Plot: After Kenny is killed yet again, an incident at the morgue turns him into a zombie gives him pinkeye! The entire town quickly become brain-eating pinkeye sufferers, and it’s ruining Stan, Kyle, and Cartman’s Halloween.
Breakdown: Wow. I’ve gone all this time on this blog without ever reviewing anything from South Park. That’s wild.
I’ve never been a huge South Park fan. I had a period of a couple years around when the movie premiered on TV where I was somewhat into the show and watched the movie several times (Careful to not get caught by my parents. I was only around ten at the time.) but I was never too big of a fan of it. I respect South Park greatly for what it is, and I also respect its longevity, plus it can be a lot of fun, but my sense of humor just doesn’t fully mesh with South Park’s.
I guess I’ve just never been too into “Working real hard to offend you” type of humor. I’m not a prude by any means, but a lot of the time it just feels like shock value doing a lot of the work. South Park tends to be good about maintaining funny commentary and witty jokes to offset the shock humor, but the formula just isn’t something I’d consistently be attracted to.
Made more sense for me to get into it briefly as a kid. This was the time in my life where I was making a slight effort to sneakily watch more mature stuff just to feel more grown up. I did the same thing with things like Beavis and Butthead and Celebrity Death Match and stuff. It didn’t matter if I found the thing particularly great or even good. I just felt value in being like “Hehe, I’m watching stuff outside my age bracket. Hehe.” That sounds lame, but I was a very sheltered child. It didn’t take much to get that particular thrill.
As an adult, South Park is something I dip my toes back into a few times every now and then, but, again, it’s just not something that tends to lock me in. I’ll get a hankerin’ for it out of the blue, enjoy a few episodes, and then leave it behind again. It’s like if South Park were a physical item, it’d be on the shelf right at checkout so every time I see it I’ll be like “Ehhh, should I? It’s right there. And I enjoy it enough. I have a few extra bucks. But I already got a candy bar. Ehh, sure. Why not?”
That said, this is one of those episodes I actually did watch back when I was a kid. I enjoyed it quite a bit. I remember watching it more than once, and I think I enjoyed it about as much as I did back then.
There’s a certain talent to doing the “Something obvious is happening but people either ignore it or think it’s something innocuous” running joke, and South Park pulls it off pretty well. Everyone but the boys are freaking out about pinkeye, and the boys just don’t notice or care that the town is going to hell and Kenny’s eating people’s brains. All they care about is their Halloween candy.
How all this happens and how it gets cleared up without affecting continuity is, as expected of South Park, pretty much just nonsense, and that’s fine. A satellite falls on Kenny, killing him, and that actually has nothing to do with anything in the story besides starting us off with Kenny dead as opposed to how the show usually kills him off near the end.
Kenny is brought to the morgue and embalmed accidentally with Worcestershire sauce and that turns him into a zombie. And everyone who wasn’t completely killed by the zombies or Cartman and Stan get turned back just by killing the original zombie IE Kenny.
Trey Parker apparently didn’t like this ending and thought it didn’t make sense and was a deus ex machina, but like….does he know what show he’s making? If your zombie story started with a boy turning into a zombie because he was embalmed with Worcestershire sauce, I’m pretty sure there’s no ending that DOES make sense and isn’t a deus ex machina.
This, apparently, was a breakout episode for the series. It solidified aspects of several characters, like Mrs. Cartman being the town whore, Cartman being….just the worst human being, and Chef being one of the only level-headed adults in town who actually understands the truth of the weirder things happening in town.
I understand how it did become such a classic of the series. I don’t personally think it’s worthy of being a yearly Halloween rewatch for me or anything, but it is fun and got a handful of chuckles and smiles out of me.
I actually don’t know how many South Park Halloween episodes exist, so maybe we’ll cross paths again on Animating Halloween in the future. Or even AVAHS.
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