Deleted South Park Scenes Left On The Cutting Room Floor

After more than 25 years, "South Park" creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone still manage to consistently deliver their heady mix of toilet humor, absurdism, and social commentary — no small feat considering that most episodes are written and produced from start to finish in under a week. The sped-up timeline — demonstrated in the Comedy Central documentary "6 Days to Air" – means that they're under constant pressure to keep things moving along in the process.

But not everything can make the final cut for an episode. Sometimes a story changes out of narrative necessity or it just doesn't fit in the show's 22-minute runtime. Occasionally, content doesn't get past the network censors — though this happens less frequently than you might think for a show that pushes the limits as much as "South Park" does. In the hundreds of "South Park" episodes to date, loads of footage hasn't made it to the final episodes, but fortunately for diehard fans, many of them do make it onto the DVD releases. From serious celeb burns to abandoned alternate endings, these are a few of fans' favorite deleted "South Park" scenes.

The first part of the two-part Season 22 finale, "Unfulfilled" imagines a world where South Park is now a company town for an Amazon fulfillment center. As expressed in their DVD commentary for the episode, Trey Parker and Matt Stone were struck by how ubiquitous Amazon had become in everyone's lives as the company was very publicly looking for a new city to establish headquarters in. To the "South Park" duo, the term "fulfillment center" had an ironic quality, with Stone emphasizing, "That's what it obviously isn't." At the same time, they were acutely aware of how addicted many consumers — including themselves — are to purchasing from Amazon.

Setting out to portray the — in their words — gigantic and dehumanizing nature of Amazon's facilities, they created a version of Jeff Bezos inspired by the egg-headed Talosian aliens from the "Star Trek" episode "The Menagerie." This highly exaggerated representation of Bezos is a telepathic, single-minded creature focused only on fulfilling customers' needs. Meanwhile, the townspeople are trapped in a hellish cycle of consumption and work as their local businesses become obsolete. After an accident leads to a worker named Josh getting permanently compacted into a Marxism-preaching Amazon box, the employees strike in outrage. To stop the demonstrations, Bezos has Josh kidnapped and compels a group of children to open him, causing his insides to burst. In an alternate ending, Josh the Box battles Bezos in an extended cardboard-on-Talosian throwdown as the strikers storm the facility.

The Season 16 opener "Reverse Cowgirl" tackles the war between the sexes — particularly as it pertains to the age-old battle over leaving the toilet seat up. The episode begins with the absurd but hilarious premise that Clyde's mother died after he failed to put the toilet seat down. In classic "South Park" fashion, Trey Parker and Matt Stone turn this petty squabble into a conversation about government overreach and frivolous litigation. But as the Toilet Safety Administration (TSA) holds South Park under siege, it's a deleted scene involving the South Park kids that makes for one of the funniest moments.

The deleted scene finds the South Park kids returning to school after Clyde's mom's funeral. When Kyle, Cartman, Kenny, and Stan ask Jimmy to help them cheer up Clyde, he is happy to oblige. Ever the comedian, Jimmy tosses out a couple of innocent jokes about Kim Kardashian and current events to an unresponsive Clyde as the others laugh encouragingly. When his call for more current events leads Butters to inappropriately offer, "Clyde killed his mom!" there's a horrified silence before Clyde responds bleakly, "Well Jimmy? Go ahead! Try and make that funny!" With a deadpan delivery, Jimmy responds with one of the most shocking jokes in the series — and that's saying something, considering it's "South Park."

Another brilliant scene that didn't make the cut in "Reverse Cowgirl" deals with the Toilet Seat Administration (TSA), the government agency that serves as a metaphor for the increasingly frustrating Transportation Security Administration. Just as the real TSA has been accused of heaping humiliations on airport travelers, the "South Park" TSA subjects the people of South Park to an endless stream of humiliations and horrors including security checks before entering the bathroom, forced booty wipes, and cameras in each bathroom. The TSA checkpoints around town are monitored by a pair of security personnel — Roshawnda and Rashawnda — who get to star in a public service announcement advert in a deleted scene featuring Cartman.

Wearing a TSA uniform and flanked by Roshonda and Rashawnda, Cartman announces, "TSA workers are people just like you. We're not objects to be yelled at — we are certified professionals who have had hours of extensive job training at Denny's and IHOP." Citing a very specific indignity that TSA agents must perform, Cartman then asks toilet users to give them a break. It's a silly throwaway scene that adds nothing to the episode, but it's still a favorite among fans.

