How South Park's Matt Stone Stays In Creative Touch With Pop Culture
"South Park" is one of those rare series that has not only endured for an extremely long time but has also managed to stay relevant in satirizing modern-day culture and society. Since debuting in 1997, "South Park" has become television's most unapologetically crude program, never fearing to poke fun at everyone and everything in a ridiculously unrestrained fashion.
Similarly, the show has made some notable jabs toward films, TV shows, and other realms of pop culture. From the episode "Mecha-Streisand" parodying Japanese kaiju movies to "Bebe's Boobs Destroy Society" doing the same for "The Silence of the Lambs" to "Return of the Fellowship of the Ring to the Two Towers" being an obvious play on Peter Jackson's trilogy, it seems that no piece of media is safe from the wrath of the cantankerous kids and their quiet, little mountain town.
And that doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of just how much "South Park" has made fun of over the years. Keeping up such a healthy diet of pop culture and media may seem like a tall task for the show's creative team, but for series co-creator Matt Stone, it's simply one of the perks of the job.
Stone and company are obsessed with movies
Creating an entire animated series is hard work enough, but finding a way to implement up-to-date pop culture references into that show is a whole other beast to contend with. But the team behind "South Park" have been doing just that and then some for nearly 30 years now, with the long-running adult animated series satirizing movies and shows with the same unflinching brutality reserved for real-life political and cultural figures.
And the team behind the Emmy-winning series can't get enough of doing so. In a 2021 interview with Bloomberg, "South Park" co-creator Matt Stone was asked how he stays in touch with the cultural landscape as he grows older. Stone responded, "I just turned 50 this year. In some ways we are out of touch. The one thing that unites us, whenever we come back into the writer's room, is just being unreasonably, emotionally interested in the movie industry. What movies were to us, and are now, seem so far apart, and there seems to be some deep cultural criticism of America nestled in it." He further elaborated that if they were to parody any film at that time, it would have been "Space Jam 2."
Thankfully for longtime fans of the iconic animated comedy series, "South Park" has shown no halt in its chaotic jeering at the world of pop culture.