Before Battling Paramount, This Was ‘South Park’s Dumbest Legal Controversy

As South Park fans are well aware, the show’s future is extremely uncertain thanks to the pending Paramount-Skydance merger. Lawyers have been hired, legal threats have been delivered and bitter social media messages have been posted.

But this is hardly the first time that South Park has dealt with sticky legal situations. One case was especially sticky, because it involved an anthropomorphic piece of candy.

Back in 2007, South Park’s 11th season delivered the epic, three-episode-long “Imaginationland.” Originally envisioned as a theatrical film, “Imaginationland” found the kids visiting a fantastical world where all the characters created by humanity’s imagination reside — from Count Chocula to Jason Voorhees to Totoro.

While the show was full of familiar copyright-protected characters, including Disney’s precious Mickey Mouse, the only person to file any sort of legal complaint was some guy claiming to be the creator of the “Lollipop King,” who was literally just a talking lollipop.

In a Philadelphia court filing, the man alleged that the Lollipop King character was really based on the “Big Bad Lollipop” from his show The Lollipop Forest, a piece of children’s entertainment that was both highly obscure and, as The A.V. Club pointed out at the time, somehow unable to correctly spell the word “Forrest.” 

Judging from the footage that’s available online, it wasn’t exactly the most professional of shows. The Lollipop Forest basically had the production value of a school play and the vibes of that cursed VHS tape from The Ring.

“The South Park television show and its producers, directors and writers disregarded the public copyright notice and appropriated The Lollipop Forest for financial gain, without permission or attribution of authorship or compensation for use,” the purportedly serious complaint read. “The South Park television broadcast diminished/tarnished the value of The Lollipop Forest as a wholesome family show by association within the context of unwholesome language and sexual innuendo.”

In addition to the fact that it’s nearly impossible to tarnish the reputation of something most of humanity has never heard of, oddly enough, the complaint was filed in 2012, five years after the show aired.

No details were ever made public about how this case was resolved, but Parker and Stone were likely in the clear thanks to fair-use laws, which allow for parodies of copyrighted material, hence why they were able to include scenes of, say, Ronald McDonald searching for his severed limb. 

And Parker and Stone revealed in interviews, released long before the legal threat, that Comedy Central’s lawyers had approved everything in the episode. “We have a pretty crack legal team at Comedy Central that everything gets okayed by,” Stone explained. “So in an episode like this, they gave us pretty explicit guidelines about how much had to change. Every one of those characters was checked by a group of lawyers who approved it and had it altered in some small way. They’re not the exact versions, but they’re enough to evoke them.”

To be clear, he was referring to iconic characters like Luke Skywalker and Strawberry Shortcake, not a nameless lollipop seemingly shot on a handycam in someone’s basement.