"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: South Park, "Handicar," and American Dad, "Blonde Ambition" (tie)

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

This week's best first-run animated series episodes are both cases where the climactic sequence is stronger than the actual episode itself. While I like how Trey Parker and Matt Stone intertwine the ride-sharing wars (handicapped kid Timmy launches a ride-sharing startup with wheelchairs as the transportation, in order to raise money for the disabled kids' summer camp from "Crippled Summer") with both Elon Musk's unveiling of the Tesla D and Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn's bizarre, frequently parodied Lincoln ads starring Matthew McConaughey, "Handicar" is a step down from last week's solid South Park episode.

"The Cissy" has become a viral sensation due to both positive feedback from transgender viewers and supporters of their community regarding the sharply written way it handled "transginger" issues and a certain catchy pop song that's performed by the show's version of Lorde, who's been revealed to be Randy Marsh disguised as a teenage girl musician from New Zealand ("I am Lorde/Ya ya ya"). "Handicar" is no "Cissy," and you have to sit through a lot of repetitive comedic misunderstandings between Nathan--the evil kid with Down syndrome who's always seen plotting to ruin the lives of either Timmy or Jimmy, the aspiring stand-up with cerebral palsy--and his incompetent lackey Mimsy in order to get to a brilliant sequence that stages the Silicon Valley rivalry between online ride-sharing companies as the old Hanna-Barbera cartoon Wacky Races.

Nathan and Mimsy are South Park's throwback to '40s and '50s pairings of mismatched Warner Bros. cartoon villains like Rocky and Mugsy (who make a cameo appearance on a poster in Nathan's bedroom), the castaways in "Wackiki Wabbit" and Spike and Chester. While Nathan and Mimsy work better in smaller doses, it's fitting that the duo shows up in an episode that, thanks to South Park's fast turnaround, also manages to work in the September 27 demise of Saturday morning animated TV on the broadcast networks. When Randy and the parents of his son Stan's friends rejoice over the return of Wacky Races--in which the likes of Timmy, Nathan and Mimsy, Lyft, Tesla, Zipcar and McConaughey compete against Dastardly and Muttley and a Penelope Pitstop-ized and farty-due-to-her-Canuckness Neve Campbell to resolve the ride-sharing wars once and for all--the sight of the adults racing to the supermarket for cereal and then gathering around the TV in their pajamas and with cereal bowls in hand clearly reflects Parker and Stone's affection for Saturday morning cartoons.

While I outgrew Saturday morning cartoons ages ago--the last first-run animated kids' show made for broadcast TV that I watched on the regular was The New Batman/Superman Adventures--a part of me is sad that Saturday morning cartoon lineups no longer exist on broadcast TV, and so are Parker and Stone. Their adoration of that extinct breed of Saturday morning programming shines through in every detail of the terrific Wacky Races sequence.

The animators nailed every bit of Hanna-Barbera limited animation that the studio recycled on Wacky Races and countless other '60s and '70s TV cartoons I caught as a kid in the '80s. I laughed out loud when the screen suddenly got covered in those ubiquitous Hanna-Barbera clouds of gray dirt. But the funniest joke in "Handicar" has nothing to do with either cookie-cutter '60s and '70s TV animation or the decline of the taxi industry in the wake of Uber and Lyft. It's a jab at the decline of CNN as a serious news org: an announcer is overheard saying that complete Wacky Races coverage will air on CNN.

***

"Blonde Ambition," the first episode of American Dad's exclusive run on its new home network TBS, premiered on TBS' YouTube channel about a week before its cable premiere on October 20 and was made streamable on the YouTube channel for only 48 hours, and while it's lovely to hear profanity go unbleeped on the new, cable-only American Dad (broadcast standards on TBS are looser than Fox's), "Blonde Ambition" is an unremarkable--but not terrible--season premiere. Other than the unbleeped profanity, not much about American Dad has changed since it jumped ship from Fox to TBS.

