South Park: Complete Second Season (1998-9)
Film:
DVD:

Created by Trey Parker & Matt Stone
Starring the voices of Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Isaac Hayes, Mary Kay Bergman

Features:

• All eighteen second season episodes
  
• Introductions by Trey & Matt on discs one & two
  
• Goin' Down to South Park docu
  
• "Chocolate Salty Balls" by Chef music video
  

Released by: Warner Brothers.
Rating: NR, although you get flogged if you let little kids watch the thing
Region: 1
Anamorphic: N/A; episodes appear in their original 1.33:1 format.

My Advice: Rent it; fans should own.

Stan, Kyle, Cartman and Kenny: the Four Musketeers who comprise the main cast of South Park. In their second season, their already tenuous and violent friendship will be tested by everything from an evil planetarium to an evil twin of Cartman's to an evil chicken fornicator. There seems to be a whole thread of evil running throughout the season. Regardless, with the assistance (of varied quality) of Chef, perhaps they will all survive the experience. Well...except Kenny.

South Park is probably one of the most subversive shows to hit television in God knows how long. Granted, for sheer humor it ranks up there with The Simpsons, although it's not always as clever nor as plentiful with the cultural references. Parker and Stone paint with broad strokes, and despite the plethora of bathroom humor bits, cursing and violence--they manage to have a thread of morality running through the shows. Granted, the moral can be used to pummel you to death--and it's a lot harder to bring such things to life in twenty-two minutes as opposed to a feature film--but still, it's there.

The DVD set contains all of the second season episodes--and on the first two discs you get a surprise bonus of Parker and Stone introducing each of their "favorites." First up, they're entertaining at a retirement home, then they're doing a bacon cooking show with a pig sidekick. They are over the top, sick, weird and oddly amusing. What's also amusing is the fact there are no such intros on disc three--very strange.

There's also the documentary, which is roughly fifty minutes in length and was filmed before the feature film hit cinemas. Without context--i.e. knowing when this docu is from, it's especially jarring to see Mary Kay Bergman being interviewed and doing her voices before the camera, seeing as how she committed suicide the year the film came out. Jarring, but once you realize what the shot is, it's just pretty goddamn sad--she was tremendously talented.

The rest of the docu is interesting enough, divided between talking with Parker and Stone (who are sitting in a hot tub with a strange third man), the cast and crew members, and some demonstrations of the animation process. Parker and Stone's schtick is to act as though they are total assholes throughout, which comes within a hair's breadth of becoming...well, to use their own terminology, "old and stupid." Somehow it manages to remain funny enough to persevere, however. This is probably due to the fact that the behind the scenes stuff that is shown--which is fascinating to watch how you can take the most powerful FX programs known to man...and create construction paper characters with them. I was a bit miffed that you never get any overlays with people's names on them, so I couldn't tell you the names of ninety percent of the people the docu introduced me to.

Finishing up the set is a music video for Chef's "Chocolate Salty Balls," which is a song that needs to be covered by Fishbone if I've ever heard one.

The set is for the fan, pure and simple. They would buy it even with no features, but with not much in the way of features (and no CD set of commentaries to supplement), there's nothing really on here to entice the non-fan to grab it. But they should rent it at least, because it's just drop dead funny.