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After 12 seasons, South Park has pretty well established its strengths and weaknesses, both of which are on display in the new Season 12 DVD box set. While there are a couple of clunkers, particularly the Ms. / Mr. Garrison-centric “Eek, a Penis!” and the Ms. Spears-skewering “Britney’s New Look,” most of the episodes play to the show’s prodigious strengths, this time with backup features to match.
In the last few years, Trey Parker and Matt Stone have garnered quite a bit of attention for the timeliness of their episodes, often skewering current events and trends within mere weeks of their occurrence. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the episode “About Last Night…,” which aired the day after the presidential election and contained excerpts of Obama’s victory speech. While the bulk of the episode was devoted to an Ocean’s 11-style jewelry heist led by Obama and McCain, airing a cartoon that directly quoted an event that took place less than 24 hours before was an astounding triumph.
Movie parodies provide quite a bit of inspiration this time around. Cartman‘s main story in “The China Problem” is vastly overshadowed by a B-plot involving the rest of the boys trying to come to terms with the new Indiana Jones film, viewing it as the rape of a beloved character. There are a couple of disturbingly hilarious scenes, featuring George Lucas and Steven Spielberg re-enacting famous movie assaults. “Super Fun Time” lampoons several ‘80s action movies, most notably “Die Hard,” while the two-part “Pandemic” takes on Cloverfield and other creature features, and “Elementary School Musical” deservedly rips Disney’s wildly popular series a new one.
This season also includes one of the series’ forays into other animation styles, with “Major Boobage,” a snarky homage to the early ‘80s feature film Heavy Metal, using similar rotoscoped and hand-drawn cel techniques. It’s a blast to watch for anyone familiar with the cult classic, even if the original wasn’t, as Parker and Stone note in the commentary, nearly as good as remembered.
Other episodes hit on the recent Writers Guild strike (“Canada Goes on Strike”), Internet addiction (“Over Logging”), society’s dwindling lack of interest in the AIDS threat (“Tonsil Trouble”), and schoolyard fights (“The Breast Cancer Show Ever”). Part of what makes South Park so much fun to watch is how wide a net it casts. As the creators have said before, either it’s all okay to make fun of, or none of it is.
Where this set stands out from previous collections, though, is in the special features. While the mini-commentaries or each episode return, they’re complemented by a making-of featurette for “Major Boobage” and “About Last Night…” The real standout is a lengthy, day-by-day breakdown of making “Super Fun Time,” illustrating how an entire episode comes together in the space of a single week.
With these peeks behind the curtain and a line-up of mostly strong episodes, Season 12 is a solid addition to any South Park collection, and a good reasoning for tuning in as Season 13 begins.
