South Park

Trivia

• The film Bowling for Columbine includes an interview with Matt Stone that suggests South Park was largely inspired by Stone's childhood experiences in Littleton, Colorado. Stone describes Littleton as painfully normal and highly intolerant of nonconformist behavior. Stone's appearance was followed by an uncredited cartoon in a style strongly reminiscent of South Park that was not the work of either Stone or Parker. It became a point of contention between them and the filmmaker, Michael Moore, as they believed Moore meant to imply they had contributed it to his film. They have said the appearance of Moore as a suicide bomber in their 2004 feature film Team America: World Police is their sardonic response to this incident.
• Les Misérables has had several cameo roles throughout the series, including Cosette's appearance, Cartman's prison number, 24601 (Jean Valjean's number), and an entire song in South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut that is based on "One Day More", a song from the musical. Also, in Episode 414 "Helen Keller! The Musical", the "musical theater expert" sounds similar to Colm Wilkinson, who played the original Jean Valjean on Broadway. In fact, Cartman says the expert (introduced as Geoffrey Mainard) played the lead in a production of Les Misérables. Characters on The Simpsons, incidentally, often have the number 24601 as well.
• A short tribute sketch was shown for the 30th anniversary of Monty Python which parodied the "Dead Parrot sketch." The parody takes part in a friend's store, where Eric Cartman walks in and complains that Kenny, the friend that he bought, is dead. Eventually an ending showing crude cut outs of Terry Gilliam, Venus de Milo, and the Monty Python foot appear.
• Trey Parker animated a South Park version of a joke called The Aristocrats for the documentary of that name.
• The Parker-Stone production company is named Braniff Productions, named after a defunct airline. The logo (which featured a computer-generated shot of the Braniff airline with the subtitle "...believe it") originally appeared in Episode 101 as a joke, but decided since Parker and Stone had already established Braniff as their company anyway, the logo would close every episode.
• Many celebrities say this is their favorite cartoon.
• There are four references to O.J. Simpson:
• When Cartman tries to drive away from the cops on a powerwheels truck shaped like the white Ford Bronco going 50 mph.
• O.J. was in the episode where Butters went missing on account of his mother trying to kill him.
• In Chef Aid when Chef asks who Johnny Cochran is, Gerald Brovlovski says "He's the guy who got O.J. off."
• In The Jeffersons the police complain how they framed him and it was only because someone said the 'n word' too much that he got off.
• In almost every episode of South Park, one of the aliens from Episode 101 is hidden somewhere in the episode. You can find them all here: http://www.eeggs.com/items/1256.html