The older I get the more I realize how much damage South Park did to us as a country. How it poisoned an entire generation into thinking that caring about anything or getting mad about important issues was stupid and embarrassing.
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I cringed at the "if Mrs. Garrison can be trans, I can be a dolphin" story line when it came out. So it's hard to chalk it up to not aging well. Otoh, they'd both sides some issues that absolutely didn't deserve it with some last minute dialogue.
So valuable to know that in every possible scenario both sides are equally crazy and the correct answer is always in the middle! No matter what! Don't question it!
Name climate-related disasters after
the creators.
If the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation ends, call it the Tre Parker Shutdown. Antarctic ice shelf melts? Why, that’s the Parker-Stone collapse.
So they sort-of apologized for ManBearPig. Fuck them. Tie climate change around them.
I think the creators realized this a little bit. There is a newer episode where ManBearPig (climate change) is real and they apologize to Al Gore. I've heard other people say that ironic distance and not caring is largely Gen X behavior.
Daria was a great show but I can see how it wasn’t for everyone. Daria was too “goth” for a mainstream audience even if she was just a bit emo. Honestly South Park feels like what you’d get if you mixed Daria with Beavis and Butt-Head.
I’m not trying to be a troll I swear but there’s so much of the show dedicated to the fact that she’s nowhere close to goth or emo. Also Daria is from Beavis and Butthead so not sure how South Park can be a mix.
If you take the heavy social commentary of Daria and the juvenile humor of B&B you get South Park.
Sure but all the ads for the show always made her out to be some sad girl who hated the world. MTV did a terrible job at marketing Daria. The show should be more important to the cultural zeitgeist.
Yeah I think there’s a lot of episodes that speak to Kyle or Stan having a Daria mindset and then throughout the events of the show get shaken out of it or even more pessimistic
The weird thing is a lot of South Park is inherently progressive. People focused on the weirdest shit from it and I'm sure short form video didn't help.
I spoke about this and got so many fanboys pushing back about how "they criticize everyone equally" and man, that's the fucking problem. They make people think everything is just a lulzy unimportant issue, don't get worked up, if your heart rate goes over 90 you must be triggered
I think about it so much, because there really was a shift. I was 13 when it came out and it was like going off a cliff, the way (mostly) boys in my class who had been kind and generous and pretty good kids just turned into apathetic “just joking” ghouls overnight, the damage continues to this day.
I was part of the problem! All through middle and high school and college I thought it was hilarious and also thought “they’re just joking about the really bad stuff, that’s the joke! They’re bigots and horrible! Cartman is the villain!” but no, it really desensitized us all to those “jokes”
there were two guys at my highschool that would constantly say antisemitic things to me because of South Park (i’m not Jewish i just have curly hair) until i beat the shit out of one them, and got suspended.
Same to this (but I am Jewish), I remember trying to tell them it made me uncomfortable to which of course they said “stop being such a Jew about it” >___>
There was something about it that made me hate it from the jump, I don’t pretend to have made that decision consciously, but I read some of my blog posts from back then and the tone is so wild, but it is so clearly a reaction to that vibe of “it’s embarrassing to be earnest about anything”
Because a lot of it is very “fuck you, I like this band, okay, so you better deal with it” like it’s aggressive from the jump, a defense mechanism to “haha you care about something, what a loser”
You're not even the problem demographic. The biggest fuckwit losers who support Trump and don't take adulting seriously are mostly Gen X over 50 and Baby Boomers. Millennials are much more likely to be involved in politics.
Only if you never returned to it and analyzed it. It's satire. That said I watched it too young and did accept it at surface value for a very long time.
