Air Date: 13 August 1997
Director: Trey Parker
UK Network: Channel 4
Original Network: Comedy Central
Stars: Matt Stone, Trey Parker, Mary Kay Bergman, Franchesca Clifford, and Isaac Hayes

The Background:
In 1992, Matt Stone and Trey Parker took some glue, construction paper, and an old 8 mm film camera and created The Spirit of Christmas, a short animated film in which four young boys accidentally bring to life a killer snowman. A Fox Broadcasting Company executive then commissioned the duo to create a follow-up short, Jesus vs. Santa, in 1995, which quickly became one of the first viral videos and led to the commission of a full series. Allegedly produced on a budget of $300,000, “Cartman Gets an Anal Probe” was a laborious process for the duo, who used the same traditional stop-motion techniques as their earlier shorts to bring their vulgar humour to life. The episode took about three months to complete, and about ten minutes of the story ended up being cut, and received poor results from test audiences. Comedy Central took a chance on the concept, however, based on the previous shorts and the duo’s previous shorts, and “Cartman Gets an Anal Probe” was heralded as a huge success despite complaints over its toilet humour and crass content. Since then, the hand-animated techniques have given way to computer animation that replicates the construction paper aesthetic of the duo’s early work, and South Park has become a popular and successful cultural phenomenon, with the creators now able to produce episodes within just a few days to stay on the pulse of current events.

The Plot:
While hanging out at the bus stop before school, Eric Cartman (Parker) tells his friends about a nightmare he had about being abducted by aliens. Although reluctant to believe the incident actually happened, he begins sprouting an extraterrestrial probe from his anus, sending his friends into a panic when Kyle Broflovski’s (Stone) brother, Ike (Clifford), is abducted by alien Visitors (Parker).

The Review:
South Park made an impression right from the start with its mock advisory warning at the start of each episode and jaunty little opening theme song; I especially enjoyed how the show would eventually change up the intro, adding new characters and updating the animation techniques and even aging up and altering some of the characters (even if you couldn’t always tell on sight alone). The episode proper opens with our four main characters – “big boned” foul mouth Eric Cartman, Jewish Kyle Broflovski, troubled everyman Stan Marsh (Parker), and poor Kenny McCormick (Stone) – happily singing at the bus stop before being interrupted by Kyle’s oddly shaped baby brother, Ike. This evidently isn’t the first time Ike has followed Kyle to the bus stop, so he’s pretty annoyed at his persistence; so much so that Kyle swiftly sends his brother packing with a good ol’ kick up the ass! Right away, the four kids stand out; they each look and sound different, with Cartman being the most vulgar (referring to Ike as a “dildo” despite not actually knowing what that is) and Kenny’s voice and face being constantly obscured by his trademark orange parka. While Cartman might not know what a dildo is, Kenny does; in fact, Kenny would go on to exhibit a working knowledge of such sexual topics far beyond his years, even if we never clearly hear what he says, though Kyle’s habit of playing “Kick the Baby” would largely be forgotten following this. Cartman is feeling the effects of a lack of sleep, brought about by a terrible nightmare where he was abducted by aliens the kids dub “Visitors”. He dreamt that the grey-skins took him up to their spacecraft and conducted bizarre, invasive experiments on his rectum. Although Cartman is insistent that the whole thing was a terrible dream (after all, his mum did say so), Kyle and Stan insist that he had an actual encounter with alien lifeforms, who have been known to abduct people and mutilate cows.