It's basically the same show it was on Fox: Stan Smith, a competent CIA agent, remains clueless about almost anything that has nothing to do with CIA work or killing people, and when Stan's not trying to teach his dorky teen son Steve how to be manlier, he--or any of the rest of his family, like his not-as-dim wife Francine or their oldest child Hayley--is still getting into mischief with Roger, the show's breakout character and a Paul Lynde-voiced alien con artist who runs a neighborhood bar out of the Smiths' attic. Roger's like a crazy--and sociopathic--uncle or aunt who happens to be from another planet.

American Dad also remains a more satisfying and watchable Seth MacFarlane animated show than Family Guy (although MacFarlane has no involvement in American Dad's writing and his contribution to the show is mainly just voice work as both Stan and Roger). Comedically, American Dad is a tighter ship--it doesn't pause for any of those annoying and pointless cutaway gags that were such a memorable object of ridicule in South Park's "Cartoon Wars" two-parter about Family Guy's inexplicable popularity--and both the espionage side of Stan's job and Roger's scheming and grifting give American Dad an unusual sense of purpose and make it a more plot-driven show than Family Guy (in other words, there's no time for the random five-minute chicken fights that Family Guy is famous for).

Also, while Family Guy plays to the lowest common denominator (i.e., a shitload of hacky race jokes and the poorly received rape joke during Bart and Stewie's phone pranks on Moe in "The Simpsons Guy"), American Dad has been a little more experimental in its humor. For instance, it once took a story about Stan's daddy issues and presented it as a serious stage play in the style of August: Osage County, so that meant the Smiths' living room and basement were sets on a stage, off-screen audience members could be heard coughing or gasping like during any other typical play you see in a theater and semi-regular cast member Patrick Stewart appeared as himself in live-action wraparound hosting segments to class up the joint (but a twisted version of the classy and polite Stewart we know and love--just like Avery Bullock, Stewart's perverted CIA boss character on the show--presided over the evening and barely concealed his boredom with the one-episode experiment).

None of American Dad's episodes during its final season on Fox have equaled the hilarity and weirdness of 2009's post-apocalyptic "Rapture's Delight," my favorite American Dad episode (although any episode where Scott Grimes, who voices Steve, gets to show off his unexpectedly top-notch R&B singing skills has come close), and it's unlikely that any of the TBS episodes will equal "Rapture's Delight" either (many American Dad fans attribute the slight dip in quality to the departure of longtime co-showrunner Mike Barker last season). But what "Blonde Ambition" has going for it, aside from eye candy in the form of a blond and club miniskirt-clad Hayley, are some observant jabs at celebrity environmentalists (Ike Barinholtz from The Mindy Project and The Awesomes provides the voice of DJ Iron Monkey, a hypocritical EDM artist/philanthropist who wears an oversized, Deadmau5-style helmet shaped like a cartoon monkey's head); an amusing dance-off between Francine and Hayley to distract a bouncer (Cedric Yarbrough); and silly nods to the invisible stage prop gimmick from Our Town (another bunch of weird stage play references from American Dad) during Stan and Steve's action-packed but mostly drab subplot about Stan's obsession with buying a dream house he mistakenly thinks is empty. Hayley's ploy to dye her hair blond in order to attract more male philanthropists to help her fund her environmental causes was more enjoyable when Just Shoot Me tried the same thing with Maya and a blond wig for one episode, but hey, at least we got out of it a nicely animated dance sequence from the temporarily blond Hayley and a Hayley-ified Francine at the end. Fran service!

