My question to you guys here is :

Do you like watching South Park? If not, why?

I understand that the jokes in it can rub a lot of people the wrong way especially when they make fun of religious groups, race and current day first world problems.

Personally I’ve enjoyed the show ever since I watched earlier seasons on DVD years ago. I just find the humor and some of the moments give you that shock kind of laughter “They really put that in there??”

So what’s your view? Do you watch it? Do you hate it? You thought of watching it?

Let me know!

  • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    4 months ago

    Started strong, ending weak, like most things that stay on the air far beyond their Best By date.

    Matt and Trey got old and turned into the same kind of curmudgeons they used to mock.

    It happens to everyone, especially when they’ve had fame and money and stop being the punk rock weirdos in the biz. They aren’t the young upstarts pointing out the absurdity of the business anymore, they’re the financial lynchpin of Comedy Central. They’re as important to revenue as shit like the Daily Show. Whether they want to admit it to themselves or not, they’ve grown to become what they hated. As artists working for a big corporation, they represent The Industry.

    They don’t think of themselves at the rich corporate tools, but they are whether they think they are or not. The run-ins they’ve had with the staff at Casa Bonita speak to it as well. They’re not actually listening to their workers. Further, no word on whether the people at Casa Bonita are allowed to unionize. Wouldn’t be surprised if Matt and Trey are outright against unionization. “Why would you want to unionize when we’re offering $30 an hour?” Because at some point you can just change your mind about it, like you’ve already changed your mind on your employees once already.

    South Park’s real crime was to think they were being subversive and not understanding that Capital doesn’t give a fuck about morals or ethics or who gets made fun of, they only give a fuck about money. If being subversive and making fun of everyone makes money then they’ll back it to hell and back, social consequences be damned. They don’t care if your dumb show makes people think dumb shit, and you don’t get to absolve yourself for it by saying shit like “we think people shouldn’t get their politics from our cartoons.” Sorry, they do get their politics from your cartoon, dumbfucks. You don’t absolve yourself of it by handwaving it away like the people are the problem and not the product you’re creating.

    They don’t get to hide from the endless stream of copycat “adult” cartoons that all try to out-offend each other. They’re all trash and none of them have ever equaled what South Park originally brought to the table.

    EDIT: Also, they went from being the guys who put all the episodes of their show online, for free, on southpark dot com to the guys who made a deal with Paramount to lock everything behind a paywall. If you want to bitch about how the corporate suits are making PIRACY WORSE because they fail to see that access to their content is a SERVICE PROBLEM, then maybe you need to accept that Matt and Trey are some of those corporate suits.

    https://www.wired.com/2008/03/south-park-to-o/

    In an appropriately glib statement, Parker and Stone said they were inspired to start the site when they got “really sick of having to download our own show illegally all the time. So we gave ourselves a legal alternative.”

    Interesting how times change and now they’re simply money grubbing assholes that don’t care about locking content behind paywalls? Fuck em. They’re fucking corporate suits like anyone else now. Matt and Trey together have a wealth of over a billion dollars combined, but they don’t have enough money to put the episodes online for free anymore apparently… Suits.

    • Aggravationstation@feddit.uk
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      4 months ago

      Interesting how times change and now they’re simply money grubbing assholes that don’t care about locking content behind paywalls? Fuck em. They’re fucking corporate suits like anyone else now.

      Little strong, but hey, I’m with you ultimately.

      They don’t get to hide from the endless stream of copycat “adult” cartoons that all try to out-offend each other. They’re all trash and none of them have ever equaled what South Park originally brought to the table.

      Yea, a lot of newer adult animations like say Brickleberry and Crash Canyon really suck. But South Park is just a part of that story. The Filntstones, Jetsons, Simpsons, Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill all predated it and Family Guy, American Dad came out not long after.

      • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        4 months ago

        Little strong,

        I want to agree with you but the South Park IP is worth $1 billion and they made an absolute truckload of money selling the streaming rights to HBO/Paramount because in 1997 they included a clause in their contract that gives them 50% profits from “any non-television broadcast sources.” In other words: streaming. Every stream Matt and Trey are getting fully half the money. They’re literally fucking milking the living shit out of it.

        Viacom briefly attempted to argue their way out of the clause, but in the end, Parker and Stone were successful in not only owning a 50% cut of non-broadcast revenue but also in having the right to distribute the show digitally as they saw fit. Once they saw their show being pirated non-stop on YouTube, Matt and Trey decided it would be pointless to fight the pirates, so they put every single episode online for free, earning millions from the digital ad revenue. They really started to cash in with the advent of streaming services like Hulu. When Hulu paid $192 million for 4 years of rights to the back catalogue, Matt and Trey each earned around $50 million. At the time, is was the largest streaming deal in history. In 2019 when the deal was up, HBO Max obtained exclusive streaming rights in a deal that was rumored to be worth $500 million-$550 million.

        On August 5, 2021 it was revealed that Matt and Trey had signed a new six-year, $900 million contract with ViacomCBS. Under the deal Matt and Trey will produce six seasons of the show and 14 movies which will be exclusive to streaming service Paramount+.