While Cartman nervously laughs this off as them attempting to scare him, he’s stunned when their friend and school cook, Jerome “Chef” McElroy (Hayes), drives past and gives a picture-perfect description of the aliens Cartman saw in his “dream” and describes, in disturbing detail, the anal probes they like to forcibly insert into their victims. Thanks to his friends constantly ragging on him about it, Cartman stubbornly refuses to believe that aliens are real (even when he starts literally farting flames from his ass!) so, when Kyle is thrown into despair when he sees Ike being abducted by two Visitors, he receives little sympathy from his friend and even less from the cantankerous school bus driver, Veronica Crabtree (Bergman). While the town’s then-sole police officer, Officer Barbrady (Parker), turns a blind eye to the rampant mutilation of cows, reports of unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and military vehicles being spotted all over town (completely missing a Visitor luring a whole herd of cows away right before his eyes), Kyle is stuck enduring his school day, terrified for his brother and the fate that awaits him when his father (as opposed to this overbearing mother, Sheila (Bergman)), finds out that he (as in Kyle) didn’t look after Ike. Unfortunately for the young Jew, his teacher, Herbert Garrison (Parker), refuses to excuse Kyle from class even when he politely asks Mr. Garrison’s puppet companion, Mr. Hat (ibid), for permission to leave. Chef initially tries to cheer Kyle up with a song about making love, but flies into action when he learns of Ike’s abduction and pulls the fire alarm so the boys can get out of school. This reaction is motivated by his assumed knowledge of the Visitors and also a strange mechanical device that spontaneously emerges from Cartman’s flaming ass and suggests that the aliens are trying to communicate. Cartman remains adamant that this is all part of an elaborate prank by his friends, even when a signal from the alien spacecraft causes him to suddenly break into a cheery rendition of “I Love to Singa”. Kyle, however, lets his anger get the better of him and demands (by screaming down Cartman’s ear) that the aliens return his little brother; consequently, a UFO hovers down and blasts at them when Kyle defiantly throws a rock at their ship. The projectile sends Kenny flying right into the path of a stampede of terrified cows, but it’s Officer Barbrady’s car that finally does in the muffled youth.

Despite this, Cartman remains unconvinced; he even refuses to believe that Kenny’s actually dead (even when Kyle pulls the boy’s head off and rats start eating his corpse) and storms off home to his mother, Liane (Bergman), and the delights of a “chocolate chicken pot pie” and Cheesy Poofs. Although Kyle pleads with Stan to help him out, Stan has problems of his own; he’s been invited to meet his crush, Wendy Testaburger (Bergman), at Stark’s Pond after school but he’s so besotted with and nervous around her that he can’t help but explosively vomit whenever she speaks to him. Kyle begrudgingly accompanies him and ends up interrupting their date when Wendy is enthralled by his story of alien abduction; much to Stan’s dismay, they end up going to get Cartman to use him as bait to lure out the Visitors rather than making “sweet love” as Chef encouraged. Cartman thus ends up tied to a tree in the middle of a forest and encouraged to keep farting until a massive alien satellite dish emerges from his ass and signals the Visitors. Kyle delivers an impassioned plea to the Visitors to return Ike, having learned that he really values the little squirt, but, when they completely ignore his appeal, he flies into a foul-mouthed rant that finally sees Ike released from their ship. The Visitors then reveal their true intentions for coming to Earth were to make contact with the cows, whom they have determined are “the most wise and intelligent” species on the planet and that their mutilation was all a mistake on the part of a severely apologetic Visitor named Carl. After leaving the cows with a special device that allows them to compel people to break into song and dance, the aliens leave, taking Cartman with them. The next day, Cartman is unceremoniously dumped back to Earth at the bus stop, where his friends are waiting, suffering from a bout of pinkeye and continuing to deny that the Visitors were real, or that he was ever abused by their unusual experiments.