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: South Park, "Go Fund Yourself," and Space Dandy, "Dandy's Day in Court, Baby" (tie)

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

The last time South Park was on the air, Trey Parker and Matt Stone put together perhaps my favorite South Park episode in years, "The Hobbit." Like many latter-day South Park storylines, "The Hobbit" lampooned a reality TV star whose show will no longer be relevant a year after you first watch South Park mock it--in this case, Kim Kardashian--but then the episode concluded on an unusually devastating note and critiqued the pressures placed on girls to fit certain beauty standards, without turning all Diff'rent Strokes preachy on us during its critique. For its 18th-season premiere, "Go Fund Yourself," South Park critiques another issue, and it's been a huge one in the Native American community for over a year now: Dan Snyder's stubborn refusal to change the racist and outdated name of the NFL team he owns, the Washington Redskins, which resulted in Native American groups starting a "Change the Name" movement.

Throw in a bunch of hilarious gags about the evilness of Snyder's fellow NFL team owners and the recent ineptitude of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell in how he's handled Ray Rice's domestic violence incident--we have South Park's amazingly fast turnaround to thank for those gags about Goodell--and you've got a solid season premiere that's the cathartic laugh we needed after months of constantly being subjected to appalling examples of how much of an evil organization the NFL is, from the head injury scandals to its hypocrisy regarding women's issues. "Go Fund Yourself," which has Cartman, Stan, Kyle and Kenny launching a startup where they make money doing absolutely nothing, also contains some jabs at the dumbest aspects of Silicon Valley culture. Those aspects are always worthy of a skewering because I'm currently stuck living in Silicon Valley, and I despise all things having to do with Silicon Valley culture. It's nice when latter-day South Park goes after subjects that aren't reality TV for a change.

But what really bolsters "Go Fund Yourself" is all the satirical material about the NFL (Snyder enters the picture when he demands that Cartman and his friends stop calling their startup the Washington Redskins). The episode's portrayal of Goodell as a malfunctioning robot is laugh-out-loud funny and perfect, especially in a week when ESPN punishes Bill Simmons for speaking his mind about Goodell's ineptitude and bizarrely gives the Grantland editor-in-chief a suspension that's longer than the one the annoying Stephen A. Smith received for blaming domestic violence victims for provoking their attackers. ESPN's tongue is so far up the NFL's ass it can report to you on SportsCenter what the NFL had for lunch.

***

There's only one episode of Space Dandy left, and at this late point in the game, all we know about the past of Dandy--this doltish hunter of aliens who knows as much as we do about his origins--is that his body was infused with an enormous amount of a highly coveted element called pyonium (also known as "the God particle," it's the same element that once caused QT to increase in size when Dr. Gel's ship accidentally blasted him with it); he's a middle school dropout; he used to date a female heart-in-a-transparent-box who hails from the fourth dimension; and the pyonium enables him to cross dimensions and remember every single one of them, including dimensions where he died. In "Dandy's Day in Court, Baby," we now find out he has no DNA, which confirms a theory I've had since "A World with No Sadness, Baby": Dandy isn't human, baby.

I think Dandy's either the escaped result of an experiment to construct a person out of pyonium or a god who developed amnesia, much like Will Smith in Hancock. Since then, he's been wandering space without any cash in a clunker of a ship for a long-ass time, barely aware of his special pyonium-related power, which the Gogol Empire wants for its own nefarious purposes. Like I've said before about any theory I've had regarding any mystery on Space Dandy, I could be wrong either way, and we'll see how wrong I'll probably be in the final episode of Space Dandy's way-too-brief run.

In the meantime, "Dandy's Day in Court, Baby" is an interesting case of a bottle episode of an animated show that's clearly a bottle episode--BONES Inc. reportedly went all out with the animation for the finale and needed to rush out an episode that's not as expensive--but instead of putting together a clip show like Space Dandy general director Shinichiro Watanabe and Manglobe once did for Samurai Champloo, BONES chose to set most of the episode inside a courtroom to cut costs. The episode actually works despite its downsized scope. For one thing, "Dandy's Day in Court, Baby" isn't recycling old material like those superfluous clip shows do. It's 100 percent new material, including the flashbacks to the crime scene where Dandy inadvertently became a murder suspect, and I'll take a courtroom trial with completely original content over a clip show any day. Plus the whodunit that "Dandy's Day in Court, Baby" writer Dai Sato came up with is simply diverting and full of what the NBC announcer who used to record all its promos (before Dorian Harewood's current stint as the voice of the network) would intone were "those Law & Order twists."

