Cartman Gets an Anal Probe

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"Cartman Gets an Anal Probe"

"Cartman Gets an Anal Probe" is the first episode of the American animated television series South Park. It was originally broadcast on Comedy Central in the United States on August 13, 1997. The episode introduces child protagonists Eric Cartman, Kyle Broflovski, Stan Marsh and Kenny McCormick, who attempt to rescue Kyle's younger brother Ike from abduction by aliens.

At the time of the writing of the episode, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone did not yet have a series contract with Comedy Central, and Parker later commented that they felt "pressure" to live up to the internet shorts that first made them popular. Short on money, the duo animated the episode using cut paper stop motion techniques. As such, "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe" remains the only South Park episode animated without the use of computer technology.

Part of a reaction to the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s in the United States, South Park is deliberately offensive. Much of its humor, and of "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe", arises from the juxtaposition of the seeming innocence of childhood and the violent, crude behavior exhibited by the main characters. The episode also exemplifies the carnivalesque, which includes humor, bodily excess, linguistic games that challenge official discourse, and the inversion of social structures.

When the episode was first broadcast in Canada, "objectionable" material was cut; it was later restored in subsequent showings. Initial reviews of the episode were generally negative; critics singled out the gratuitous obscenity of the show for particular scorn and compared South Park unfavorably with what they felt were the more complex and nuanced The Simpsons and Beavis and Butthead.

Background

South Park began in 1992 when Trey Parker and Matt Stone, students at the University of Colorado, met in a film class. They created two Christmas-related animated shorts called "Jesus vs. Frosty" and "Jesus vs. Santa". The low-budget, crudely made Jesus vs. Frosty featured prototypes for the main characters of South Park. Fox Broadcasting Company (FOX) executive Brian Graden saw the film and in 1995 commissioned Parker and Stone to create a second short that he could send to his friends as a video Christmas card. Titled "Jesus vs. Santa", it resembled the style of the later series more closely.[1] The video was popular and widely shared, both by duplication and over the internet. After the shorts began to generate interest for a possible television series, Parker and Stone developed a concept based on the town of South Park and the characters Stan, Kyle, Kenny, and Cartman.[2] Later, when Comedy Central expressed interest in the series, Parker and Stone brought up the idea of a Mr. Hankey episode during negotiations with the network executives. Parker claimed he said during a meeting, "One thing we have to know before we really go any further: how do you feel about talking poo?" The executives were receptive to the idea,[3] which Parker said was one of the main reasons he and Stone decided to sign on with the channel.[4]

South Park was part of a reaction to the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s in the United States, in which issues such as Murphy Brown's motherhood, Tinky Winky's sexuality, and the Simpsons' family values were extensively debated. The culture wars, and political correctness in particular, were driven by the belief that relativism was becoming more relevant to daily life and thus that what were perceived as "traditional" and reliable values were losing their place in American society. South Park, one scholar explains, "made a name for itself as rude, crude, vulgar, offensive, and potentially dangerous" within this debate about values. Its critics argued that Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny were poor role models for children while its supporters celebrated the show's defense of free speech.[5]

Plot

As Kyle, Stan, Kenny, and Cartman wait for the school bus, Kyle's little brother, Ike comes up to them to try and follow them to school. Kyle tells Ike that he cannot come to school with him and Cartman says "Yeah, go home you little dildo." After Kenny explains what a dildo is, Kyle whacks Cartman in the face with Ike, knocking Cartman out. When he comes to, Cartman tells the boys about a dream he had the previous night about being abducted by aliens. The others try to convince him that the events did happen and that the aliens are called "visitors", but Cartman refuses to believe them. Chef pulls up in his car and asks if the boys saw the alien spaceship the previous evening, inadvertently confirming Cartman's "dream", and relays stories of alien anal probes (which throughout the episode Cartman denies he experienced). After Chef leaves, the school bus picks up the boys and they watch in horror as the "visitors" abduct Ike. Kyle spends the rest of the episode attempting to rescue him.

At school, Cartman begins to fart fire and Kyle unsuccessfully tries to convince his teacher Mr. Garrison to excuse him from class to find his brother. When Chef learns that Kyle's brother was abducted and sees a machine emerge from Cartman's anus, he helps the boys escape from school by pulling the fire alarm. Once they are outside, Cartman reiterates that his abduction was just a dream, when suddenly he is hit by a beam and starts singing and dancing. Soon afterward, a spaceship appears. Kyle throws a stone and the spaceship fires back, propelling Kenny into the road where he is run over by a herd of cows and a police car, killing him. This is the first time Stan and Kyle's famous lines "Oh my God! They killed Kenny! You bastards!" are heard.

