When it comes to parodying and lampooning current news and trends, no show — animated or otherwise — comes close to South Park. Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s brainchild (brainchildren?) takes and equal opportunity approach when it comes to skewering everything from pop culture to religion. Here are 3 classic episodes that saw Stan, Kyle, Kenny, Cartman, and the rest of the South Park population set their sights on technology.
Black Friday – Video games isn’t a new subject for South Park (“How do you kill that which has no life?” immediately springs to mind), but they took the next generation console war between the Xbox One and the PS4 to new and absurd heights by mashing it up with Game of Thrones. It’s wizard Cartman and his Xbox One army against elf warrior Stan and his PS4 brigade in a war that translated to an actual video game rather well in The Stick of Truth.
Freemium Isn’t Free – Speaking of video games, the show also took aim on the proliferation of the so-called “free-to-play” or “freemium” video game business model. The explanation the Canadian Minister of Mobile Games gives Terrance and Phillip about the whole “freemium” (the “mium” is Latin for “no really”) is a pitch-perfect rant on why a lot of gamers consider the F2P model a veritable plague on gaming. And no, while the South Park brand may have everything from a critically-acclaimed action RPG to a branded online lottery-based game, they haven’t succumbed to the F2P menace just yet.
HumancentiPad – While a relatively more uneven episode laughs-wise compared to the first two on our list, HumancentiPad is still noteworthy for having one of the most insane Terms of Agreement jokes ever as well as another chance for Cartman to get all giddy about Kyle’s misfortune — and if you know anything about Human Centipede then you’ll have a good idea what makes Eric so deliriously happy.
South Park has been at this for 19 whole seasons and there are no signs it’ll be slowing down soon, so expect more ridiculous trends to get their turn.