"Dandy's Day in Court, Baby" is more of an homage to the courtroom drama genre than a parody. For the first half, it's played completely straight to trick us into thinking a sad, remorseful-looking and mute Dandy really did kill an alien named Guy Reginald, a rare Lumetian (his race is named after the late director of 12 Angry Men and The Verdict), right in front of Reginald's hot wife Rose, a waitress at Dandy's favorite hangout Boobies (both Reginald and Rose are named after the writer behind 12 Angry Men, Reginald Rose). Instead of aping the original Law & Order, which I don't think is even popular in Japan (and if it were popular over there, Sato would have been aware that Law & Order never spent as much time in the jury room as "Dandy's Day in Court, Baby" does), the episode has more of an Ace Attorney vibe. Ace Attorney is a popular Japanese series of video games where the player gets to be heroic lawyer Phoenix Wright and make legal decisions instead of shooting at zombies or enemy soldiers. I knew all those hours of watching X-Play on G4 despite not being a gamer at all wouldn't go to waste someday.

In the second half of "Dandy's Day in Court, Baby," things get nutty, and the case goes from appearing to be a noirish crime of passion to turning out to be an absurd foofaraw involving a kid who was angry at his best friend for blocking him on Chwitter, Space Dandy's Twitter knockoff; a runaway baseball that contains a massive amount of pyonium like Dandy's body does; Lumetian pro wrestlers' secret identities; and Reginald's sleep apnea, which fooled his wife and the coroners--the dumbest coroners in the galaxy--into thinking Reginald was dead. Dandy is exonerated, and in the episode's best gag, the judges learn why he was being tight-lipped and reserved all through the trial. For a while, I thought the reason why Dandy was immobile was because he skipped the trial to hide from the court and replaced himself with a realistic-looking rubber decoy, but it turns out that he was actually asleep in the courtroom the whole time.

Then things turn serious again in the episode's great cliffhanger ending. Before "Dandy's Day in Court, Baby," Dandy never once got face-to-face with the Gogol Empire--every time Dr. Gel would come close to capturing Dandy, the alien hunter would be unaware of the presence of Dr. Gel's ship and then Gel's ship would immediately get blown up before Gel could get his mitts on Dandy--but now Dandy and the empire finally get to see each other when the empire's troops surround Dandy outside the courthouse. The conclusion of "Dandy's Day in Court, Baby" also marks the first time that the "To be continued" graphic at the end of many Space Dandy episodes isn't a joke.

Whether Dandy turns out to be a god or the God (or neither), I don't want Space Dandy to end because it's shown so much creativity in its brief run. An extra season of a few more special guest animators bringing their idiosyncratic flair to Dandy's universe(s) would have been nice. It's funny how I initially thought Space Dandy was going to be Shinichiro Watanabe's first artistic failure and just another lewd sci-fi comedy. Instead, it's turned into something better and unexpected: an anthology-like show that captures the adventurous and exploratory spirit of both the original Star Trek and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy--and more effectively than the last time Star Trek hit the screen. Now that's a feat as impressive as anything pyonium can do.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: South Park, "The Hobbit"

(Photo source: South Park Archives)

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

Of all the memeable and hashtaggable things Kanye West has said or done since the release of his latest album Yeezus--from "You don't got the answers, Sway!" to "Do I look like a motherfucking comedian? Don't fucking heckle me. I'm Kanye motherfucking West!"--the South Park 17th-season finale has chosen to zero in on Yeezy's bizarre remolding of Kim Kardashian into Beyoncé, something I never really noticed until South Park pointed it out. Kim's currently dyed blond hair makes a whole lot of sense now. (By the way, I like how Trey Parker and Matt Stone didn't give a shit about updating Yeezy's look, so 'Ye still looks the same as he did when he transformed into a gay fish at the end of South Park's 2009 "Fishsticks" episode: barefoot and rocking that 808s & Heartbreak-era mullet that made him look like Theo Huxtable, circa 1985.)

