Cartman Gets an Anal Probe

Plot

While waiting for the school bus, Kyle Broflovski, Stan Marsh, Kenny McCormick, and Eric Cartman are joined by Kyle's young brother Ike, whom Kyle tells he cannot come to school. Cartman recounts a dream about being abducted by aliens, but the others insist the events were real and refer to the aliens as visitors. Chef arrives and confirms seeing an alien spaceship the previous evening, mentioning stories of anal probes, which Cartman denies experiencing.

The school bus picks up the boys, and they watch as the visitors abduct Ike. Kyle spends the rest of the episode trying to rescue him. At school, Cartman begins farting fire, and Kyle fails to convince teacher Mr. Garrison to excuse him from class. Chef, learning of Ike's abduction and seeing a machine emerge from Cartman's anus, helps the boys escape by pulling the fire alarm.

Outside, Cartman is hit by a beam that makes him sing and dance to I Love to Singa. A spaceship appears; Kyle throws a stone, and the ship fires back, propelling Kenny into the road. He is trampled by cows but survives, then is run over and killed by a police car. Stan and Kyle meet Wendy Testaburger at Stark's Pond, where she suggests using the machine inside Cartman to contact the visitors.

They tie Cartman to a tree, and when he flatulates, a satellite dish emerges from his anus. The alien ship arrives, and Ike jumps to safety after Kyle asks him to imitate David Caruso's career. The visitors communicate with cows, finding them the most intelligent species. Cartman is abducted again but returned the next day with pinkeye.

Production

The pilot was written by Matt Stone and Trey Parker, with Parker directing, on a budget of $300,000. It was animated entirely with traditional cut-paper stop-motion, involving hundreds of construction paper cutouts—including individual mouth shapes and characters in multiple sizes—photographed frame by frame with an overhead camera to pre-recorded dialogue. Assistants helped cut and paste, while Parker, Stone, and animation director Eric Stough did most of the animation.

The episode took about three months to complete during the summer of 1996 at Celluloid Studios in Denver, Colorado. The starry night sky was created by punching holes in black posterboard and lighting it from behind; Kenny's blood was simulated by drawing a red dot and adding more each frame. Non-speaking characters rarely move to save time. The finished pilot was 28 minutes, too long for a half-hour slot with commercials, so the creators cut about ten minutes and added three minutes to tie up the changed storyline.

In the original pilot, Cartman flatulates fire after eating hot tamales; in the shortened version, it results from the alien probe. Other scenes focused more on Pip; his introduction scene was later reused in An Elephant Makes Love to a Pig in its original cutout form. The additions were made with computer animation, and all subsequent episodes have been computer-animated. The creators aimed for computer animation to simulate cardboard cutout animation, but the techniques were not perfected until later, making the two styles easily distinguishable in the pilot.

Themes

South Park is described as a vicious social satire that highlights the amorality of the children and contrasts it with the hypocrisy of the adults around them. The show is often compared to The Simpsons and King of the Hill, but is noted for a malevolent streak exemplified by Kenny's repeated death. Humor arises from the disparity between the characters' cute appearance and their crude behavior. Parker and Stone stated that the language is realistic, arguing that many shows portray children as unrealistically good and sweet.

Frederic Biddle of The Boston Globe notes that the show plays on its grade-school aesthetic for shock value, calling it more a profane Peanuts than a downsized Beavis and Butt-Head, with Kenny symbolizing the voiceless underclass eliminated each episode. Claire Bickley of the Toronto Sun explains that the show captures the mix of innocence and viciousness in children that age, with the boys fascinated by bodily functions and mimicking adult behavior and language, such as Kyle telling Stan and Wendy to make sweet love down by the fire, a phrase learned from Chef.

Jim Dawson notes that the rise of adult animation in the 1990s allowed television to indulge in flatulence humor with shows like The Ren & Stimpy Show, The Simpsons, and Beavis and Butt-Head, and South Park builds on this tradition.

Broadcast and reception

The episode first aired at 10 pm EDT on August 13, 1997 on Comedy Central. In Canada, it was broadcast during prime time after Seinfeld on Global TV, with objectionable material cut, including dildo jokes and two scenes of Kyle kicking Ike. After viewer complaints, the series was moved to midnight on October 17, 1997, and the deleted material was restored. It first aired in Britain on Channel 4 on July 10, 1998, with a station representative saying it was for the audience coming back from the pub with a curry.

The episode earned a Nielsen rating of 1.3, translating to 980,000 viewers, considered high for a cable program. In April 2007, The New Zealand Herald called the first episode a huge success, but initial reviews were generally negative, focusing on the low, obscene comedy. Bruce Fretts of Entertainment Weekly criticized the writing and characters, stating the jokes were not as fresh as the mouths and the characters were as one-dimensional as the cut-and-paste animation.

Tim Goodman of The San Francisco Examiner acknowledged that many viewers would find the show vile, rude, sick, potentially dangerous, childish, and mean-spirited, but argued that viewers need a bent for irony, sarcasm, anger, and an understanding that cardboard cutout animation of foul-mouthed third-graders is a tragically underused comic premise.

Did You Know?

• The origins of South Park date back to 1992, when Trey Parker and Matt Stone created a Christmas short known as Jesus vs. Frosty while students at the University of Colorado.
• Fox Broadcasting Company executive Brian Graden commissioned Parker and Stone in 1995 to create a second short, The Spirit of Christmas, which more closely resembled the later series.
• The episode was first released on video on May 5, 1998, as part of a three-volume VHS set with humorous introductions by Parker and Stone.