"Guitar Queer-o (South Park)", 11-8-2007

When "Guitar Queer-o" started, I was distracted on the computer. My wife asked me something, and I said, "Shh! South Park is starting!"

It started with a set of knights having some sort of conversation about some murderous traitor. Instead of the little round computer figure characters we've come to know in "South Park", these figures were much more detailed. We have already seen such figures on "Make Love, Not Warcraft", where the avatars of Kyle et. al. were the near-perfectly detailed characters from those sword-and-sorcery PC games. I sat and waited for the punchline.

There was no punchline. I missed the opening tag. This wasn't "South Park" at all but a two-minute commercial for "Assassin's Creed", a new video game which will be "released" in November, not unlike a movie.

It just goes to show you that the writers of "South Park" have the ability to go after anything. We've seen live action, manga, computer avatars, and the classic South Park animation so nothing is safe on "South Park". Oddly enough, this episode goes right after the very demographic "Assassin's Creed" is trying to reach -- young male video gamers with a lot of time on their hands.

The episode stars with the South Park kids sitting on a couch watching Stan and Kyle play a popular video game called "Guitar Hero", which really exists. The idea behind "Guitar Hero" is that if you press the keys on your controller correctly, the guitar parts from (formerly) popular songs will be duplicated in the video game. If you punch buttons correctly, you will produce note-perfect riffs and if you miss a button or two, you get awful clanks and missed chords. Stan and Kyle are playing this game on controllers which are shaped like ukelele-sized guitars and manage to rack up an impressive 100,000 points.

Randy Marsh, Stan's father, wanders in. Getting what the game is about, he decides to impress the kids by hooking up his old electric guitar and playing "Carry On Wayward Son" by Kansas, which is the "game" that Stan and Kyle have just mastered. To Mr. Marsh's chagrin, the kids aren't interested. They call the playing of an actual guitar "gay" and suggest that actual guitar playing is a hobby of old people.

Marsh counters that what Stan and Kyle are doing is not real music in any way, shape, or form but at the door arrives Mr. Kincaid (a throwback to "The Partridge Family") a music manager who is impressed with Stan and Kyle's high score and offers to sign them to a big-money contract -- playing "Guitar Hero". He takes the two to a producer who listens to "Carry On Wayward Son". Unfamiliar with it, he asks if the boys played it, and Kincaid answers that no, that was a song by Kansas -- but that Stan and Kyle racked up awesome points on "Guitar Hero".

The producer agrees to put up the money and invites Kyle and Stan to a party, where they meet the cream of celebrities -- from Denver.

For the rest of the show, the show's writers play some riffs of their own, as they humorously drag out every trope in "the rise and fall of the young rock star". The band makes it big. The manager tells the star (Stan) that the rest of the band (Kyle) is expendable. The shocking scene where Kyle discovers Stan has left him behind. The formation of the new band. The star's disputes over the choice of music. The rest of the band playing the music they love at the local bar (bowling alley). Etc. etc. All that's missing is the girlfriend who gets dumped for a richer, more urban girl and you've got your classic rock movie.

And of course, where would a movie about rock and roll tragedy be without drug use. Stan, the pressure getting to him, calms his nerves by playing a video game called "Heroin Hero" -- you chase a dragon that you can never catch. And of course, Stan falls apart at the big gig. But can he and Kyle put their differences aside and make it?

The show is an extended comment about people making it bigtime playing virtual versions of real-life activities. As the Marshes note, if Stan spent as much time studying a real guitar as he did in playing a virtual one, he'd probably have a skill he could take somwhere -- if it weren't "gay" and for "old people" in Stan's social set. Today, you can find people who spend hours on games like "World of Warcraft", and I mean hours as in "80 plus hours a week". There are people who spend every waking moment they are not at work or in school playing these games, the parts of which have virtual characters mimic mundane professions like blacksmithing or metalworking. If the players dumped that time into actually getting out and working at these skills -- ! But that never happens. A person who spent 80 hours a week using an actual sword might be marked as one of those Ren Faire geeks; someone who has a fighter character with master swordplay on "World of Warcraft" would be seen as more impressive in some quarters.

