"Cartman Gets an Anal Probe" is the series premiere of the American animated television series South Park. It originally aired on Comedy Central in the United States on August 13, 1997. The episode introduces child protagonists Eric Cartman, Kyle Broflovski, Stanley "Stan" Marsh and Kenneth "Kenny" McCormick, who attempt to rescue Kyle's adopted brother Ike from being abducted by aliens.
Part of a reaction to the culture wars of the 1990s in the United States, South Park is deliberately offensive. Much of the show's humor, and of "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe", arises from the juxtaposition of the seeming innocence of childhood and the violent, crude behavior exhibited by the main characters. At the time of the writing of the episode, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone did not yet have a series contract with Comedy Central. Short on money, they animated the episode using a paper-cutout stop-motion technique, similar to the short films that were the precursors to the series. "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe" remains the only South Park episode animated largely without the use of computer technology.
Despite South Park eventually rising to immense popularity and acclaim, initial reviews of the pilot were generally negative; critics singled out the gratuitous obscenity of the show for particular scorn. Regarding the amount of obscenity in the episode, Parker later commented that they felt "pressure" to live up to the earlier shorts which first made the duo popular. Critics also compared South Park unfavorably with what they felt were more complex, nuanced animated shows, such as The Simpsons and Beavis and Butt-Head.
Plot As Kyle Broflovski, Stan Marsh, Kenny McCormick, and Eric Cartman wait for the school bus, Kyle's young brother, Ike, tries to follow Kyle to school. Kyle tells Ike he cannot come to school with him. Cartman tells the boys about a dream he had the previous night about being abducted by aliens. The others try to convince him the events did happen and that the aliens are called "visitors", but Cartman refuses to believe them. Chef pulls up in his car and asks if the boys saw the alien spaceship the previous evening, confirming Cartman's "dream", and relays stories of alien anal probes (which Cartman denies he experienced throughout the episode). After Chef leaves, the school bus picks up the boys, and (looking out the back window) they watch in horror as the visitors abduct Ike. Kyle spends the rest of the episode attempting to rescue him.
At school, Cartman begins farting fire, and Kyle unsuccessfully tries to convince their teacher, Mr. Garrison, to excuse him from class to find his brother. When Chef learns that Kyle's brother was abducted and sees a machine emerge from Cartman's anus, he helps the boys escape from school by pulling the fire alarm. Once outside, Cartman reiterates that his abduction was only a dream, when suddenly he is hit by a beam that inexplicably causes him to begin singing and dancing to "I Love to Singa". Soon afterward, a spaceship appears. Kyle throws a stone and the spaceship fires back, propelling Kenny into the road. As he gets back up, he is trampled over by a herd of cows, but survives. A police car then runs Kenny over and kills him.
Stan and Kyle meet Wendy Testaburger at Stark's Pond, where she suggests using the machine lodged inside Cartman to contact the visitors. To lure them back, the children tie Cartman to a tree and, the next time he flatulates, a massive satellite dish emerges from his anus. The alien spaceship arrives and Ike jumps to safety once Kyle asks him to do an impression of "David Caruso's career". In the meantime, the visitors communicate with the cows in the area, having found them to be the most intelligent species on the planet. Cartman is again abducted by the aliens, but is returned to the bus stop the following day with pinkeye.
Background The origins of South Park date back to 1992, when Trey Parker and Matt Stone, then students at the University of Colorado, created a Christmas-related animated short commonly known as "Jesus vs. Frosty". The low-budget, crudely made animation featured prototypes for the main characters of South Park. Fox Broadcasting Company executive Brian Graden saw the film, and in 1995, he commissioned Parker and Stone to create a second short that he could send to his friends as a video Christmas card. Titled The Spirit of Christmas (also known as "Jesus vs. Santa"), the short more closely resembled the style of the later series. The video was popular and widely shared, both by duplication and over the Internet.
After the shorts began to generate interest for a possible television series, Fox hired Parker and Stone to develop a concept based on the shorts for the network. The duo conceived the series set in the Colorado town of South Park and revolving around the child characters Stan, Kyle, Kenny, and Cartman as main protagonists, and included a talking stool character named Mr. Hankey as one of the minor supporting characters. The inclusion of Mr. Hankey led to disputes between Fox and Parker and Stone, and further disagreements caused the duo to part ways with the network. Later, Comedy Central expressed interests in the series, and Parker and Stone created a pilot episode for the network.
