'South Park' - it's a gas
Creative, crass, obsessed with bodily functions, cable's new cartoon, nurtured by the Net, has grown into a cult phenomenon
By Nathan Cobb, Globe Staff, 01/28/98
It's another Wednesday night. A dozen or so Boston University undergraduates, ages 19-24, have gathered in an off-campus apartment in Allston for their weekly TV fix. They chat quietly together during ''Beverly Hills, 90210'' and ''Party of Five,'' but when the clock strikes 10 they shush each other into silence. At the downbeat of the theme song to the next offering, they're ready to do some serious laughing.
''I'm going down to South Park, gonna have myself a time.... ''
Welcome to South Park the cult, a spinoff of ''South Park'' the show. The latter is the crudely animated tale of four semi-foulmouthed third graders and their bizarre Colorado neighbors, an edgy cable TV phenomenon that's - choose one or more - creative, crass, hilarious, tasteless, original, and offensive. The former is made up of God only knows how many faithful young fans, a flock that has purchased approximately $25 million worth of ''South Park'' T-shirts, stampedes to some 75 home-grown ''South Park'' sites on the World Wide Web, and can't get its hands on enough trivia about the five-month-old show, only nine episodes of which have so far been aired by Comedy Central. (A new batch starts next Wednesday. The show is repeated four times later in the week.)
''I can't explain the popularity. It's just funny, '' offers Debbie Sorocco, a 19-year-old BU sophomore who's perched on a sofa in the Allston apartment. ''My boyfriend gave me a tape of all nine shows for Christmas, and that's all I did during my vacation: sit in the house and watch it.''
Which means Sorocco viewed, among other things, an anal probe by aliens, the coming out of a gay dog, a bloated Ethiopian child named Starvin' Marvin, hunters blowing away their prey with artillery, a townwide bout of explosive diarrhea, and, of course, ''South Park'''s obsession with flatulence. Never forget that this is an entertainment world where the creators of ''South Park'' have been accused by the creators of ''The Ren & Stimpy Show,'' another animated departure from the norm, of ripping off their idea for talking feces.
Located in the animation universe somewhere between the moronic numbness of ''Beavis and Butt-head'' and the sharp satire of ''The Simpsons,'' ''SP'' draws a crowd of over 2 million Wednesday-night viewers that's roughly 80 percent 35-and-under and about 60 percent male. And these folks buy stuff. That $25 million worth of T-shirts, for example, represent more than 10 times the cost of making those first nine episodes of the show.
Newbury Comics, the 18-outlet pop culture chain that's based in Boston, sold some 6,000 ''SP'' T-shirts in December alone. ''That's like five times larger than a Pearl Jam or a Metallica,'' effuses Newbury Comics co-owner Mike Dreese, who also says he's been doing a nice business in ''SP'' bumper stickers (2,000 in the past month), refrigerator magnets, mugs, caps, baseball jerseys, and note cards. A soundtrack CD, computer game, poster, book, home videos, and dressier (read: women's) apparel are scheduled to follow.
''This is,'' Dreese declares of the growing ''South Park'' product line, ''the biggest pop-culture icon we've had in the past two or three years.''
Meanwhile, Comedy Central sounds almost as surprised by all this as you might be. ''Anyone who tells you this was expected would be lying,'' says Larry Lieberman, the network's vice president of strategic planning and new business development. ''You can't predict a phenomenon like this.''
Any ''South Park'' aficionado can spout the brief history of the show for you: how its two 20-something creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, initially concocted a five-minute video entitled ''The Spirit of Christmas,'' which starred the four ''South Park'' kids and featured Jesus Christ and Santa Claus fighting Mortal Kombat-style; how the video, commissioned as a Christmas card by a communications executive, became something of an underground legend, particularly on the Internet; and how more than one TV network turned down a series based on the short before ''South Park'' landed on Comedy Central, which makes its living off 18-to-39-year-old viewers.
Parkheads are people like Leana Lyons, a 21-year-old Brandeis senior who wouldn't be caught anywhere but in her Waltham apartment, stationed in front of her television set, on a Wednesday night. ''It's crass, yes, but it's fresher than almost anything else on TV,'' Lyons says of ''South Park.'' But what really hooks ''SP'' junkies is the fact that, as 21-year-old BU senior Matt Ossen puts it, ''`South Park' offends everybody, not just a certain group.'' Women, minorities, rednecks, TV evangelists, gays, old people, and assorted other populations take their hits.
''It's un-PC in a world that's gotten totally PC,'' says Ken Weingold, a 25-year-old Salem software engineer and hard-core fan of the show. ''The world has gotten so PC that you can't offend anyone. But `South Park' rags on everyone, and it does it equally.''
Weingold and a few of his co-workers sometimes watch a CD-ROM containing all the episodes of ''South Park,'' which they downloaded from one of the handful of Web sites that make them available. Therein lies perhaps the main reason ''SP'' has boomed so quickly. When ''The Simpsons'' debuted in 1987 (as a short on ''The Tracey Ullman Show''), and even when ''Beavis and Butt-head'' first came on the air in 1993, the Internet hadn't yet become a multimedia hangout where devotees of such non-mainstream productions could glom onto factoids, video clips, and each other. But when ''South Park'' hit the airwaves last August, word of ''The Spirit of Christmas'' had already spread via the Internet, and an audience was waiting. (One Comedy Central executive says that even a bootlegged copy of the show's unaired pilot episode, to which only a handful of network executives had access, turned up on line.)
The ''South Park'' crowd remains very much wired, using the Internet to pore over sound files, video clips, show scripts, games, press releases, character bios, theme song lyrics, and whatever else they can unearth. Inquiring minds go on line because they want to know: Are Stan and Kyle the same voice? (No.) Is George Clooney really the voice of Sparky the dog? (Yes.) Are Cheesy Poofs, Cartman's favorite food, real? (No.) Does Kenny die in every episode? (All but one.) The creator of the most popular on-line repository for such minutiae this side of Comedy Central's own Web site is Taison Tan, a 21-year-old senior at the California Institute of Technology. Tan says he spends a couple of hours a day updating his South Park Information Center, an on-line warehouse that has made him something of a ''South Park'' figure himself. ''I get about 10,000 visitors a day,'' he says proudly.
But here's another question for fans of ''South Park'' to ponder: If there are enough of you out there to buy $25 million worth of T-shirts, are you still a cult? Tan isn't sure. ''It's definitely becoming a mainstream thing now,'' he says of ''SP.'' ''It used to be people would ask you, `What's that T-shirt you're wearing?' Now everybody knows, and everybody wants one.''
This story ran on page D01 of the Boston Globe on 01/28/98. � Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company.
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