'South Park's' cyber cohort
WEB SCOUT
The Internet and the TV show have long had a symbiotic relationship. Just ask 'South Park's' creators.
ON last week's episode of "South Park," residents of our favorite made-up mountain hamlet woke up to a new kind of horror: a townwide Internet outage. No e-mail, no WebMD.com to check rogue symptoms and, most harrowing of all, no Internet porn. Panic-stricken and Net-starved, Stan Marsh and his family lash their belongings to the roof of their SUV and head west -- "out Californee way" -- in hopes of finding enough bandwidth to survive.
As the best episodes of "South Park" do, "Over Logging" manages to be equal parts insightful, hysterical and disturbing. If the Internet did go down, it actually would be a federal disaster -- probably causing not only a depression and security crisis but also serious disruption to the psyche of a nation that can barely imagine unwired life -- even though we can remember it. Which leads to the other side of the scenario: How absurd it is that the way we live has been fundamentally altered in, like, the life span of "South Park."
When I asked co-creator Matt Stone about having a show that bridged the gap from the pre-Internet era to now, he knew what to say.
"We kind of did that on purpose."
Which is a good joke, but the thing is, there's some truth to it. From the beginning, Stone and co-creator Trey Parker have been medium-agnostic -- always saying they didn't give a fuss if the show played on a TV, a computer or a plastic Happy Meal wristwatch as long as fans were watching it. Back in 1997, that may have sounded anathema to Comedy Central and parent Viacom Inc., but now it looks like master augury, as the line between TV and the Internet becomes ever less distinct.
"South Park" has the Internet in its very DNA. Grainy videotapes of the show's 1995 prototype, "The Spirit of Christmas," which featured a vicious (and, back then, blasphemous) duel between Santa and Jesus, circulated with legendary speed around Hollywood, eventually winning Stone and Parker a deal with Comedy Central in 1997. "The Spirit" even made its way online -- though no journalists at the time even mentioned it. This was back when downloading a five-minute movie clip could take hours, even with a good connection. "I don't know if it was the first, but it was one of the first viral videos for sure," Stone said. "Yeah, the Internet's been really good to us."