Stan and Kyle meet Wendy at Stark's Pond and she suggests using the machine lodged inside of Cartman to contact the visitors. To lure them back, the children tie Cartman to a tree and, the next time he farts, a massive satellite dish emerges from his anus. The alien spaceship arrives and Ike jumps to safety. In the meantime, the visitors communicate with the cows in the area, having found them to be the most intelligent species on the planet. Cartman is again abducted by the aliens and returns to the bus stop the following day with pinkeye.

Production

See also: Development of South Park (season 1)
Two men sitting on chairs wearing jeans and hoodies.
Matt Stone and Trey Parker used cut paper stop motion animation over a three-and-a-half month period to create "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe".[6]

Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators of South Park, wrote "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe" and Parker directed; it was made on a budget of $300,000.[7] It received poor results from test audiences[2] and Comedy Central executives were uncertain whether to order additional episodes of the show. However, when the two original South Park shorts, "Jesus vs. Frosty" and "Jesus vs. Santa", began to produce internet buzz, the network paid Parker and Stone to write one more episode. In writing "Weight Gain 4000", the duo sought to give the network an idea of how each episode could differ from the others. The network liked the script and agreed to commit to a series when Parker and Stone said they would not write another individual episode until Comedy Central signed off on a season of at least six episodes.[2]

Parker has said that "In the first episode, we felt the pressure to live up to Spirit of Christmas, and tried to push things ... maybe further than we should". In contrast, he explains, "Subsequent episodes have been more about making fun of things that are taboo ... without just throwing a bunch of dirty words in there."[8] The pilot was originally 28 minutes long, but Parker and Stone had to rewrite and reshoot parts of it so that it would fit in the 22-minute slot on Comedy Central. For example, in the original pilot, Cartman farts fire because some older kids feed him hot tamales, while in the shortened version, he does so because of the alien probe implanted in him.[6]

"Cartman Gets an Anal Probe" is the only episode of South Park Parker and Stone animated completely with traditional cut paper stop motion animation techniques.[6] This laborious process took three-and-a-half months to complete; the characters who are not speaking rarely move, saving time in the animation process. Almost all subsequent episodes, including the new scenes made for the television pilot, were computer animated.[6]

Style and themes

File:CartmanAnalProbeSinga.ogg
Cartman, hit by a beam from the spaceship, sings "I Love to Singa". Cut paper stop motion animation is conservatively used: the non-speaking figures do not move.

Describing the general tone of the show, Teri Fitsell of The New Zealand Herald explains that "South Park is a vicious social satire that works by spotlighting not the immorality of these kids but their amorality, and contrasting it with the conniving hypocrisy of the adults who surround them."[9] Often compared to The Simpsons and King of the Hill, South Park, according to Tom Lappin of Scotland on Sunday, "has a truly malevolent streak that sets it apart" from these shows; he cites the repeated death of Kenny as an example.[10]

The humor of the show comes from the "disparity" between the "cute" appearance of the characters and their "crude" behavior.[11][12] However, Parker and Stone said in an early interview that the show's language is realistic. "There are so many shows where little kids are good and sweet, and it's just not real...Don't people remember what they were like in third grade? We were little bastards."[13] Frederic Biddle of The Boston Globe notes how the show "constantly plays on its grade-school aesthetic for shock value, with great success", arguing that at its height, it is "more a profane 'Peanuts' than a downsized 'Beavis and Butt-head.'" He points, for example, to Kenny, who symbolically represents the voiceless underclass, which is eliminated in each episode.[14] Claire Bickley of the Toronto Sun explains that "The show captures that mix of innocence and viciousness that can co-exist in kids that age", that "the boys are fascinated by bodily functions", and that they "mimic adult behavior and language". For example, Kyle instructs Stan and Wendy to "make sweet love down by the fire", a phrase he learns from Chef.[15] In a light-hearted study of the humor of flatulence, Jim Dawson explains how the rise of adult animation in the 1990s allowed television to indulge in such humor with The Ren and Stimpy Show, The Simpsons, and Beavis and Butthead. Beginning with "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe", South Park builds on this tradition.[16]