The Season 18 episode "The Magic Bush" finds South Park spinning out of control after Cartman hijacks Butters' dad's drone and scores a scandalous picture of Craig's mom before leaking it to the Internet. In an effort to clamp down on unwanted drone activity, the townspeople turn their community into a drone-monitored police state. Amid the proliferation of drones, Randy Marsh's drone is shot down by a police drone, sending the town into a frenzy of riots and mayhem. At various points during the episode, news of the quickly devolving drone crisis is relayed through News 4 reports.

But one report doesn't make the cut, most likely due to its unsavory description of the inciting image. In the news clip, the reporter describes the image and its contents, pleading with the public on behalf of the police not to view them before referring viewers to the website where they can be viewed. In doing so, "South Park" incisively skewers the media's insensitivity in reporting both on violations of celebrities' privacy and on graphic video recordings of crimes that in most cases, audiences don't need to see to get the point.

In the three final episodes of Season 20, South Park is in crisis once more as troll culture has led to the worst possible outcome. The storyline finds the orange-faced Trump-esque President of the United States Mr. Garrison responding to Denmark's attack on the United States via a program called Troll Trace. When the program is unleashed, every user's online activity will become public, revealing every iota of problematic behavior and every dirty little secret that would have otherwise remained hidden. Goaded by Mr. Slave at the behest of the American public, Garrison decides to bomb Denmark and prevent Troll Trace from being released.

The storyline makes a complete mockery of Denmark, Trump, Internet outrage, and most of all, troll bro culture, even throwing in an extended Rickroll for good measure. Kyle ultimately saves the day by leading a troll campaign to shut down the Internet. But in an unfinished alternate ending, things take a darker turn for Denmark when a rogue pilot goes through with the bombing. When the U.S. Air Force receives confirmation that the mission has been called off, one pilot turns off his radio, telling his co-pilot, "I can't let my wife see everything I've done online — can you?" Given Gerald Broflovski's detainment in Denmark during the episode, it's a good thing "South Park" decided to go another route.

For the Season 13 episode "The Coon," Trey Parker and Matt Stone set out to create "a whole Watchmen thing where we were gonna have all the kids in costumes," but by the time they finished brainstorming, the story had evolved to focus on Cartman, Butters, and the nameless superhero Mysterion. As the writing duo noted, keeping Mysterion's identity secret proved easy since most South Park characters look the same without their outfits and hair. The story finds Cartman taking on a secret identity in a knockoff Tanooki Mario costume as the crime-fighting superhero the Coon, except all of the "crimes" he reports are Cartman's hyperbolic overreactions to otherwise innocent events.

When a second superhero, a figure named Mysterion, appears, the Coon teams up with Professor Chaos (Butters) and General Disarray (Dougie) in a plan to unmask him. The plan works, and Mysterion shows his entire face, revealing nothing to the "South Park" audience since his regular hair and clothing can't be seen. The episode's deleted ending shows Kyle, now arrested as Mysterion, sitting in a jail cell when the real Mysterion arrives to chastise Kyle for taking the fall. The real Mysterion shows his face as Kyle did before, but once again, the audience has learned nothing.

The Season 13 episode "Fishsticks" was inspired in part by a "South Park" writers' retreat trip to watch salmon jumping. Not content to quietly marvel at the beauty of nature, the team began to imagine the salmon as a gay Kanye West fish dressed in an Evil Knievel outfit. When Jimmy comes up with the "funniest joke ever" — a pun on "putting fish sticks in your mouth" — it takes the nation by storm. Only Kanye West isn't laughing, becoming furious anytime it's mentioned, and taking it as an accusation that he is a gay fish. Anytime he is questioned, West insists that he is a "genius" who would know if he "was a homosexual or a fish."

In the DVD commentary for the episode, Matt Stone and Trey Parker expressed surprise that the real Kanye West seemed to take the rather absurd plot point quite seriously. In a rather intense now-archived blog post, West expressed, "South Park murdered me last night ... I just wanna be a doper person which starts with me not always telling people how dope I think I am. I need to just get past myself." If that's his reaction after watching the episode air on Comedy Central, let's hope he never saw the cut version of the ending in which West literally dies while making love to a gay fish.

In an episode any former Boy Scouts will find familiar, Episode 6 of Season 13 sees Stan and Randy Marsh team up for a father-son entry into the local pinewood derby race, and as usual, Randy takes the whole thing entirely too seriously. To give their racer a competitive edge, Randy dresses as Princess Leia to rip off a superconductor from the Hadron Particle Collider to insert into their car. They win, but things take an unexpected turn when their racer achieves warp speed, attracting the attention of an alien.