Parker brilliantly ties Yeezy's Vertigo-ing of Kim into recent headlines about women relying on Photoshop to remove imperfections in their selfies for an episode that's South Park at its most vicious in the celebrity parody department. Other than correctly predicting Time magazine's pick of Pope Francis as its Person of the Year and the gut-punch of an ending I'll get into in a moment, the most remarkable thing about "The Hobbit" is that outside of a few pinups of Kim on Butters' locker when Wendy Testaburger points out to Butters the cold, hard facts about his favorite pinup girl, Kim is never seen at all, not even during the show's descriptions of her as a short, fat and hairy Hobbit. Yeezy's bungled attempts to discredit his future wife's Hobbitness were amusing the first couple of times but got tiresome about halfway through the episode, even during the "Bound 2" video parody, which I actually like a little more than James Franco and Seth Rogen's overlong "Bound 3" parody. Then like a lot of Sideshow Bob rake scene-ish running gags, they somehow regained their funniness when the episode cycled through them for the final time.

(Photo source: South Park Archives)

(Photo source: South Park Archives)

But what elevates "The Hobbit" from "B" territory to "A" territory aren't the jabs at Kanye and Kim (or Britney Spears' "Work Bitch" video or news anchors' strained attempts to look hip) but Wendy's arc--she attempts to take her anti-Photoshop crusade to the local news and the state Senate--and its downbeat conclusion. South Park rarely strives for genuine pathos. Some of those attempts at pathos have fallen flat, but then there are other times where the seriousness works, and the wordless final scene of "The Hobbit" is one of those times. Parker usually throws in one last comedic punchline before the end credits, but he opts instead for a dramatic punchline, and it's mad devastating.

Wendy, who inadvertently created a monster when her Photoshop skills led the other girls at school to Photoshop themselves, succumbs to pressure. With tears in her eyes, she doctors her own photo and e-mails it to everyone (compare this self-inflicted Photoshop makeover to the makeover Ally Sheedy's misfit character receives from Molly Ringwald's character at the end of The Breakfast Club, and the "Hobbit" conclusion drives home how much I hate that Breakfast Club scene where the Sheedy character loses everything that made her unique and likable--it's one of Reaganite filmmaker John Hughes' most Reagan-ish, pro-conformity moments). A typical South Park episode--particularly during the show's earlier years--would climax with an out-of-control situation being brought to an end by a speech from Stan or Kyle about the idiocy of the situation and what they've learned. That doesn't happen here. Instead, Stan and Kyle fall for the out-of-control bullshit in "The Hobbit," and--like what has often happened in real life with girls who struggle with their self-image--so does an anguished Wendy.

(Photo source: South Park Archives)

(Photo source: South Park Archives)

Memorable quotes:
* Wendy: "Are you just an asshole? Is that it?" Butters: "Am I just an asshole?" Wendy: "Yeah!" Butters: "Well, no. I've got arms and legs. I have everything."

* "Kim is not even in that movie. That movie is just loosely based on her television show Keeping Up with the Kardashians, which is a show about short, loud little people living in a fantasy world--hold up!"