The episode employs what literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin calls the carnivalesque. As Ethan Thompson explains in his article, "Good Demo, Bad Taste: South Park as Carnivalesque Satire", the style consists of four crucial elements: humor, bodily excess, linguistic games that challenge official discourse, and the inversion of social structures. Cartman's body—his obesity and his inability to control his farting—exemplifies the grotesque. The boys swear throughout the episode, using words and phrases such as "fat ass" and "dildo", challenging the boundaries of appropriate language. Finally, the social structure of the town is inverted, as the episode focuses on the knowledge that the four boys have of the aliens as opposed to the ignorant and incompetent adults. Moreover, the aliens perceive the cows as more intelligent than the humans, inverting the species order.[17]

South Park tends to employ large-scale musical numbers in its episodes, often parodying 1930s cartoons. For example, Cartman sings part of "I Love to Singa", from the cartoon of the same name, when he is struck by a beam from the alien ship.[18]

Release and reception

The episode was broadcast for the first time at 10 p.m. EDT in the United States on August 13, 1997 on Comedy Central.[13] South Park was originally broadcast during prime time after Seinfeld on Canada's Global TV, with objectionable material cut from the show.[19] The "dildo" jokes were removed from the pilot as well as two scenes in which Kyle kicks his baby brother, Ike.[15] After complaints from viewers, the series was moved to midnight on October 17, 1997 and the deleted material was restored.[19] Almost a year later after its original air date, the episode was broadcast for the first time in Britain (outside of satellite television) on July 10, 1998 on Channel 4. A station representative said "It's for the audience coming back from the pub with a curry".[20] The episode was first released on video on May 5, 1998 as part of a the three-volume VHS set, which included introductions to each show by Parker and Stone.[21]

"Cartman Gets an Anal Probe" initially earned a Nielsen rating of 1.3, translating to 980,000 viewers, which is considered high for a cable program in the United States.[22] In April 2007, The New Zealand Herald called the first episode "a huge success",[23] however reviews at the time of the episode's broadcast were generally negative, most focusing on the low, obscene comedy. Bruce Fretts of Entertainment Weekly thought poorly of the writing and characters stating that "If only the kids' jokes were as fresh as their mouths" and "It might help if the South Park kids had personalities, but they're as one-dimensional as the show's cut-and-paste animation".[24] Tim Goodman of The San Francisco Examiner acknowledged that many viewers will find South Park "vile, rude, sick, potentially dangerous, childish and mean-spirited". He argued that viewers "have to come into 'South Park' with a bent for irony, sarcasm, anger and an understanding that cardboard cut-out animation of foul-mouthed third-graders is a tragically underused comic premise."[25]

Calling the series "sophomoric, gross, and unfunny," Hal Boedeker of the Orlando Sentinel believed that this episode "makes such a bad impression that it's hard to get on the show's strange wavelength."[26] Ann Hodges of the Houston Chronicle considered the show "made by and for childish grown-ups" and for "adults who enjoy kid shows".[27] Seeing the show as the inheritor of The Simpsons and Beavis and Butthead, Ginia Bellafante of Time noted its failure to cohere and considered the show "devoid of subtext".[28] Caryn James of The New York Times commented that the series "succeeds best in small touches" but "seems to have a future."[29] In a generally negative review of the first three episodes of the series, Tom Shales of The Washington Post, wrote that "Most of the alleged humor on the premiere is self-conscious and self-congratulatory in its vulgarity: flatulence jokes, repeated use of the word 'dildo' (in the literal as well as pejorative sense) and a general air of malicious unpleasantness."[30] In one of the few generally positive reviews, Eric Mink of the Daily News praised the South Park universe and the "distinct, interesting characters" within it. He singled out Cartman, calling him "the most vibrant of the bunch", describing him as "a bitter old man living in an 8-year-old's body".[31]

