South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut After 25 Years

Yo Ho, WeRCats here!

The Comedy Central show South Park has made a major impact being the antithesis of what constitutes pop culture and directly challenges social norms with highly intelligent satire, themes, and shocking-but-true counterpoints that have the audience think about what they have done to their own culture.

25 years ago, Trey Parker and Matt Stone were told by Paramount to make a full-length film for South Park called South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. Since they feared that the show will suck because of Season 2, Parker and Stone worked on the film to be a personal, fully invested musical. The film is modeled after the 1st Season episode “Death,” where Grandpa Marsh wants to die and Kyle’s mom Sheila wages war on Terrance and Philip for their “toilet humor.” This episode satirizes and attacks censorship and talks about the ethics and morality involving euthanasia.

The film itself advocates against censorship, satirizes the causes of war (people wanting to “clean up” freedom of expression to their exceptions), and the real-life notion that underaged kids want to go see a rated R film by sneaking in after buying a ticket to some other film.

At the time of release, there were many controversies regarding South Park either directly or indirectly: the Columbine Massacre that conservatives claimed happened because of shows and films like South Park, the reports of kids buying tickets to see Wild Wild West just to sneak in and see the South Park film, and famously, how the classic song “Blame Canada” was presented during the Oscars; it was performed memorably by Robin Williams. Parker and Stone were high on LSD when they went, but they also “sobered up” to a horrible reality: they knew they were to lose but not to Phil Collins’s “You’ll Be in My Heart” from Tarzan. Angered at this, the two South Park episodes “Cartman’s Silly Hate Crime 2000” and especially “Timmy 2000” addressed their grievances.

For a brief time, South Park: Bigger, Longer Uncut will be re-released in a few theaters on June 23 and June 26 to celebrate the film’s 25th anniversary. If you didn’t see this film when it first came out, try to see it in theaters now while you still can!