* "And even though she still couldn't sing like Beyoncé or dance like Beyoncé or act like Beyoncé or be a decent human being like Beyoncé, the little Hobbit was looked up to and loved, just like Beyoncé. [sniffles]"

The uncensored cut of "The Hobbit" can be streamed in its entirety at South Park Studios.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: South Park, "A Song of Ass and Fire," and Samurai Flamenco, "Change the World" (tie)

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

Consistently funny South Park episodes are a rarity these days, and "A Song of Ass and Fire," the second in a three-parter that reimagines the upcoming holiday season's Xbox One/PlayStation 4 console wars as Game of Thrones, helps break the show's slump with a sturdy storyline (which began in "Black Friday" last week) and jokes that stick the landing and are even stronger than the jokes in "Black Friday" by being occasionally surprising. I didn't see the punchline to the news anchor sex scene coming and couldn't stop laughing for a minute and a half afterward. Plus any moment where South Park parodies anime is worthwhile because Trey Parker nails the sounds of J-pop so well, like he does here with Princess Kenny's anime theme song.

The only running joke that's lazily written in "A Song of Ass and Fire" is Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin's obsession with wieners, which doesn't really go anywhere (Martin's choir inside his phallically decorated mansion and their performance of an all-"wieners" cover version of the Game of Thrones main title theme are filler and just an excuse to pad this three-parter out). Otherwise, it's nice when South Park isn't comedically asleep at the wheel, whether it's an Xbox One racing wheel or a PS4 racing wheel.

Over on Samurai Flamenco, the show just took a turn for the crazy--or hasn't. "Change the World" finds Masayoshi Hazama in distress after a note from his deceased grandfather Daisuke Hazama reveals that Masayoshi's parents were murdered, and he's worried about his inability to feel enraged by the way in which they died. The episode also pits Masayoshi and Goto against the show's first real supervillain: a crazed drug chemist who transforms into Guillotine Gorilla, a giant gorilla with a guillotine for a stomach and a minion of a villain boss who identifies himself to Samurai Flamenco as "King Torture." Samurai Flamenco's tonal shift from largely grounded slice-of-life territory (the show's universe has been established in the last few episodes as a universe without superpowers and supervillains) to typical tokusatsu material is extremely jarring and out-of-nowhere.

Some bloggers think Guillotine Gorilla and King Torture are hallucinations Samurai Flamenco, Goto and the other cops are experiencing due to the drugs they found during the drug bust that Samurai Flamenco joins in on (the police department honors him for bringing the crime rate down and makes him "police chief for a day," while Akira is disappointed about his site's crime news headlines becoming so dull because of the positive effects of the Flamencos' heroic acts; could Akira have planted those hallucinogens to manipulate headlines and stir shit up again?). The fact that the Guillotine Gorilla/King Torture cliffhanger ending is animated in the same gauzy filter that shrouds Masayoshi's fantasy sequences about Daisuke is a hint that this could all be playing inside Masayoshi's head. Guillotine Gorilla could just be a perp on PCP, reimagined by an increasingly delusional Masayoshi as a talking gorilla.

But if it turns out next week that humans are capable of transforming into monsters straight out of Thor: The Dark World, I'm going to be slightly disappointed. Nothing we've seen on this show has built up towards drugs that alter people's DNA like what Arrow is carefully doing this season with the particle accelerator to establish Barry Allen and his (now-to-take-place-outside-of-Arrow) transformation into the Flash, and that's just sloppy writing if superpowers were indeed always part of this show's plan. My disappointment would also stem from how much the absence of superpowers and supervillains on Samurai Flamenco has helped make the show a unique and different take on the superhero genre in animation (so far, Samurai Flamenco has been as grounded as Christopher Nolan's live-action Batman movies but not as somber). With the addition of Guillotine Gorilla and King Torture, Samurai Flamenco becomes just another animated superhero show, although with some above-average writing.