References

  1. ^ Kinney Littlefield, "Comedy Central scores with poop and circumstance", The Orange County Register (January 28, 1998).
  2. ^ a b c Trey Parker, Matt Stone (2003). South Park: The Complete First Season: "Weight Gain 4000" (CD). Comedy Central. {{cite AV media}}: |format= requires |url= (help)
  3. ^ Chris Vognar, "Brats entertainment: "South Park" creators potty hardy on Comedy Central show", The Dallas Morning News (February 1, 1998).
  4. ^ Trey Parker, Matt Stone (2003). South Park: The Complete First Season: "Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo" (CD). Comedy Central. {{cite AV media}}: |format= requires |url= (help)
  5. ^ Stephen Groening, "Cynicism and other Postideological Half Measures in South Park", Taking South Park Seriously, Ed. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Buffalo: SUNY Press, 2008), 113.
  6. ^ a b c d Trey Parker, Matt Stone. (2003). South Park: The Complete First Season: "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe" (Audio commentary) [CD]. Comedy Central.
  7. ^ Kinney Littlefield, "South Park is a Far-out Place to Play", AAP Newsfeed, (February 1, 1998). LexisNexis (subscription required). Retrieved April 30, 2009.
  8. ^ Eric Deggans, "A stroll in the park with a demented muse", St. Petersburg Times (August 13, 1997). LexisNexis (subscription required). Retrieved April 30, 2009.
  9. ^ Teri Fitsell, "Not in front of the children ...", The New Zealand Herald (July 8, 1999). LexisNexis (subscription required). Retrieved April 30, 2009.
  10. ^ Tom Lappin, "Shock value", Scotland on Sunday (March 22, 1998). LexisNexis (subscription required). Retrieved April 30, 2009.
  11. ^ Rick Martin, "'Peanuts' Gone Wrong", Newsweek (July 21, 1997). Retrieved April 30, 2009.
  12. ^ Brian Lowry, "Out of the mouths of babes...", Los Angeles Times (August 13, 1997). Retrieved 30 April 2009.
  13. ^ a b Rob Owen, "'South Park' is Sure to Make Parents Cringe", Times Union (August 12, 1997). Access World News (subscription required). Retrieved May 4, 2009.
  14. ^ Frederic M. Biddle, "'South Park' wickedly makes the grade", The Boston Globe (August 13, 1997). LexisNexis (subscription required). Retrieved April 30, 2009.
  15. ^ a b Claire Bickley, "Charlie Brown they ain't", Toronto Sun (September 25, 1997). LexisNexis (subscription required). Retrieved April 30, 2009.
  16. ^ Jim Dawson, Who Cut the Cheese? A Cultural History of the Fart (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1999), 129–30.
  17. ^ Ethan Thompson, "Good Demo, Bad Taste: South Park as Carnivalesque Satire". Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era. Eds. Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey P. Jones, and Ethan Thompson. (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 221–22. ISBN 978-0-8147-3199-4.
  18. ^ Daniel Goldmark, Tunes for 'toons:music and the Hollywood cartoon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 162.
  19. ^ a b Associated Press, "Midnight slot for adult cartoon show", The Gazette (October 10, 1997). LexisNexis (subscription required). Retrieved April 30, 2009.
  20. ^ "Cult Cartoon hits Screens", Birmingham Evening Mail (July 10, 1998). LexisNexis (subscription required). Retrieved April 30, 2009.
  21. ^ Staff, "Three Collectible Videos of Comedy Central's "South Park" Available for the First Time With Made-for- Video Footage Featuring Creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone", Business Wire (May 4, 1998). LexisNexis (subscription required). Retrieved April 30, 2009.
  22. ^ Toni Johnson-Woods, Blame Canada!: South Park and Popular Culture (New York: Continuum International, 2007), 6–8. ISBN 0-8264-1730-2.
  23. ^ Staff, "Controversial cartoon still on top", The New Zealand Herald (April 3, 2007). LexisNexis (subscription required). Retrieved April 30, 2009.
  24. ^ Bruce Fretts, "TV Review South Park", Entertainment Weekly (August 15, 1997). Retrieved April 30, 2009.
  25. ^ Tim Goodman, "'South Park': Comedy you can swear by", The San Francisco Examiner (August 11, 1997). Retrieved April 30, 2009.
  26. ^ Hal Boedeker, "Comedy Central's 'South Park' Series Takes Adult-Aimed Humor A Bit Too Far", Orlando Sentinel (August 13, 1997). Retrieved April 30, 2009.
  27. ^ Ann Hodges, "'South Park' for adults who haven't grown up", Houston Chronicle (August 13, 1997). Retrieved April 30, 2009.
  28. ^ Gina Bellafante, "The Next Generation", Time (August 18, 1997). Retrieved April 30, 2009.
  29. ^ James Caryn, "Cartoons About Children Feature Grown-Up Jokes", The New York Times (August 13, 1997). Retrieved April 30, 2009.
  30. ^ Tom Shales, "'South Park' Falls Flatulent", The Washington Post (August 13, 1997). LexisNexis (subscription required). Retrieved April 30, 2009.
  31. ^ Eric Mink, "'Toon's Gross Encounters are Hilarious TV", Daily News (August 13, 1997). LexisNexis (subscription required). Retrieved April 30, 2009.

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