Furthermore, like the episode of "The Simpsons" called "Homer's Enemy" which put to death the idea that American really, really loves a working man, "Guitar Queer-O" puts to the torch the idea that wisdom is more important than fame in American society. For many kids, the difference between being Keith Richards or Slash versus just having the money and fame of a guitar god would be no difference at all. My wife, when she was a school teacher, found that many brain-dead kids had dreams of being doctors and lawyers yet didn't do as much as lift a finger to bring those dreams to reality. Those kids must have supposed that loving the fame would be enough.

As Stan and Kyle move up levels in "Guitar Hero", the game releases messages like "you are a ROCK GOD!" When the two finally reach their goal -- when they finally unlock the last message -- the writers jab the knife home with a skill that would have made the highest-level fighter in "World of Warcraft" hang his head in shame, if he had a mind to listen.

I wonder what the message was to all those people contemplating spending hours on "Assassin's Creed".

"More Crap (South Park)", 10-10-2007

It's hard to believe that "South Park" has been on the air for ten years. The style of the humor hasn't changed because the original writers, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, are still writing stories and are still fairly funny.

The reason I don't follow "South Park" that closely is that "South Park" episodes are strictly hit and miss. Either Parker and Stone manage to come up with something almost divinely inspired (for example "Le Petit Tourette", when Cartman decides to fake Tourette's Syndrome, believing it will give him an excuse to curse nonstop), or they go for raunch and fall flat on their faces.

This time, they fell on their face. "More Crap" is an episode that doesn't require much comment. The father of Kyle, Randy March, hasn't gone to the bathroom for three weeks. When he finally manages to pass a bowel movement, he is impressed with its size and decides to show it to the guys at the local bar.

He believes that he might be the world record holder for biggest crap, but to his chagrin (and everyone's relief), the Guinness organization does not keep track of that record. Instead, Mr. March is referred to the European Fecal Standards and Measurements Board in Switzerland, which sadly informs Mr. March that the holder of this dubious record is none other than legendary singer/philanthropist Bono.

March is depressed, and drowns his sorrows at the local bar. His barrmates cheer him up by telling him that he came close to breaking the record, without really even trying. He might be able to beat the record if he....trained for it.

And so it goes. I won't spoil the episode for you if you haven't seen it, but be warned...there is a lot of fecal matter here, and not just in the writing. "South Park", which has never flinched from the gross-out, provides its readers with some very large animated fecal matter, the type that does not dance and save Christmas, so be forewarned.

One fault of "More Crap" is that, not unlike "The Simpsons" and the most recent "Family Guy, the show flags the minute the attention turns away from the major characters. I have to protest that I never really found Randy Marsh all that compelling, world record crap or not. Kenny is much more interesting than Randy Marsh, and he doesn't even speak!

Of course, there are the drive-by shots at pop culture. Along with Bono being roundly mocked, we learn that the measurement of fecal mass is a "Couric" (after Katie Couric) and that Randy gets his "talent" by consistently eating at P. F. Chang's, a franchise Chinese restaurant. Rather than say anything really thought-provoking, I suppose Parker and Stone wanted the world to know how much they disliked Bono, Couric, and P. F. Chang's. "We get it already. Stop trying", as Kyle might say.

The other major fault is the "let's beat the joke to death" philosophy. It's a tired trope of modern comedy, where a bad joke is repeated with multiple variations in the hopes that one will either laugh from a) fatigue, or b) in admiration of the performers' persistence. In a recent episode of "Family Guy" -- "Movin' Out (Brian's Song)", Chris Griffin and another character have a long conversation about films -- a looooooooonnnnnnnng conversation -- that brings the comedy to a screeching halt and makes me want to horsewhip Seth Green to within an inch of his life.

Thus, more jokes about Bono are repeated in an effort to force the viewer into giving up a chuckle. This Bono-bash builds up to a gross out moment that evokes disgust more than it does humor. (Matt and Trey seem absolutely convinced that all guys do is talk about what large bowel movements they've had. I don't think I've ever had that kind of conversation with a dude, and if I did, I wouldn't brag about it.)

There is a running gag where a window pops up at the bottom of the screen reminding the viewers that South Park is an Emmy-winning comedy, which is used at the end to underline the incongruity between what one believes to be an Emmy-winning comedy and the huge load one is seeing on the screen. I suppose that Matt and Trey wanted to remind us that Emmy-winning comedies can occasionally produce a clunker, in this case, a gold-plated clunker weighing several Courics. Hopefully, with this episode out of their...uh...system, they'll do better next time.