So, there’s a lot of ways to get the back story on a particular movie: Behind the Scenes features, Wikipedia articles, imdb triva, etc, but the best way to hear it is from the people who made it themselves.

Only problem is, some of those people, even though they make tight movies, are super boring. Plus, you gotta watch the whole movie over again. Sometimes they go off topic and start talking about craft services, and you’d like to fast forward to a good part, but there’s no visual indication of what’s going on in an audio track.

But some people are cool to listen to, and if you really like the movie, you’ll be happy to watch it again. Only problem is, like Trey Parker and Matt Stone, are often too cool for commentaries. All the “South Park” season collections only feature “mini commentaries” where Trey and Matt speak for about 5 minutes and then cut out. Just when it’s getting interesting they’ll say, “Well, I think we’ve said enough.” “Yeah that’s good.” They’ve made so many South Parks they hardly remember which one they have to talk about on a given occasion. So when I heard that they recorded a full length commentary for the full length “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut” on the new Blu Ray edition, I had to get on that shit.

Here’s what I found out about this classic:

Trey and Matt hated the trailer:

It was apparently cut by the same people who do Adam Sandler movies, record scratch and all. They say it represented pretty much everything they were against in the movie industry, so Matt or Trey actually stole it and put it in their car. This was kind of a big deal, and their lawyer, who usually has their back, said they had to return it or they’d be under arrest, since they basically stole property from Paramount Pictures. They riff on the trailer hilariously, and you can see where the inspiration for this little chestnut came from:

It’s been 10 years since the movie came out, and it far from represents the show as we know it today

South Park is known for it’s intentionally ghetto animation, but it’s come a long way since this movie came out. Computer animation has developed considerably since 1999, when their “crowd scenes” could only fit 14 or so people in without using too much memory. Take a look at the difference between the climactic battle between the U.S. and Canada, and this clip from this past week’s season finale, “Pee”:

Just notice how much more detailed the backgrounds are and how many characters are in every scene. Both are pretty epic, but the animation quality on “Pee” definitely takes the cake.

On top of the animation (they also hate the Baldwin bombing scene), Trey and Matt are bothered by the framing in a lot of the scenes, and little details like when the background color matches another character’s shirt.

A lot of the character’s we know today are MIA

First and foremost: no Butters! To be fair, Butters wasn’t even around yet. There was a character that looked like him in the background that had been around since the beginning, but the character didn’t come to his own until the episode “Two Guys Naked In A Hot Tub”. In his place is the prominence of Chef, who’s long gone by now.

They point to the fact that a movie needs to be only about a few characters, and trying to fit everyone in for a solid story is very difficult. They note that “The Simpsons Movie” also had trouble with that, which they tried to solve by putting a dome around the town and making all the secondary characters have to react to that. They still are left in the background, one of the disappointing aspects of that film (which overall I think is great.)

South Park wasn’t even that popular when the movie was coming out

Although super-popular in it’s first season, South Park suffered from sophomore syndrome in their second. People were starting to get over it, and the studios assumed it was on it’s way out.

On top of that, that summer had the huge marketing campaigns of the first “Star Wars” prequel and the second “Austin Powers” movie, so all the “Summer Movie Previews” featured this one as basically a foot note.

But once it came out, people realized it was actually pretty good.

Matt and Trey never made a dime from this movie

Although they made a small script fee, which wasn’t much since they were basically nobodies, Paramount claims this movie is basically in debt.

The Motion Picture Association of America is lame as shit

Before red band trailers, every piece of promotional material for a movie had to be rated “G”. Any mother who took their kids to see this movie and left promptly after seeing “Uncle Fucker” can blame the MPAA for misleading them.

Promotional material also includes clips for talk shows, so they weren’t allowed to show the clip that takes place on Conan when they actually went to visit Conan. Unfortunately this is the best clip I could find:

The second best one had better quality, but was also in Spanish. Anywho, the people at Conan actually went and bought a bootleg copy of the movie on the streets just so they could show the clip, which is bad ass. And on this note I also learned:

Why Brooke Shields is in the movie

She’s the one who just got slapped in that previous clip. Apparently at some Hollywood party, Brooke went up to Trey and Matt and said something like “Oh my god, I’ve been wanting to meet you for so long.”

Trey, trying to make a joke, tried to complete her thought by saying, “And now that I have, I think you’re a total asshole!”

She didn’t get it, and it was weird. Later they were all on some talk show together, and during that commercial break cut you can see Trey try and explain it to her profusely. I couldn’t find that clip, so I’ll include this one instead:

Her dad was tall too? INTERESTING. Oh well, she’s hot, right? That’s all that matters.

The story behind the “Kenny Goes To Hell” sequence

Like I said, animation was harder to do back then, so they had to outsource this sequence to another studio. Today it would only take a week or so.

The guy singing is Metallica’s James Hatfield, who goes uncredited. Metallica had some strict thing about members doing anything seperate from the band. Trey and Matt also guess it’s because the song is bad. It’s basically like “hell is bad you don’t want to go to hell it’s not good there.” Their joke, not mine.

Third acts are often the worst

When asked if he thinks the 3rd act holds up, Trey says no. But Trey and Matt think most movie’s third acts don’t hold up. They go on an extended riff about “Iron Man” and “The Dark Knight” of all things. While I love them both, they complain that in “Iron Man” you see Tony Stark go through the whole movie experimenting with things, making the suit, training and sucking at first. In the 3rd act, Jeff Bridges is just like “I made another suit and I AM INVINCIBLE” and it kind of comes out of nowhere. The only thing they say about “Dark Knight” is how it has like, 5 or 7 acts.

In conclusion, this movie is amazing. Just classic. I don’t have anything else to say, except these two are the yin to Seth MacFarlane’s shitty and terrible yang.

OK, I think I’m done. Can I go now?

Tags: Reviews, movies // Add Comment »