The Summary:  
I’ve been a huge fan of South Park since it first aired; I can’t really remember how we first came to learn from it, but it must’ve been from TV spot and adverts for its impending debut on late-night TV over here. Interestingly enough, “Cartman Gets an Anal Probe” somehow wasn’t the first episode of the show I saw; instead, it was “An Elephant Makes Love to a Pig” (Parker, 1997). Quite how I missed the first four episodes of this massive cultural phenomenon are beyond me, but I was a kid at the time so probably distracted by videogames and hormones. Regardless, as a big fan of The Simpsons (1989 to present) and Beavis and Butt-Head (1993 to 1997; 2011), I was enamoured by this crude cartoon with its vulgar content, hilarious use of censored swear words, and surreal concepts but, as I revisit the series from the very start, it’s hard to deny that this first episode is a little rough around the edges. Obviously this applies to the animation style, which is very jerky and lacks the polish of later (and more recent) episodes, but it also applies to the voice acting and characterisation, though I can accept all of this as it was a pilot episode meant to kick-start the series and pretty much all of these issues were addressed throughout the first season and beyond. I’ve always found South Park’s crude presentation part of its appeal; there’s something inherently amusing to see these characters awkwardly shuffle about the place, seeing the UFO’s shadow against the background, and Ike’s oddly-shaped head flapping about this place (this was, of course, long before it was revealed that Ike was Canadian). There’s a clear amount of effort put into bringing this episode to life using these laborious methods and, while the characterisations aren’t quite as we know them now and many of the voices aren’t quite as refined, the core elements that would dictate the course of the next few seasons and later be so cleverly subverted are all here. One of the most obvious examples of this is Liane Cartman; while she’s clearly an enabler and an overly doting mother as she would be characterised as later in the show, she has a little more backbone here as she not only lets in Cartman’s friends after he explicitly tells her not to but also snaps at him to not “be difficult” when he initially refuses to indulge their alien fantasies.

“Cartman Gets an Anal Probe” also introduces us to just how wacky South Park’s inhabitants can be; Mr. Garrison is clearly unstable, banging on about how Christopher Columbus was the “Indian’s” best friend and discovered France and projecting a far more sinister persona through his puppet, and Chef is constantly breaking into song and asides about sex. One of the most amusing aspects of this episode for me is Ms. Crabtree’s selective deafness; this means that when the boys mutter insults at her, they have to come up with amusing soundalikes like “rabbit’s eat lettuce” to throw her off. Equally amusing is the subplot involving Officer Barbrady’s attempts to round up the missing cows; Barbrady would sadly be pushed to the side as South Park expanded and progressed, but I always enjoyed his cluelessness and it always cracks me up seeing the cows lining up to escape town on a train and the conductor (Stone) warning them not to use their “cow hypnosis” on him. Of course, a recurring theme in this episode is Cartman’s adamant refusal that he’s been abducted and experimented on by aliens; even when he sees a crop circle in his image, he dismisses it as being Tom Selleck rather than him, which is just scratching the surface of how toxic and stubborn the little psycho would become. Kyle and Stan have always been largely interchangeable characters but there’s enough to make them stand out; from Kyle’s concerns for his brother (a focal point of the episode) to Stan’s crippling vomiting whenever Wendy is around, the boys certainly do have a lot to deal with even when aliens aren’t invading their town. While Kenny is the least developed of the four, he still stands out since you can’t hear anything he says, he’s got a hell of a dirty mind, and he’s left dead before the episode’s end. Overall, “Cartman Gets an Anal Probe” is a fun first outing for the crassest mountain town on television; while it’s rough around the edges and subsequent episodes in even the first season are stronger in terms of jokes, presentation, and narrative, this first episode still makes an impression and, if anything, is refreshing to revisit since it’s before the cast ballooned out and the scope of the show started to focus more on political and social commentary.

My Rating:

Pretty Good

Did you enjoy “Cartman Gets an Anal Probe”? What did you think to it, and South Park in general, when it first aired? Which of the four main characters is your favourite and why? Do you prefer the cruder animation on show here? Would you like to see some of the elements introduced here return to the show? What are some of your favourite characters, episodes, and moments from South Park? How are you celebrating South Park’s anniversary this year? No matter what your thoughts on South Park, I’d love to hear from you so feel free to drop your comments below or leave a reply on my social media.