South Park Turns 20: How South Park Changed the Way I Thought About Cartoons

Four foul-mouthed third-graders made it OK for animation to appeal to adults.

By Ryan McCaffrey

In 1997, I was a high-school senior when one of my friends brought in a VHS cassette of a show taped off of Comedy Central the night before to one of our regular lunchtime get-togethers. We convened in our (very cool) history teacher’s classroom because she had a TV in there and, as my buddy said to our group, “You all have to see this.”

The show was South Park, and the dichotomy of the crude, childlike animation and the TV-MA-rated language coming out of the mouths of third-graders Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny – not to mention the weekly violent end that the latter would inevitably meet – hooked my friends and I instantly.

For me personally – and no doubt many other teens who’d left the cartoons of our childhood Saturday mornings behind – South Park also changed the way I thought about animated shows. Suddenly they had a present and a future in my life rather than just a past. And they also could speak to my adolescent and adult sense of humor rather than just the more innocent version from my youth.

Twenty years later it may be no Simpsons in the longevity department (what is, really?), but it’s not only still on the air, it’s as relevant today as ever and has evolved into one of media’s most pointed, balanced, and entertaining satires. It used to just be about the shock value, but show creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker were smart enough to know that shock value wears off after a while. And so South Park evolved. It became topical for a long time, with Stone and Parker turning around biting critiques of the world’s absurdities of the moment in shockingly short amounts of time.

Whether it was Saddam Hussein’s capture, Michael Richards’ stand-up comedy controversy, or some other news-story-of-the-week, South Park was there to lampoon it while still also making a really, really good point to boot. In more recent years, South Park serialized itself, as if Stone and Parker needed a new challenge. Maybe they did, for all I know. Point is, that worked too, with proof being when they somehow made last year’s Season 20 make sense after the results of the 2016 presidential election disrupted their expected story arc. I can’t wait to see how the show will reinvent itself next.

With all due respect to shows like Ren and Stimpy and countless anime – I’m by no means suggesting that South Park invented adult-themed animation – I do think it’s fair to argue that without South Park, I’m not sure we’d have ever gotten Family Guy, Bojack Horsemen, Rick and Morty, and dozens of others. And who knows if Stone and Parker ever would’ve been afforded the opportunity to create Team America, The Book of Mormon, and everything else they’ve entertained us with in their careers.

So thank you, South Park, for all the laughs over the years. Here’s to many more.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s Executive Editor of Previews and Xbox Guru-in-Chief.Follow him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan, catch him on Unlocked, and drop-ship him Taylor Ham sandwiches from New Jersey whenever possible.

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