South Park, the show that goes where other shows generally fear to tread. It is famous for no subject, person, or belief being above the mockery of the long-running animated juggernaut. So absolutely nothing is off-limits, right? Wrong!
Even South Park is not immune from outrage. It turns out there are episodes that you might have to really work hard to watch. You might even have to set sail to disreputable waters if you feel the need to revisit them.
Recently, online outlet Ladbible collated a list of these episodes. We can all guess a couple of them, but here is the full list.
Super Best Friends – Season 5 Episode 3 (2001)
In this episode, Stan, Kyle, Kenny, and Cartman learned that magician David Blaine was behind a mass-suicide pact. In order to stop this from taking place, the boys teamed up with Jesus, who recruited a team of other religious figures, one of whom was Muhammed.
The episode didn’t receive much backlash when it first aired, and then the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy gained massive headlines. A few years later South Park again featured a depiction of Muhammed in several episodes and these led to the fundamentalist organization Revolution Muslim sending death threats to co-creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone.
As a result, this episode was pulled at the same time and now remains hard to track down through official channels. South Park Studios says:
“We apologise that South Park Studios cannot stream Super Best Friends.”
Cartoon Wars Parts I and II – Season 10, episodes 3 and 4 (2006)
For what will become a regular theme in this list, Cartoon Wars started with Cartman and Kyle coming to blows over an upcoming episode of Family Guy, which intends to feature Muhammad.
In the episode, the Family Guy network threatened to ban the episode. Cartman sees this as an opportunity to get Family Guy off the air forever, but Kyle is a fan. So the two of them head for Hollywood to drive the outcome they want for Family Guy.
Meanwhile, the terrorists hatch a plan to respond with a cartoon of their own that shows Jesus taking a dump on the American flag.
200 and 201 – Season 14, episodes 5 and 6 (2010)
These episodes poked fun at previous South Park episodes around Comedy Central’s refusal to show images of Muhammad on the network and Tom Cruise attempting to steal the Prophet Muhammad’s ‘powers’.
Once again Revolution Muslim threatened the show’s creators, and once again Comedy Central pulled the episodes. Former Comedy Central head Doug Herzog gave an interview at the time to the Hollywood Reporter, saying:
“We were protecting everyone who works here. That was the decision we needed to make. That was the hardest we’ve ever pushed back [over the show’s content].”
Not On The List
Not on the list above, but causing issues for Comedy Central and Paramount at the time, is Trapped In The Closet.
The twelfth episode in the ninth season of South Park, and the 137th episode of the series overall, it featured Stan joining the Church of Scientology in an attempt to find something “fun and free”. During his auditing, his “thetan levels” result in him being identified as the reincarnation of founder L. Ron Hubbard.
When it first aired, the Scientologists went absolutely crazy. A rebroadcast was scheduled for March 15, 2006, but it never happened.
Chef voice actor Isaac Hayes, a Scientologist, left the show over the episode. Reports also said prominent Scientologist Tom Cruise, who is portrayed in the episode, threatened to back out of his promotional obligations for the Paramount Pictures film Mission: Impossible III if Viacom, the owner of both Comedy Central and Paramount, allowed a repeat airing of the episode.
Cruise and his representatives have subsequently denied the claim, while Isaac Hayes son claimed the Scientologists wrote the statement on behalf of their father, without his knowledge, as he had still not recovered from a stroke.
This episode does, occasionally, now air.