South Park was part of a reaction to the United States culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, in which issues such as Murphy Brown's motherhood, Tinky Winky's sexuality, and the Simpsons' family values were extensively debated. The culture wars, and political correctness in particular, were driven by the belief that relativism was becoming more relevant to daily life, and thus what were perceived as "traditional" and reliable values were losing their place in American society. South Park, one scholar explains, "made a name for itself as rude, crude, vulgar, offensive, and potentially dangerous" within this debate about values. Its critics argued that Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny were poor role models for children while its supporters celebrated the show's defense of free speech.
Production
The pilot episode was written by creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the latter of whom served as director; it was made on a budget of $300,000. Similarly to Parker and Stone's Christmas shorts, the original pilot was animated entirely with traditional cut-paper stop-motion animation techniques. This laborious process involved creating hundreds of construction paper cutouts—including individual mouth shapes and many of the characters in several different sizes—and photographing every frame of the show with an overhead camera, to the dialogue that had been recorded earlier.Back cover. (Included with purchase of the following at Best Buy, USA: ) Assistants helped with the cutting and pasting of the cutouts, while the animation was primarily done by Parker, Stone and animation director Eric Stough. The episode took about three months to complete, with the animation done in a small room at Celluloid Studios in Denver, Colorado, during the summer of 1996. Additional animation techniques involved creating the starry night sky by putting holes into a black posterboard and illuminating it from behind, and having the pooling of Kenny's blood simulated by drawing an initial dot with a red marker pen, and drawing more to it with every frame. The characters who are not speaking rarely move, which was done to save time in the animation process.
The finished pilot was 28 minutes long, which was too long to air, as Parker and Stone did not realize that more time should be allowed for television commercials during the half-hour spot reserved for an episode on Comedy Central. In order to shorten the episode to 22 minutes, the creators cut out about ten minutes' worth of material and added back another three minutes in order to tie up the changed storyline. For example, in the original pilot, Cartman flatulates fire after some older kids feed him hot tamales, while in the shortened version, he does so because of the alien probe implanted inside him. Other scenes focused more heavily on the character Pip; the scene in the pilot where he is introduced was later reused for the series' fifth episode "An Elephant Makes Love to a Pig", in its original cutout animation form. The storyline additions were created with the use of computer animation, and all subsequent episodes of the series have been computer-animated. While the creators' aim was for the computer animation to visually simulate the cardboard cut-out animation, the techniques were not perfected until later in the series, and as a result, the two styles of animation are easily distinguishable in the pilot. When the episode was re-rendered in HD in 2009 along with all the other episodes made at that point, the computer animated segments were updated to resemble more closely to the original cut-out animation, and are harder to distinguish.
The idea for the town of South Park came from the real Colorado basin of the same name, where the creators said that folklore and news reports originated about "UFO sightings, and cattle mutilations, and Bigfoot sightings". Parker and Stone's original intentions were to have the alien presence feature more frequently in the plots of subsequent episodes, but eventually they decided against this, as they did not want the show to look like a parody of the popular television series The X-Files. However, the crew started hiding aliens in the background in many South Park episodes as Easter eggs for fans, a tradition that goes back to their first major collaboration, the 1993 independent film Cannibal! The Musical."Did You Notice?" section, "Visitors in Cannibal!" link In:
Regarding the language in the episode, Parker has said that they "felt the pressure to live up to Spirit of Christmas", which contains a lot of obscenities, and as a result, they "tried to push things ... maybe further than we should". In particular, Parker said that they felt the need "to put in dildo and every word we can get away with." In contrast, they allowed subsequent episodes to "be more natural", saying that those episodes are "more about bizarre happenings and making fun of things that are taboo [...] without just throwing a bunch of dirty words in there."
"Cartman Gets an Anal Probe" received poor results from test audiences, and Comedy Central executives were uncertain whether to order additional episodes of the show. However, as the two original Christmas shorts continued to produce Internet buzz, the network paid Parker and Stone to write one more episode. In writing "Weight Gain 4000", the duo sought to give the network an idea of how each episode could differ from the others. The network liked the script and agreed to commit to a series when Parker and Stone said they would not write another individual episode until the network signed off on a season of at least six episodes.
Themes
Describing the general tone of the show, Teri Fitsell of The New Zealand Herald explains that "South Park is a vicious social satire that works by spotlighting not the immorality of these kids but their amorality, and contrasting it with the conniving hypocrisy of the adults who surround them."Teri Fitsell, "Not in front of the children ...", The New Zealand Herald (July 8, 1999). LexisNexis . Retrieved April 30, 2009. Often compared to The Simpsons and King of the Hill, South Park, according to Tom Lappin of Scotland on Sunday, "has a truly malevolent streak that sets it apart" from these shows; he cites the repeated death of Kenny as an example.Tom Lappin, "Shock value", Scotland on Sunday (March 22, 1998). LexisNexis . Retrieved April 30, 2009.