There’s a Major Screw-Up in the ‘South Park’ Pilot Hardly Anyone Has Noticed

South Park has featured a number of live-action elements over the years, from Saddam Hussein’s head, to Season Six’s reality show parody, to that “Fighting the Frizzies at 11” guy.

But some fans may not be aware that the show included a live-action cameo in the very first episode. Although it was a total accident.

As a user on Reddit recently pointed out, if you pause “Cartman Gets An Anal Probe” at just the right moment during Chef’s (way too sexual) cafeteria song, an animator’s hand can be seen very briefly, seemingly caught in the act of manipulating the cut-out characters. 

Most viewers probably didn’t even notice the frame-length blip when the show first premiered back in 1997. But over the years, some dedicated fans who combed through the episode as if it were a foul-mouthed cartoon Zapruder film have noticed the stray appendage. 

The reason why “Cartman Gets An Anal Probe” contains this technical goof is because it’s the only full-length episode of South Park that was primarily animated with actual construction paper cut-outs. 

After the old-school viral success of their “Spirit of Christmas” shorts, Trey Parker and Matt Stone used the same technique for the Comedy Central pilot. But animating the full show required Parker, Stone and future South Park producer Eric Stough (aka Butters) to laboriously move cut-out characters to match pre-recorded audio tracks, capturing each frame with a 35mm film camera, for a period of around three-and-a-half months.  

“We just sort of did it, and had no idea what it looked like,” Parker explained on the episode’s DVD commentary. “Luckily most of it worked out.”

It’s not that Parker and Stone didn’t realize that one of their hands was captured on camera, the problem was there were a lot of shots of people’s hands that needed to be removed for the final edit. But clearly they missed at least one.

“I think we edited a lot of them out frame by frame,” Parker recalled, “but when we first had to edit this show, there (were) tons of frames with like our hands in there, and scissors left in there and everything, because once it got to be three or four in the morning on certain nights, it was just brutal.”

Since this process was “hell on this earth,” for the rest of the show, the production instead opted to use a cutting-edge computer animation program that allowed them to “pump out a show every three weeks,” which wasn’t bad for ‘97.

Nowadays, the only time a live-action hand appears on the show is when it’s tasked with playing Donald Trump’s microjunk.