This month, on June 30th, marks the 20th anniversary of the critically acclaimed South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut. The movie was unlike any animated movie before it, and I don’t believe any animated film can compare to this day. Let’s look back at how Matt Stone and Trey Parker brought us this groundbreaking movie and the controversy around it.
The story of South Park is pretty well known. The fellas put together a short animated piece as a Christmas card known as “The Spirit of Christmas,” which was commissioned by Brian Graden, an executive from Fox, who had seen their original “Spirit of Christmas” short. Brian Graden’s short was passed all around Hollywood and became an early internet viral video, which led to Comedy Central coming to Parker and Stone to develop them into a series, South Park.
The network wasn’t sure how the show would do since the first episode tested poorly, so Comedy Central released the first 6 episodes in one night, The South Park Sleepover, and the show became an overnight phenomenon on August 3rd, 1997.
The pressure to make a movie based on South Park came down quickly on Parker and Stone, but they were up for the challenge. The two teamed up with writer Pam Brady and began working on a masterpiece of cinema. A musical cartoon on the scale seen during the Disney Renaissance while parodying censorship and the controversy that surrounded the show. The problems the movie faced with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) lead the movie the heavily lampoon the organization as the duo has become known to do.
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The movie features 12 original songs written by Trey Parker and Marc Shaiman. They were nominated for an Academy Award for best original song at the 72nd Academy Awards for the song “Blame Canada.” Parker knew it would get nominated all along.
The team used the same kind of technology used to give us the Jurassic Park dinosaurs that were all the rage at the time to animate the movie. This cut down on a lot of production time and allowed the animators to go in new directions they weren’t capable of doing the traditional way.
The MPAA and Paramount tried relentlessly to censor Parker and Stone in some way during the post-production of the movie. The trailers the studio made were wrong, the music videos they made were wrong, the studio even threatened to sue them after Stone stole the tape for the music video.
South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut had a budget of $21 million and grossed $83.1 million, the highest-grossing animated R-rated movie until Sausage Party came out. Though the film was successful, it did have its critics, mainly conservative family groups who found the film offensive, even if they didn’t see it. Don’t let them stop you from watching it now.