Shockwave.com & Awe

March 18, 2004 7:34 PM

Drawn in the style of a pre-school children's cartoon. But from the sick & twisted minds of the guys from Southpark. Princess, A lap dog who observes the very adult world around her. The sexual content was so extreme shockwave.com halted development of the "webisodes" only after seeing the first 2 of 39 episodes that were contracted. Now you can watch these shorts & judge for yourself. Thanks to the folks at Trio. (username/password required... mefi/mefi)
posted by Dreamghost (21 comments total)

so very very wrong.
posted by Steve_at_Linnwood at 7:40 PM on March 18, 2004

not very funny. their satire is much better now.
posted by ColdChef at 7:42 PM on March 18, 2004

preeeeeeensayce!
posted by Hankins at 7:56 PM on March 18, 2004

boy, that was really filthy...but funny (too bad the narrator sounds like cartman tho) : >
posted by amberglow at 8:07 PM on March 18, 2004

That was revolting. Oh dear.
posted by dazed_one at 8:17 PM on March 18, 2004

isn't this like a triple post? or is it just because I've seen it on every other website?
posted by PigAlien at 8:56 PM on March 18, 2004

good stuff.
posted by Tryptophan-5ht at 8:57 PM on March 18, 2004

Embarassingly stupid. I may actually stop watching South Park after having seen this.
posted by wigu at 9:10 PM on March 18, 2004

You mean you all managed to log in? What an infuriatingly slow site.
posted by raysmj at 9:27 PM on March 18, 2004

I think it's worth noting that the unfunny offensiveness is entirely intentional. TRIO aired a documentary about the creation of these shorts, called "Shocked," though I haven't seen it myself. From what I hear, it was fairly clear that Matt Stone and Trey Parker were playing a prank on the clueless execs looking for "edgy portal content," and agreed to create this on the condition it could be as offensive as they wished. So they created something that absolutely nobody in their right mind would enjoy.

I think there's more to this story than just "perverts create unfunny cartoons." Early South Park scripts had many layers of self-awareness to them. The movie, in particular, is more a satire of its own reception than a bunch of naughty jokes for their own sake. Plus, anybody who's seen "Orgazmo" or "Cannibal! The Musical" can tell you that, even accounting for the gross-out factor, the duo's sense of humor is actually remarkably gentle. "Cannibal" in general, funded completely independently during their "crazy college days," is probably the least offensive thing in Troma's catalog.

My guess is that they just thought the Internet-- or, at least, the particular deal they'd entered into-- was stupid, so it deserved something equally stupid. Perhaps they caught on early to the idea that nobody would get any money from not charging people to go to a website full of dumb things nobody wanted to see. I imagine they were laughing not at what they'd created, but how many people they'd gotten to go along with it.

I don't care much for South Park (though I think the movie was spottily brilliant) and I think Stone and Parker's work has been uneven at best. But my sensors indicate that "Princess" was all a pretty funny prank that, apparently, people are still falling for.
posted by kevspace at 11:01 PM on March 18, 2004

I agree with kevspace. That intro is just too over the top for it to be serious at all. It's an Andy Kaufman-style trick on the execs.
posted by zpousman at 7:41 AM on March 19, 2004

Kevspace nailed it.
posted by Ynoxas at 7:53 AM on March 19, 2004

The theme song is marvelous. Best use of gibberish since Screamin' Jay Hawkins died.

I agree with kevspace too, but -- wasn't a cartoon like this how South Park got greenlit? A fairly offensive lo-fi animation featuring Cartman et al making the rounds by e-mail a decade ago, and someone saw how it could be properly marketed and ran with it, and ten years later they RULE THE COMEDY WORLD?

So in that light, maybe this is part of some bigger plan. We'll be seeing "Princess" in Frasier's timeslot next year, mark my words.
posted by chicobangs at 8:06 AM on March 19, 2004

I remember when Spirit of Christmas made the rounds of the early Internet. It was the funniest fucking thing I'd ever seen, totally transgressive and sweet and hysterical.

Princess is pretty amazing: transgressive without the sweet or hysterical. Princess is to comedy as Stile Project is to pr0n.
posted by Nelson at 8:19 AM on March 19, 2004

That's the one.
posted by chicobangs at 8:34 AM on March 19, 2004

The blurb on this post made it sound quite like a relatively recent Japanese series, Ebichu. But that one's actually funny.
posted by SiW at 11:59 AM on March 19, 2004

For a while South Park's satire was formulaic, pedantic and as subtle as a sledgehammer to the testes, but they've been more clever of late.
posted by crank at 12:15 PM on March 19, 2004

Highly subversive of Matt and Trey to pull that one over the company, but as it stands, the 'Princess' web show was pretty horrendous. It might have actually been funnier without any offensive stuff at all and had just been the syrupy sweet adventures of a little dog, which had happened to be written by the South Park guys.

True, they've gotten more subtle and wittier since then.
posted by Down10 at 3:28 PM on March 19, 2004

Am I the only one with a massive soft spot for Baseketball? I did love that movie :)
posted by Mossy at 4:25 PM on March 19, 2004

I actually liked Baseketball a lot; I didn't include it in my other comment because they didn't write it.

I think the important difference between "Spirit of Christmas" and "Princess" is that "Spirit" was funded independently and "Princess" was a commission.
posted by kevspace at 5:16 PM on March 19, 2004

The links are dead, looks like it's been taken off of the website.
posted by donth at 8:30 AM on April 2, 2004