While a huge question mark hovers over the show's tonal direction like King Torture hovering ominously over Samurai Flamenco and Goto, everything that precedes the wild cliffhanger is Samurai Flamenco at its slice-of-lifey best. Kaname and Harazuka, who's as much of a fan of Kaname's old Red Axe show as Masayoshi is, meet each other for the first time and get drunk together off-screen, as implied by one of the most amusing abrupt cuts this show has done. Meanwhile, Mari goes insane over the lack of male criminals to pulverize; Moe (Erii Yamazaki voices Moe's bashfulness really well) continues to be in love with Mari (and continues to show how she's the only one out of the three idols who's fluent in English when she happily describes Mari's insane behavior as "Decadence!"); and in a nicely scripted moment of lengthier-than-usual Goto dialogue, Goto finally gives Masayoshi a vote of confidence in his mission as Samurai Flamenco, but in a typically world-weary (and guarded) Goto way that illustrates how well-realized many of Samurai Flamenco's characters are ("My basic point is that you're a freak, not a hero. You're only human, so having questions is natural. Honestly, I don't understand the current problem. But as a fellow human, I trust freaks more than I trust heroes.").

But that tonal shift is a bit of a concern for me because, as the Japanese band SPYAIR says about their old selves in the unsubtitled "Just One Life" theme song lyrics that I recently discovered the English meanings of, Samurai Flamenco's old--and more interesting--self seems to have died yesterday.

The uncensored cut of "A Song of Ass and Fire" can be streamed in its entirety at South Park Studios. Samurai Flamenco's episodes are posted on Crunchyroll the same day they premiere in Japan, but for Crunchyroll subscribers only.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: South Park, "World War Zimmerman"

(Photo source: South Park Archives)

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

South Park's handling of the George Zimmerman trial and the Stand Your Ground law was an episode I was dreading for the last few weeks because libertarians like Trey Parker and Matt Stone aren't exactly known for having the most progressive views on race (as exemplified by how Asians have been portrayed on South Park). Also, what is there to find funny about Zimmerman's killing of Trayvon Martin and the emotional debate about racial profiling that the Zimmerman verdict intensified? Plus it's later-era South Park, which, much like later-era Simpsons, hasn't made me laugh out loud in years (the last time South Park was laugh-out-loud funny was when it ripped apart the writing on Family Guy) and has been stuck in a formula (storylines that parody the latest popular reality show or cable sensation, like Investigation Discovery programming in last week's "Informative Murder Porn").

But instead of making light of Martin's death, "World War Zimmerman" pokes fun at Zimmerman's paranoia about anyone with a dark complexion--this is clearly not a pro-Zimmerman episode--and racists' dumb reactions to, well, anything that's outside their extremely limited purview, particularly the Zimmerman verdict and African Americans' feelings about it. Cartman's always terrible treatment of Token (Adrien Beard), the show's sole black character after Chef was written out of the show in typically grisly South Park fashion, is a reliable laugh-getter. Both the poem and "I Was Not the Bullet" school assembly rap song that Token has to endure from Cartman, the king of racism in the town--as well as Cartman's silly World War Z-inspired nightmare about an outbreak of black rioters--automatically make this an above-average later-era South Park episode. The delightful visual of the detestable Zimmerman being fried on the electric chair--after he shoots a white kid, of course--also bumps this episode up.

I haven't seen World War Z, but the gags that reference the famously troubled Brad Pitt blockbuster still manage to be funny. I like the little detail of Cartman wearing that stupid-looking scarf that's wrapped around Pitt's neck in World War Z trailers and publicity shots. (By the way, it's called a shemagh--frequently pronounced "schmog"--and it's used by desert soldiers to shield their faces from dust and sand, but in scarf form, it's goofy-looking. Pitt looks like he's about to join Steven Tyler for a rendition of "Cryin'.") The running gag of Cartman repeatedly causing planes to crash (in order to stop what he thinks will be an outbreak of black rioters) killed me.

Is the surprising number of genuine laughs in "World War Zimmerman" due to the involvement of former SNL cast member Bill Hader, whose Weekend Update nightlife reports as Stefon and dead-on impressions of the likes of Alan Alda and Judd Hirsch were recent (and sometimes deleted) highlights of SNL? For South Park's 17th and current season, Hader, who served as a creative consultant on South Park in the past, rejoined the animated series as a full-time writer. That's what I thought Conan O'Brien should have done after bouncing from NBC: return to The Simpsons as a staff writer to steer that leaky ship back to glory.

