South Park - The Complete Seventh Season (DVD, 2006, Multi-Disc Set)

March 17, 2006 - After you reach the top of a mountain, the only way to go is back down. After reaching comic summits in the show's fifth and sixth seasons, South Park was ripe for a bit of a letdown - and on The Complete 7th Season DVD set, signs of some decline start to creep in. Fortunately, even a diminished South Park is still a very funny show, with some wicked satire lurking beneath its faux-lowbrow surface.

Followers of Matt Stone and Trey Parker's series know that they frequently whip up episodes in the week prior to airing. While satirizing subjects when the headline ink is still damp can be a useful commodity, the flip side of that is the possibility that a sub-par episode may go out simply because Comedy Central is expecting a new show every Wednesday at 10 pm.


They freely admit in the commentaries that they still end up pulling a rabbit out of a hat more often than not, even with all the time between seasons available to craft shows. So episodes like those involving the boys' discovery that Earth is just a scheduled-for-cancellation reality series (not-so-vaguely echoing The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), Jimmy and Timmy inadvertently hooking up with the gang-banging Crips, and the TPing of a teacher's house are entertaining but occasionally feel off-kilter and forced.

After a couple seasons of witty forensic dissections of the state of the world and politics, the episode which coincided with the start of the war in Iraq was surprisingly ham-handed - it repeated a central thesis countless times and summarily oversimplified opposing sides of the issue. Meanwhile, the episode title "I'm A Little Bit Country, I'm A Little Bit Rock & Roll" suggests that they were more into connecting the story to the old Donny and Marie Show number than offering a proper dissertation on the merits or war. Still, it's kind of funny to watch anti-war protesters brutally killing pro-war activists as if they're oblivious to the irony.


After the middling start, the season's batting average markedly improves as Parker and Stone focus on smaller targets. Fat Butt and Pancake Head (better know as the "Taco-Flavored Kisses" show) treated us to the sight of Cartman's J.Lo hand puppet alter-ego jerking off Ben Affleck; CSI, Queer Eye For the Straight Guy and Red Dawn get righteously spoofed and we find out what a pre-pubescent version of Hooters would look like.

The co-opting of identity politics is slyly handled in South Park is Gay! Mr. Garrison is offended that everyone is casually adopting the appearance of being gay (via "metrosexuality"), thus depriving actual gay people of their hard-won status; he eventually contacts Chef (Isaac Hayes) to figure out how black people coped with white people co-opting their culture and language.


Speaking of group identities, the scene where Cartman poses his Christian rock band for a photo in which each member is looking off in a different direction, is hilarious in a Spinal Tap way because every musician has taken a band photo like this. Speaking of Spinal Tap, director Rob Reiner's militant anti-smoking activism was also slapped around this season.
-ign.com

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