Although South Park makes fun of everything and everyone, it is still quite striking to see one of the show’s funniest festive specials mock its own origins. The wait for South Park season 27’s release date has been unusually long, but there is a justification for this. South Park’s co-creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone told VanityFair that they didn’t have any fresh, funny satirical takes on the 2024 election, so they opted to sit out the news cycle and pick up again in 2025. This might have been a little disappointing, but it wasn’t unheard of.
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South Park’s Most Recent Thanksgiving Episode Set Up Its Biggest Change In Decades
South Park’s most recent Thanksgiving episode aired in 2013 and the outing went on to reshape the show’s style for the five seasons that followed.
South Park’s creators centered numerous episodes around their real-life creative struggles. The premise of season 8, episode 11, “Quest for Ratings,” came from the pair running out of ideas for the show while working on Team America: World Police, while season 15, episode 7, “You’re Getting Old,” was a moving acknowledgment of the show’s changing style and tone. It remains to be seen whether South Park season 27’s Donald Trump parody will reference the show’s creators running out of ideas for political satire, but one classic Christmas special bodes well in this regard.
South Park’s Season 4 Christmas Special Mocked “The Spirit of Christmas”
The Show Began Life As An Animated Christmas E-Card
Season 4, episode 17, “A Very Crappy Christmas,” sees the South Park boys create a show that is suspiciously similar to South Park in a ribald parody of the show’s real-life inception. South Park originated from a short film that Stone and Parker made in 1992 and later remade in 1995, entitled “The Spirit of Christmas.” Both versions of the short featured Santa Claus doing battle with Jesus Christ, but it was the second, more polished effort that became one of the internet’s earliest viral videos in 1995. A phenomenally popular e-card, “The Spirit of Christmas” spawned South Park.
“The Spirit of Christmas” led to Comedy Central picking up
South Park
’s pilot in 1997.
The show’s tasteless humor, plentiful gore and swearing, and social satire are evident even in this early short, but everything else is a little unfamiliar. Although most of the gang appears and Kenny even gets killed, the voices of the main characters are notably different, and their personalities are not yet well-defined. Although later South Park Christmas specials would be a lot more polished and slick, “The Spirit of Christmas” still led to Comedy Central picking up South Park’s pilot in 1997. This event is hilariously parodied in “A Very Crappy Christmas” by the gang’s short film.
“A Very Crappy Christmas” Shows How Much South Park Changed
Everything From Cartman’s Voice To South Park’s Animation Is Different
In “A Very Crappy Christmas,” Mr. Hankey fails to show up and remind everyone about the spirit of Christmas as he had done in prior years. Taking matters into their own hands, the South Park boys set about making a Christmas special to remind the townspeople of the reason for the season. Of course, their special is titled “The Spirit of Christmas” and made using cut-out animation, and the clips of the short that viewers see in the episode’s ending are taken directly from Stone and Parker’s second short.
However, South Park’s Christmas episode doesn’t stop there. South Park mocked its own production process by pointing out the inefficiency and difficulty of working with cut-out animation and having Stan dub Cartman’s voice, a nod to the character’s changing voice between the short and the series proper. Stan and Kyle also send the semifinished short to South Korea so that they don’t have to complete the animation themselves, a gag about the industry’s reliance on labor from this market. In doing so, South Park pointed out just how many changes the show made between the original short and season 4.
“A Very Crappy Christmas” Also Parodied South Park’s First Christmas Special
Mr. Hankey Returned For A Brutal Reunion
As if mocking the show’s humble origins weren’t enough, South Park also spoofed its first Christmas episode in “A Very Crappy Christmas.” In season 1, episode 9, the infamous “Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo,” Kyle met a talking turd who helpfully reminded him and the rest of South Park about the meaning of Christmas after Kyle’s Judaism left him feeling left out during the holiday. “A Very Crappy Christmas” revealed that Mr. Hankey had fallen on hard times since his series debut.
Even South Park’s own earlier Christmas episodes aren’t safe from the show’s satirical barbs.
From his dispirited children to his alcoholic wife, Mr. Hankey’s life is in a dark place when “A Very Crappy Christmas” begins. Of course, by the episode’s ending, everything has been solved, but the initial gag is a hilarious reminder that even South Park’s own earlier Christmas episodes aren’t safe from the show’s satirical barbs. In the pitiless world of South Park, even the show’s origins and its earlier yuletide episodes can expect to be ruthlessly mocked for the sake of some festive fun.
Source: VanityFair