One scene that didn't make the final cut established a long-running rivalry between the Marshes and the Hollises, who apparently win the state championship every year. The deleted scene features Randy calling Hollis to brag about their 1.8-second time, to which Hollis responds that his son Emmett's car clocked in at 1.2 seconds, making it "the fastest car we've ever built." After hanging up the phone, Randy begins hysterically yelling and beating the steering wheel, insisting that they have to modify their racer more to beat the Hollises in Denver. The hilarious scene adds context to Randy's eventual theft of the superconductor while proving once more why he is South Park's most out-of-control dad.

In a second deleted scene from "Pinewood Derby," the alien inadvertently hailed by the Marshes' warp-speed pinewood derby car shows up in South Park, and things don't go well. After Stan and Randy's big win at state, a couple of Men in Black show up at the Marsh home, optimistically telling Stan they believe the alien plans to welcome the people of Earth into the Galactic Federation. As the inventors of warp speed, Randy and Stan should be there to greet him.

Gathered in anticipation of the landing, the hopeful throngs of people hold up signs reading "Welcome to Earth" with world leaders on the phone and the Marsh family standing front and center. The alien craft lands and the creature inside emerges, holding up the Marshes' pinewood derby racer to ask for the life forms that made it. But rather than welcome them into the Galactic Federation, the alien holds up a weapon, demanding they build him another one in old-timey gangster speak, introducing himself as "Baby Fark McGee-zax, the greatest gangster this universe has ever seen." The deleted version of the scene seemingly omits the gangster storyline, instead having the alien declare he is Earth's new supreme ruler while Randy encourages the others to "rush him." Although both versions are good, there's just something a whole lot funnier about the space robber bit the show landed on.

Inspired by a rash of celebrity deaths in 2009, "Dead Celebrities" imagined Ike as South Park's answer to Haley Joel Osment from "The Sixth Sense." Only Ike is very specifically haunted by the spirits of dead celebrities like David Carradine, Farah Fawcett, and Billy Mays, with the latter turning up frequently to push products like the Big City Slider Station. With the help of the medium from "Poltergeist," Ike learns the celebrities want to move on but are trapped in purgatory because Michael Jackson won't come to terms with his own death. When Jackson possesses Ike's body, Kyle and his friends realize they have to help him find the acceptance he always longed for in his life, something they accomplish through a children's beauty pageant.

Matt Stone and Trey Parker originally intended the boys to dig up Jackson and show him his body, potentially even dragging it around for part of the episode. They ultimately decided it didn't work from a geographic standpoint as Jackson is buried in Los Angeles, far from South Park, Colorado. The scene is still available on the DVD's deleted scenes, with Ike riffing Jackson-esque lyrics as an annoyed Kyle and friends exhaustedly dig away at Jackson's grave.

When concerns about NFL football concussions trickle down to safety precautions at South Park Elementary School, Randy Marsh's inability to speak without sarcasm unintentionally leads to the creation of a new game: Sarcastaball. Instead of a sport where traumatic brain injury is a risk and helmets are needed, the students now where bras, hug each other, and chase a balloon around the field. Even better, Randy has talked his way into becoming the coach despite his constant sardonic complaints. As the sarcasm catches on, Sarcastaball soon takes over the NFL with Randy as its coach — that is until his brain becomes permanently damaged from all that sarcasm.

In the episode commentary, Trey Parker and Matt Stone said they found writing in sarcasm throughout the episode to be tricky, noting, "Everything seemed backwards." In a deleted scene from the episode, Randy attempts to put out a commercial warning the public about the dangers of Sarcastaball but due to his sarcasm, continually fails at getting the message across through repeated takes. Although the bit was scrapped in favor of an appeal to the bleachers at a Sarcastaball game, Randy's sarcastic PSA is still one of the funniest deleted scenes to be cut from the series.

Inspired by Colorado's proliferation of medicinal cannabis stores at the time, "Medicinal Fried Chicken" sees South Park's KFC get replaced by a medicinal marijuana dispensary. While Randy Marsh actively works on giving himself cancer to get a medical cannabis prescription by smoking, tanning, and eating processed foods, Cartman finds himself in severe withdrawal from KFC, ultimately turning to a life of organized crime to get access.

Before he gets hooked up with the chicken mafia, Cartman's withdrawals get pretty nasty — nasty enough to drive him to a methadone clinic where he's given a tapering dose of KFC gravy. A deleted scene shows just how hairy those withdrawals get as Mr. Garrison is teaching a lesson on adverbs when suddenly, Cartman leaps out of his desk and begins throwing desks around wildly. He even manages to knock another student out of her desk before Mr. Garrison sends him to the counselor's office. In the audio commentary for the episode, Matt Stone and Trey Parker said they wanted to highlight the hypocrisy of how some of the same people who fought for cannabis to be legalized were demanding that fast food be banned. At the same time, Stone noted, "For some people, they get just as high off of fried chicken as they do off of weed."