“CNN has to have a worldwide disaster to come up with a 1.4 ,” said one television industry consultant. Industry seismologists measure fan ardor more directly. Next to “such popular agents of murder and mayhem” as South Park‘s “cackling characters,” observes the New York Times‘s Michiko Kakutani, “the Devil doesn’t even stick out.” Their signature lines-”Kick ass!” “Omigod, they killed Kenny”-are on the lips of paperboys and grad students across the nation. Their likenesses are everywhere, including on last year’s hottest-selling T-shirt (“We have merchandisers lined up around the block!” boasts Comedy Central spokesman Tony Fox). Like Bart and Butt-head before them, the construction-paper-hewn Stan Marsh, Kyle Broslofskyi, Eric Cartman, and the permanently hooded Kenny McCormic now rule the malls of America. With the unstoppable force of a dead-Chris Farley joke, Comedy Central’s sick, crudely animated half-hour show South Park-featuring the adventures of four gimlet-eyed, foul-mouthed third-graders-has become not just the hottest cartoon but the hottest youth-cult phenomenon in the country.
Suddenly, before you know it, we’re up to our bungholes in ’90s cartoon Zeitgeist. Strange little icons on T-shirts and screen savers. Goateed cashiers spouting off-color catchphrases.
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The tremors start at coffee shops, movie queues, dorm rooms: young people talking in bizarre pinched voices. Here’s how it works in the post- Simpsons era. It is being republished in honor of the 25th anniversary of South Park.
This article originally appeared in the March 1998 issue of SPIN.
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