This will ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY blow your mind! South Park COPIES "The King of Kong"

LeeB99

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This will ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY blow your mind! South Park COPIES "The King of Kong"

Hey everyone,

This evening, U2 is playing in Nashville, TN at the Vanderbilt stadium and a lot of people that I know from high school on Facebook are going. This reminded me of a South Park episode that came out a number of years back which poked a LOT of fun at Bono. I went to re-watch it this morning. You can view the episode at this link:

http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s11e09-more-crap

So, here is where things get REALLY interesting. "The King of Kong" was released on August 19th of 2007 and finished it's limited release on October 21. The South Park episode "More Crap" was released on October 10, 2007 just before the theatrical run of "The King of Kong" was finished. So exactly WHAT makes me think that the creators of South Park copied "The King of Kong"? Well, if you watch the episode and imagine replacing the characters as follows:

Randy Marsh is Steve Wiebe
Bono is Billy Mitchell
Stan Marsh is Steve Wiebe's wife
The President of the European Fecal Standards and Measurements is Walter Day

The story goes like this: Randy (Steve Wiebe) THINKS that he may have a new world record, so he calls the Guiness people, but they don't keep records for what he has done. He then contacts the European Fecal Standards and Measurements institute, who DOES keep such records (the Twin Galaxies of the story) and they set up a meeting to provide him with the award. Just before the ceremony takes place, Bono (Billy Mitchell) sends a VIDEO of his record and they immediately crown Bono as the record holder. Randy gets all down about it, and his friends try to cheer him up and tell him to train more to go after the record. Randy poses the question if sending in a video is the same as being there in person or does that make it legit? Stan (Randy's son) goes to visit Bono and tells him that his dad has never been "number one" at anything and that it is really important to him (sound familiar?) that he be the best at SOMETHING. Bono goes off on him and tells him that being number one/the best is EVERYTHING to him and that absolutely NO ONE can say that he is "Number 2" at anything. It turns out that The President of the Fecal Standards (Walter Day) had a close personal relationship to Bono (Billy Mitchell) which made him favor him and it gets exposed in the end.

It is CLEAR that this episode was made as the direct result of the South Park creators viewing "The King of Kong" during it's limited theatrical showings. Thoughts???

Lee

Edit: apparently this HAD been noticed by a couple of others before, but I suspect that MOST people do not know about this, and any fan of South Park or "The King of Kong" should check out the episode to observe the similarities. At the time the episode was originally aired, "The King of Kong" was rather obscure with limited theatrical showings. There was nowhere NEAR the number of people (back then) who were familiar with the material as there is now. The vast majority of people who saw this episode when it originally aired on TV would have NO WAY to observe that this story line was "inspired by" the movie...
 
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I don't smoke weed, and I have no idea who "Willie" is? Willie Nelson? Anyhow, the creators of South Park do this sort of thing all the time. They are able to make a full episode in less than a week, and take advantage of this to put out shows that are VERY topical with current events. I'm just surprised that no one has made this observation before. If you think I am crazy, go watch the episode with what I posted before in mind. It's pretty obvious to me...
 
I don't smoke weed, and I have no idea who "Willie" is? Willie Nelson? Anyhow, the creators of South Park do this sort of thing all the time. They are able to make a full episode in less than a week, and take advantage of this to put out shows that are VERY topical with current events. I'm just surprised that no one has made this observation before. If you think I am crazy, go watch the episode with what I posted before in mind. It's pretty obvious to me...

I'm pretty sure it's been noticed before, like right after it first aired...and in other breaking news, Lincoln has been assassinated, man has landed on the moon, and the earth rotates around the sun :D
 
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Oh man you haven't seen their studios. They have a bunch of computers that aid in the development of their show, touch screen work stations and everything. They don't do anything by hand anymore, it's all like puppeteering a bunch of drag and drop characters on their computers as they construct each scene. Supposedly takes like only 3 to 6 weeks for an episode while most things in the news or whatever are still current. The voice actors seem pretty reliable as well because of the speed in which they put these things out. I mean can you imagine, first they have to pick a topic, make a story, animate it, record their voice talent, then any producing and editing in between.

They had this behind the scenes of the studios feature one day on Comedy Central, it was really interesting to see how they do it. It's nothing like traditional animation but it has gotten a lot smoother compared to their older episodes.
 
I'm pretty sure it's been noticed before, like right after it first aired...and in other breaking news, Lincoln has been assassinated, man has landed on the moon, and the earth rotates around the sun :D

Well, if anyone else ever mentioned it before, I never saw any postings or heard anything about it...
 
Yeah... I'm pretty sure everyone knew that episode was poking fun at KoK. Even one of my non-videogame friends brought up how funny the parody was, learning a little about KoK from other shows poking fun at it (like 30 Rock).

DogP
 
VERY INTERESTING. In those threads, it is mentioned and then they seem to sort of just "die out" quickly. They didn't seem to live much past the day after the original episode aired. I'm kind of surprised that I've never heard about or seen anything about this before. I wonder if any of the people featured in the movie are aware of this?
 
Man with all due respect it's cool and all but it's not exactly gonna be the topic of discussion for weeks on end :) You'll probabaly forget it after the weed wears off. :)
 
i noticed it right away, thought it would be obvious to anyone who has seen king of kong. i remember watching when it first aired and laughing my ass off when they trotted out bono as billy mitchell!!!
 
I am not a huge South Park fan (and had not heard the comparison before) bu they do this all the time:)

They do work to keep the shows current to the topics.

By far, the best eposide (IMO) was the waterpark episode.


Chris
 
The first half of this season (which recently wrapped up) pretty much SUCKED. Not one episode stood out as a "classic". A couple of years ago, they had an AWESOME season (13) that had episodes such as:

Margaritaville (about the economic crisis)
WTF (the professional wrestling episode)
Fatbeard (Cartman goes to Somalia to become a pirate)
Fishsticks (making fun of Kanye West being such a douche)
Butter's Bottom Bitch (Butters becomes a pimp by selling kisses at school)
Dead Celebrities (about all of the famous people who died that year, focusing on MJ)
Whale Whores (making fun of the Whale Wars TV show)
Pinewood Derby (which I think was inspired by the movie "The Box")
The "F" Word (making fun of Harley Davidson owners)
Pee (the water park episode mentioned above)

I mean literally HALF the episodes that season could be considered genius, and yet they intentionally threw in the WORST episode ever made on April 1st as a joke (Eat, Pray, Queef), which was so absurdly out of place among the other episodes. It's amazing that they can go from making so many good episodes to crap in such a short time. I was never a fan of "Family Guy", but I think it suffered the same fate pretty early on. The first season seemed clever enough, but as time went on, I found myself not wanting to watch any more random "Oh well you think that's bad! Remember the time when..." jokes that drive off the cliff to some random shit that has nothing to do with the story. The whole premise behind the Star Wars episodes was to basically COPY things that people are VERY familiar with and only make minor comedic changes. They bank on people being so familiar with the material that they will find it "enjoyable". That's not being creative. It's being lazy...

Lee
 
Nice, lol! Thanks for sharing the link.

The episode is definitely parodying the King of Kong. And it did a freakin' awesome job at that!
 
Nice, lol! Thanks for sharing the link.

The episode is definitely parodying the King of Kong. And it did a freakin' awesome job at that!

Glad to hear you enjoyed it! If everyone who sees this thread (and is not familiar with the episode) gives it a viewing, I think that they will feel that was time well spent. Even MORE SO if they are familiar with (or enjoyed) KOK...

Lee
 
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