens killed the cows was funnier in the unaired pilot than in the final version: making a BBQ instead of "lol we messed up."

It's not really apologising, it's making their stance clear to people who missed the points.

one thing i miss most from the early days was Pip
while Butters definitely was the better punching bag,i really wish they never killed him off

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Absolutely, and I think it's a total mistake on Parker and Stone's part to cut them off from those roots. They (or perhaps just Trey as he's the talent) got too wound into the very celebrity world they disrespected and now see it as "too crude" when that was the entirely fucking point.

Recent South Park (I remember there being a distinct turning point sometime around the late 00's) is an aesthetic trainwreck and stinks of onanism.

Classic mistake of humble talent making it big, getting swarmed by the idiot caste, and having their brains massaged by a warped perspective. They come away thinking they're geniuses when they're simply not, and that's where they end up as mouthpieces.

Didn't Matt and Trey say they wanted season 21 to be a return to form?

What happened?

Didn't Mr. Hat drive a truck into the jail?

That's where you're wrong bucko, FG is shitlib central in between crassgags. "Muh shocking" isn't inherently funny. (this is true for late Simpsons and South Park as well)

Absolutely this, it's aesthetic horror. Simpsons suffered from this as well when it started rendering Celebs and "new attractive female of week" completely differently from the townsfolk.

> south park 64
Is irredeemable. Sorry, user, you may be nostalgic for it, but it's one of the worst games on the system.

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>There were many kids who couldn't differentiate satire from the serious messages and grew up to be unironic Cartmans.
>a lot of people mistake the cripple jokes for genuine discrimination against disabled people and either get offended or start bullying real disabled children.
Is that so? This type of thing is the number one justification given for imposing "moral standards" on television programming and especially on animation, a favorite with both progressives and conservatives, but does the world really work that way?

If a show produces unironic Cartmans, it's a sign that Cartman resonates with people and carries an underlying truth to the human condition. When creators react with horror to the consequences of their creation, they're really reacting with horror at themselves, seeing that they contain within themselves the thing they believe is evil.

>When the Cartman of your class wanted to fuck you
>But you hated his guts
>Actually like Cartman the character

I don't know, user, I wouldn't put a lot of emphasis on the whole "contain within themselves" thing. When you look at it closely, creativity is more transforming what you get from the outside into your work than digging up material from the depths of your soul or whatever. You create by reacting to stimuli.

This is why early South Park is the way it is. It came from a different era. The Web was young at the time, and things felt topical for longer. You could afford to satirize yesterday's news. Flash animation hadn't made crude and violent cartoons banal. Today's South Park feels like it's made to compete with clickbait.

>You create by reacting to stimuli
There are two kinds of creativity though user: reactive and spontaneous

Reactive creatives take what they know around them or look for inspiration in real life
Spontaneous creatives don't--not to say all of their work comes from the well of their tortured soul but they don't have to have inspiration from the real world.

It's both and neither. You reflect upon the world around you, and attempt to use the weird and novel things that occur in your lived experience to express a genuine feeling. In the process, you end up discovering things about yourself.

Early South Park is the way it was because it was made by two irreverent and talented young men. The artstyle, humour, plotlines, the lot are all downstream from that creative origin. You can totally get that today, but it wouldn't be a TV show. It'd be flash or youtube business. Trey and Matt suffered from getting into TV at the point when the format got sucked up its own arse in the process of becoming a self-justifying legacy format. It could've been different if Trey and Matt pursued the internet angle further.

Whose theory is that?

Personal theory from my own experience
Just my opinion though user

Nah im more of a season 4 and onwards kinda guy

Season 1-3 wasnt that great imo

"Moral Standards" would be relevant if the show was entirely unironic. The problem is that the show tries to spread messages (some progressive and others conservative) through a blend of blatant points and satire but apparently wasn't clear enough for conservatives or progressives.

I personally think the kids who grew up like Cartman were already assholes if their first instinct was to use the show's jokes to bully others.

Heidi and Trump. Easy.

I'm not that user, but thanks for noticing that I lurk here. But sadly there's not much else to do since Horus locked me in Nut's basement.

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Get out of there and help me bully Apo m8

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I know that Horus will beat my ass, but okay!

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The only ep I like was where Cartman made that kiss eat his own parents over $5 he got conned out of and how that episode became canon

I dunno, Pip always felt out of place to me. Kinda like Matt and Trey watched the Simpsons and figured they needed a Martin in their show too.

It's not a good game by any means, but I have fond memories of it. My brothers and I would play the multiplayer to mix things up when we were bored with Goldeneye. Was pretty fun actually, and the alien dancing gun was neat weapon.
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