Memorable quotes:
* "We need to go somewhere the spread won't take hold, like Iceland."

* General: "We need you to shoot a young African American for us." Zimmerman: "I gave that up." Government agent: "You're the best, Zimmerman!"

* The general's reaction to a daytime attempt on Zimmerman's life by Cartman, who put himself in blackface: "My God, I didn't even see him!"

The uncensored cut of "World War Zimmerman" can be streamed in its entirety at South Park Studios.

March Madness March of the Day: "Blame Canada" from South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut by Trey Parker and Marc Shaiman

"Blame Canada" may not be the best original song from the foul-mouthed 1999 hit South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut--that would be the fart-tastic "Uncle Fucka"--but Trey Parker and Marc Shaiman's Canuck-baiting march is the most prime-time TV-friendly, which must be why "Blame Canada" and none of the other Bigger, Longer & Uncut musical numbers landed a Best Original Song Oscar nomination in 2000. (Plus, it's got a hilarious closing verse.)

In the film, "Blame Canada" was sung by several different parental characters. Almost all of them were played by the South Park TV series' immensely talented voiceover artist Mary Kay Bergman, who unfortunately committed suicide a few months before the song was nominated. Despite containing far less profanity than the other Bigger, Longer & Uncut tunes, "Blame Canada" was still too controversial for the musical number portion of the 2000 Oscar telecast.

ABC censors were uncomfortable with the occasional cursing in "Blame Canada," as well as lyrics that referred to the Ku Klux Klan and "that bitch Anne Murray too." They wanted Parker and Shaiman to write a sanitized version of "Blame Canada" for prime-time. Parker and Shaiman refused to change a single word because it would have contradicted Bigger, Longer & Uncut's stance on censorship. However, they settled on having Robin Williams--who entered the stage with his mouth covered in duct tape--turn his face away from the camera and not utter the f-word at the point of the number when he was supposed to say it.

Last year, Parker and Matt Stone's The Book of Mormon hit Broadway with way more curse words than "Blame Canada," and barely anybody was offended. In fact, the same Mormons who might have been too afraid to see Bigger, Longer & Uncut at a multiplex in 1999 didn't care about The Book of Mormon's profane lyrics. They embraced Parker and Stone's surprisingly uplifting musical about their faith and helped make it a Broadway sensation. Times have changed, indeed.



All the other "March Madness March of the Day" posts from this week:
"Attack" from Patton by Jerry Goldsmith
"March of the Beggars" from Duck, You Sucker by Ennio Morricone
"Prelude and Main Title" from Superman: The Movie by John Williams
"Baraat" from Monsoon Wedding by Mychael Danna

The "March Madness March of the Day" series begins Monday, March 5 here at A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Blog

While the NCAA is caught up in March Madness, A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Blog's version of March Madness will be a series of posts that will focus each weekday on a particular standout march written for film or TV.

They've opened and closed some of our favorite action films. Some of them have even wound up as marching band music at football games or as campaign anthems for politicians who try to claim these marches as their own (their association with these themes helps to kill our enjoyment of these tunes, just like how Michele Bachmann's choice of Tom Petty's "American Girl" as a rally anthem or Newt Gingrich's use of Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger" pissed off those of us who like "American Girl" or "Eye of the Tiger" but don't care for Bachmann and Gingrich's politics, until Petty and Survivor took action and got them to stop co-opting their music). Whether it's the controversial and Oscar-nominated "Blame Canada" from South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut or my personal favorite film music march, Terence Blanchard's "Fruit of Islam" from Malcolm X, the "March Madness March of the Day" series will devote a couple of grafs and maybe a video clip to it.

The series begins next Monday with a Lalo Schifrin piece that serves as great motivational music for when you're elaborately mindsmegging somebody, and it concludes on Friday, March 30 with a march from a Steven Spielberg flick that must have been more fun to act in than watch.