South Park Episode 0

August 14, 2009 4:06 PM

The complete and until today unaired pilot of South Park for Comedy Central, with an additional creator's commentary track. About 90% was recut into the first episode, "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe," but with a few slightly altered scenes and characters. After gaining underground popularity with two shorts that you've all probably seen already at this point, Trey Parker and Matt Stone were contracted by Comedy Central to produce a full pilot episode for a potential show based on the shorts. This pilot episode is what would ultimately lead to a series that is now 12 years old, spans over 180 episodes, and is one of the most successful shows in the history of cable television both in ratings and revenue. The pilot is also the only episode in the series that, like the original shorts, uses stop-motion animation of paper cutouts instead of computer software.
posted by XQUZYPHYR (24 comments total)

"Due to copyright and other legal reasons, South Park video content cannot be viewed outside the United States. Watch full episodes and 1000s of clips, all in German and available for free."

W00t!
posted by effbot at 4:11 PM on August 14, 2009

You get to watch Cartman's mother's videos in your native tongue!!??
posted by gman at 4:23 PM on August 14, 2009 [4 favorites]

Speaking of unaired...
posted by BrotherCaine at 4:26 PM on August 14, 2009 [1 favorite]

Interesting choice of words, gman.
posted by brundlefly at 4:26 PM on August 14, 2009

So there is only about 4 minutes that were cut out of the episode. What are the differences?
posted by GavinR at 4:48 PM on August 14, 2009

This post gave me pinkeye.
posted by carsonb at 5:03 PM on August 14, 2009

This page requires Adobe Flash 10 or better.

Screw you, picky website, for contributing to the upgrade treadmill. It's just an animation.. why do I really need Flash 10? See, instead of me enjoying your website and whatever else you might have monetized there, I'm just gonna go off and go do something else now.
posted by crapmatic at 5:48 PM on August 14, 2009

The thing I find interesting about South Park is that 12 years ago (before the advent of season DVDs and internet) the guys stroke a deal with Comedy Central giving them 50-50 on the non-TV revenue. Now they can afford to put every episode online, on the day it's aired, because... well, fuck it, they're filthy rich.
posted by qvantamon at 6:34 PM on August 14, 2009 [3 favorites]

crapmatic: does it still show that picture of Cartman saying "Get Flash, you goddamn hippie!"?
posted by qvantamon at 6:35 PM on August 14, 2009

Man, I remember when that first clip started circulating on the Internet. Lots of us surreptitiously downloaded it at work because we were on modems at home, still.

At the time, the idea of young kids being so unrelentingly foulmouthed was screamingly funny. It's amazing how they turned more or less one extended gag into an empire. :-)

I'm also suspicious that it's that early Internet word of mouth that made it happen. EVERYONE was talking about that Christmas clip, and they'd never have heard about it pre-Internet.
posted by Malor at 6:39 PM on August 14, 2009

True story concerning The Spirit of Christmas - Jesus VS Santa being in Tiger Woods '99 for the Playstation. What I read is that the developers explained that you had to completely fill the disc for the file size of the entire disk to be a certain amount. If you had game where they came up short they would dump what was usually garbage nonsense data to pad it out. Some wisenheimer working on the Tiger Woods game for the original Playstation decided to include the .avi of the short which was reaching a peak for online sharing of the vid. Of course it wouldn't play the vid on the Playstation, but if you popped it in a PC you could easily play the video. Somehow it leaked out and EA had to order a recall of the game.

http://www.eeggs.com/items/570.html

I bet the guy who did this lost his job really quick like...
posted by GavinR at 7:51 PM on August 14, 2009 [1 favorite]

naw
posted by porpoise at 8:33 PM on August 14, 2009

I love to sing-a about the moon-a and the June-a and the spring-a.
I love to sing-a about a sky of blue or tea for two or...
posted by erniepan at 9:00 PM on August 14, 2009 [1 favorite]

Lots of us surreptitiously downloaded it at work because we were on modems at home, still.

Wasn't it some insanely huge size, like 48 MB?
posted by smackfu at 9:19 PM on August 14, 2009

This page requires Adobe Flash 10 or better.

What annoys me is the number of sites that tell me, proud installer of Flash 10, that I need Flash 9 or better.
posted by kersplunk at 9:29 PM on August 14, 2009

> Watch full episodes and 1000s of clips, all in German and available for free

Really? When I was in Austria, the South Park Studios website worked perfectly, and in English. It would have been awesome to have been able to watch them in German (although they got the voice actors all wrong), but the German site didn't have full episodes.
posted by dunkadunc at 9:31 PM on August 14, 2009

My first exposure to South Park was at a Tool show in late 1996, when they played "Jesus vs. Santa" between the main set and encore.
posted by anazgnos at 11:30 PM on August 14, 2009

My first exposure to South Park was getting a speeding ticket while speeding across it at 80mph. A buffalo herd and grass in the distance.

Oh. the cartoon? Yeah, it's funny. Better writing than most TV for sure. Even that first episode.
posted by Balisong at 11:54 PM on August 14, 2009

> When I was in Austria, the South Park Studios website worked perfectly, and in English.

You can watch full episodes now on the German site, also in English. For some reason the English episodes are of lower quality than the German ones and the unaired pilot is not available. Btw, the German translation sucks, most of the jokes are lost. Of course there are things you just can't translate but they don't even seem to put much effort into it.
posted by cronholio at 12:44 AM on August 15, 2009

all in German and available for free

I'm german, I'm in germany and not even I want to watch this in anything but english. sucktastic.
posted by krautland at 11:16 AM on August 15, 2009

You can watch full episodes now on the German site, also in English.
except it's horribly outdated. they don't even have season 13.
posted by krautland at 11:18 AM on August 15, 2009

Wow, I'm surprised how much WORSE it looks with real cardboard cut outs. Going with CGI was a smart idea.
posted by empath at 12:05 PM on August 15, 2009

.
posted by sighmoan at 2:40 PM on August 15, 2009

Due to copyright and other legal reasons, South Park video content cannot be viewed outside the United States.

SHENANIGANS!
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 3:22 PM on August 15, 2009