Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s animated series
South Park
got its start as a defiantly crude slice of counterculture, with the
shock value of potty-mouthed adolescents and the bashing of various
sacred cows. As it’s aged, though, it’s only gotten smarter and better,
surpassing The Simpsons as the best animated comedy on television several years ago, and holding onto that title with ease.
South Park’s
seventh season spanned March through December of 2003 — owing to Comedy
Central’s offbeat programming calendar and the show’s staggered
production schedule — and
includes a number of instant classics.
“Toilet Paper” offers up the series’ take on the classic middle school
prank, with Kyle overwhelmed with guilt after the fact, Officer
Barbrady hot on their trail and Cartman contemplating killing him so
that he doesn’t rat them out. “Lil’ Crime Stoppers,” meanwhile, finds
the kids on the other side of the law, as they start their own
detective agency. After returning a missing doll to a little girl, the
police department recognizes the boys’ efforts and officially names
them junior deputies, leading to an assignment to break up a meth lab.
“South Park Is Gay” assays the metrosexual craze, with Cartman, Stan
and Kenny falling victim to its sway; only Kyle doesn’t “feel” gay. Mr.
Garrison, meanwhile, accuses the guys from
Queer Eye of selling out.
The series really hits its stride late in the season, though. “Grey
Dawn” takes as its leaping-off point the real-life story of an elderly
man plowing through a Santa Monica farmer’s market in his car and
killing a number of people, and turns it on its end. When the same
happens in South Park, the town considers legislation to strip senior
citizens of their driver’s licenses. This leads to a mass gathering of
the elderly, and when the meeting breaks up,
the rest of the town
realizes they’ve created the circumstances for a catastrophic event —
all of the senior citizens on the road at the same time. “Butt Out”
makes the representatives from an anti-smoking advocacy group look like
such tools that Kyle and the kids take up smoking.
The wickedly clever
“All About Mormons” does for that religion what “Trapped in the Closet”
did for Scientology.
It’s
“Raisins,” though, that might be the most jointly hilarious and
astute offering here. After Wendy breaks up with Stan — through a
friend, of course — he’s utterly devastated. (“Why?” he plaintively
queries said friend. “I haven’t said anything to her for
weeks!”)
In an effort to cheer him up, Kyle and the gang take him to the titular
local chain restaurant known for chicken wings and prepubescent hot
girls. It doesn’t work — Stan instead joins the goth gang and wallows
in despair. Oblivious Butters, however, finds his heart set afire by
the casual touch and chirpy sociability of a waitress, and takes that
as a sign that she’s his girlfriend. Oblivious to the fact that she
only spends time with him at the restaurant, he proceeds to spend all
his allowance wooing her with tips.
DVD extras on this three-disc set — housed, like previous seasonal
releases, in expansive gatefold packaging in a nice cardboard slipcase
— consist of
mini-commentaries by Stone and Parker. Running only several
minutes apiece, these introductions contain a few
bon mots here
and there, such as when Parker reveals that the Mexican restaurant/fun
park at the center of “Casa Bonita,” where Cartman tricks Butters into
a bomb shelter so he can join Kyle on a birthday trip, is a real place
in Denver. They also acknowledge the razor’s edge dance the series
consistently engages in as far as the “political and religious shows
that some kids don’t find funny.” It’s precisely those episodes, I’d
argue, that make
South Park so subversively brilliant. That
said, a bit more behind-the-scenes material on just this very
interesting sort of balancing act would really make this set sing.
A (Show) B+ (Discs) 
