The Deep End of South Park


Book Description

No American television show of the past decade has been vilified as has Comedy Central's South Park. This is the show that has featured, in turn, a nine-year-old boy enmeshed in an affair with Ben Affleck, a maniacal Mel Gibson smearing feces everywhere, and the misadventures of Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo, a talking, bouncing, singing piece of poop. While it's not always an exercise in good taste, South Park is a socially significant satire that has also devoted entire episodes to interpretations of Great Expectations, Ken Burns' Civil War, and Hamlet. This volume explores the popularity and cultural relevance of South Park and its place as an artistically and politically worthy satire.




South Park FAQ


Book Description

(FAQ). There are few modern animated television shows that could survive over a decade and a half and remain as funny... or as stupid... or as sick... or as depraved... today as when they started. Even fewer can claim to cater to "mature" audiences, while their critics complain that everything about the show is immature. And fewer still where, for the first decade or so, one of the main characters was killed off every week. Then returned, no worse for wear, seven days later. That, however, is the world of South Park , and this is a book about that world. A journey through the lives, times, and catastrophes that have established the tiny mountain town of South Park, Colorado, as America's favorite dysfunctional community. A voyage into a universe where Barbra Streisand is reborn as a Japanese monster movie; where Kentucky Fried Chicken is a registered drug; where Canada is forever on a footing for war; and where we discover that even feces love Christmas. From Zebulon Pike to Chef, from Brian Boitano to Mel Gibson, from "Super Best Friends" to South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut , it's all covered in South Park FAQ . Featuring A-Z coverage of the all the characters readers have come to know and the stories behind the episodes, it also includes an episode guide and an appendix of all of the songs featured in South Park . Nothing is sacred and nobody is safe. Even physical and emotional disabilities are just another banana skin for someone to slip on, and the term "politically correct" has been translated into "oh good, you're getting annoyed." It is a place where ... you get the picture. This is not Bambi !




South Park


Book Description

South Park is to be a phenomenon in the UK with the madcap adventures of Cartman, Kenny and pals thrilling fans. South Park: The Scripts: Book Two ties into Channel 4's transmission of Series 3, and includes five hilarious scripts: The Mexican Staring Frog of Southern Sri Lanka Chef's Salty Chocolate Balls Cow Days Gnomes Rainforest Schmainforest Each script is illustrated with a selection of images from the show, along with the original storyboards which the animators worked from.




Popular Culture and the Future of Politics


Book Description

Popular Culture and the Future of Politics: Cultural Studies and the Tao of South Park argues that progressives should perceive the connections among media, policy, and culture beyond the limits of "politics" and "news". With sustained analyses of groundbreaking contemporary examples of what has become known as "convergence culture," Ted Gournelos brings together a wide range of media without sacrificing depth. His examples, such as South Park, The Simpsons, The Onion, The Daily Show, Chappelle's show and The Boondocks, are chosen for their political scope and social impact and demonstrate the ways in which what we know as "politics" is rapidly changing. The book's forays into established fields like feminist, race, and queer theory are combined with perspectives drawn from political economy and rhetoric to demonstrate the power of irony, humor, and cultural dissonance in modern approaches to dissonant cultural politics. Popular Culture and the Future of Politics approaches popular culture's treatment of events, social norms, and political shifts through three techniques by which political discourse can be reframed, negotiated, or opposed. It incorporates discussions of contemporary U.S. media policy, the structural changes incurred through the emergence of the internet, and political developments over the past decade, and suggests that contemporary popular media can combine with a self-consciously oppositional branding strategy to allow and encourage new types of activism. Book jacket.




The Intersection of Animation, Video Games, and Music


Book Description

In both video games and animated films, worlds are constructed through a combination of animation, which defines what players see on the screen, and music and sound, which provide essential cues to action, emotion, and narrative. This book offers a rich exploration of the intersections between animation, video games, and music and sound, bringing together a range of multidisciplinary lenses. In fourteen chapters, the contributors consider similarities and differences in how music and sound structure video games and animation, as well as the animation within video games, and explore core topics of nostalgia, adaptation, gender and sexuality. Offering fresh insights into the aesthetic interplay of animation, video games, and sound, this volume provides a gateway into new areas of study that will be of interest to scholars and students across musicology, animation studies, game studies, and media studies more broadly.




Enviro-Toons


Book Description

This book takes an ecrocritical approach to analytical readings of animated feature films, short subjects and television shows. Beginning with the "simply subversive" environmental messages in the Felix the Cat cartoons of the 1920s, the author examines "green" themes in such popular animated film efforts as Bambi (1942), The Simpsons Movie (2007), Wall-E (2008) and Happy Feet (2008), as well as James Cameron's live action/animation blockbuster Avatar (2009). The discussion extends beyond American films to include the works of Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, including the Oscar-winning Spirited Away (2002). Also evaluated for their pro-ecological content are the television cartoon series South Park and Futurama. The appendix provides a list of film and television titles honored with the Environmental Media Award for Animation.




Terror on the Screen


Book Description

"Through dazzling close readings of a wide variety of cultural texts, from the "Battlestar Galactica" reboot to post-9/11 pornography, Howie is able to demonstrate how the politics and poetics of witnessing' have come to structure the experience of American popular culture in the past decade."--Jeff Melnick, University of Massachusett, Boston.




Titus Andronicus: The State of Play


Book Description

Shakespeare's and Peele's Titus Andronicus has had a theatrical and a critical revival in the last fifteen years; the critical revival was perhaps prompted by Jonathan Bate's Arden edition of the play and its revision of the traditional critical account that it is an immature work and overly sensationalistic with its emphasis on non-essential violence. Recent debates and approaches have drawn closer attention to the play's classicism; re-defined its genre (for example the revised edition of the New Dramatic Sources will re-classify the play as one of Shakespeare's Roman plays); re-considered the nature of violent spectacle, family relations and kinship, political alliance, race and miscegenation. This study will explore how the revitalized critical responses to early modern and contemporary performance histories has had a significant impact upon the wider reception of this play.




Drawn to the Gods


Book Description

Sacred centers -- The difference race makes: Native American Religions, Hinduism, and Judaism -- American Christianity, part 1: backwards neighbors -- American Christianity, part 2: American Christianities as dangerous threats -- Stigma, stupidity, and exclusion: "cults" and Muslims -- List of episodes referenced




South Park Conservatives


Book Description

For the better part of 30 years, liberal bias has dominated mainstream media. But author and political journalist Brian Anderson reveals in his new book that the era of liberal dominance is going the way of the dodo bird.