[Krythor]

Don't worry Milhouse, I agree with you.

I think I started to hate it for the wrong reasons. I loved South Park when it started so much that I hated seeing it change in season four, with the new teacher, new theme music etc. What REALLY drove me up the wall though was that in season five they bizarrely began using stock music as incidental cues. I swear that before the fifth season all the music was written specifically for the show, but there is at least one cue in season five that I heard in an episode of King of the Hill, and there are other weird out of place cues that are obviously from elsewhere.

The other thing is the animation. I hate hate hate when there'll be an imitation 3d shot of Cartman or whoever. The one example I can think of is an episode in season 6 or 7 where Cartman prays to his Mel Gibson poster. It was so awkward and wrong. It's like The Simpsons when they realised that seeing Homer head-on or seeing Bart's face twist around when he spoke was disturbing, but in reverse. Matt and Trey want the animation to look worse for some reason.

Like you, I hated that one joke, usually topical, was stretched to fill an entire episode. I know that people are generally down on season 2, even Matt and Trey themselves, but it has real plots with jokes arising from the characters, the dialogue and the situation that they're in. Robert Redford or whatever celebrity will appear for two or three scenes of the episode, but it's not Mel Gibson running around throwing shit for twenty minutes.

What made it worse for me personally was that I was the biggest South Park fan I knew when it started, I liked it better than The Simpsons at the time (mostly because it had passed its peak; I was the biggest Simpsons fan I knew before South Park came along,) and I'm from the UK where South Park completely dissappeared from TV for two or three seasons. From season three it was pushed back later and later into schedules, season four arrived way later than usual, and season five arrived even later than that, I think almost a year later than it aired in the US. Season six didn't air on ANY channel, and I don't think season seven or eight did either. Eventually MTV picked it up and repeated all of the episodes we didn't get, and showed the new ones.

Obviously, I had turned to downloading them at season six when I had become impatient from the long wait I had for season five, so I got to see them. But I hated that people here had completely forgotten about it and acted like it was a terrible show that they didn't miss anyway. I tried to convince people that South Park was still good to no avail. Then MTV picked it up, people started watching again, and it got a second wind. Now people quote new South Parks, and I just think, "that episode is terrible, and where were you when it was still decent?"

I gave up on it for a few years after that, but in the last few months I've caught one or two when there's been nothing else on TV and actually really enjoyed it. I guess the distance has helped. I also may have just got lucky with the ones I stumbled across, as hardly any were current event based and were just about the kids being kids, such as the one where they all become wrestlers.

...What a long shitty post this is.