How you going to blame the show and not the irresponsible parents who let their children watch it because it was animated. South Park was always intended for a mature audience. People who understood the sarcastic tone of the show. How it was poking the bear, lampooning reality. It was never for kids
Oh that existed way before South Park. It was the defense mechanism of an entire generation left alone to our own devices until the parents got off work. We often spent 2-4 hours a day completely unsupervised. We felt as if nobody cared about us. It’s 10 pm do you know where your kids are? Was real
That fair. Once it became the cash cow at Comedy Central the quality of the episodes went down. I thing that by the tenth season the show has lost what made it good to begin with. The proto South Park film “spirit of Christmas” was a funny take on the meaning of Christmas. Jesus or Santa.
The Manbearpig thing alone is CRAZY. When I finally realized that episode was about global warming and not just a weird nonsequitor, I felt like I was losing my goddamn mind. And I only realized that LONG after growing up and seeing how shitty that show really was!
Too few characters are allowed to unpack this, but as an Xer, I think cause and effect is being confused here. Shows like South Park resonated because they captured the angst and feelings that we had all been lied to and hoodwinked by the Boomers. It felt like a middle finger or protest.
Idk the entire movie is about how important free speech is and arguably this could extend to the show as a whole. Just because nobody was free from criticism in the show doesn’t mean nothing is worth caring for, it just means like in life we have to keep going no matter how absurd it is
I dunno man as an old Millennial I'm going to say it was probably actually extensive lead poisoning and bad/negligent parenting to older Gen X and the youngest Baby Boomers that made ppl stupid enough to take life advice from SOUTH PARK.
Agreed, it's pretty pathetic that a TV show could damage a whole generation. Be serious. Have some integrity and principles regardless of what's going on around you. Goodness, the fragility is sad.
Ahkchullay… If’s the people of today that make it and anything else embarrassing. They were just reflecting what exactly society as a whole did. Ad nauseam but accurate.
Yes! I thought I was the only one who recognized how just mean they were. Not funny or satirical, just mean-spirited. (You can be the former without being the latter)
I also have really strong memories of late Elementary to Middle School of people parroting what they said on South Park so I always associate it with horrific bullying.
I'm not saying Seth MacFarlane is a major lefty or anything, but Family Guy is not nihilist in the way that South Park is. FG has always done anti-reactionary material.
That's a fair point. But even Family Guys attempts to be progressive of always been at best lacking. Thinking specifically about the episode where Quagmire's dad transitions and McFarlane was talking about how she was portrayed so sympathetically when it very very much missed the mark.
The worst part is I think McFarlane actually thought this character would be "the most sympathetic trans character on television" and honestly didn't see what the problem was.
And that I think is really emblematic of that type of humor where they don't seem to understand that there's a difference between making fun of those in power and punching down. And that was very much punching down.
MacFarlane isn't as smart as he thinks he is, and his approach seems to be to use everything he thinks of. Thus the inaccuracy you note. American Dad, for example, is much more coherent because is not his show in the same way.
What's funny is if I recall correctly having not watched the show in years the "not as smart as he thinks he is" is the exact same thing that is leveraged by other character at Brian, who is basically his author insert.
Some of it was abrasive but I’ve always seen it as the opposite because the kids were always the sane ones and the ones caring about issues while the adults were idiots. Or pointing out hypocrisies in pop culture events. & Like a mirror to what was going on at the time of the episode
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the creators.
If the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation ends, call it the Tre Parker Shutdown. Antarctic ice shelf melts? Why, that’s the Parker-Stone collapse.
So they sort-of apologized for ManBearPig. Fuck them. Tie climate change around them.
South Park was a product of a counter-culture and attitude that already existed. Matt and Trey didn't rise from primordial ooze to poison our minds.
It was Gen X disillusionment reflected back at the world in cartoon.
Sure but all the ads for the show always made her out to be some sad girl who hated the world. MTV did a terrible job at marketing Daria. The show should be more important to the cultural zeitgeist.
I don't think I missed much.
And, if you let yourself be sucked up into it--fuck you--you have latched onto a tit that will NEVER help you understand what you need to know.
Reality is outside your reach.
That why the show blew up so big.
Media literacy should be taught in high school. More people might have understood the underlying messages
Tho...
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