This Is How Matt Stone and Trey Parker Felt the First Time They Missed A Deadline for An Episode
South Park made headlines last week — not because of a new, zeitgeisty joke about Donald Trump’s genitals, but because the scheduled episode was delayed by a week. Depending on who you believe, this was either due to one of several wacky conspiracy theories, or because procrastinating until the very last minute is a risky way to produce an animated television series.
As we’ve mentioned before, this was only the second time in the show’s history that Trey Parker and Matt Stone missed a deadline. The first came back in 2013, when the Season 17 episode “Goth Kids 3: Dawn of the Posers” was delayed by a week after the South Park offices were hit with a power outage the evening before the airdate.
On the episode’s DVD commentary, Parker and Stone revealed that they were genuinely bummed about missing the deadline. “It really felt sad, it felt like something you’d accomplished for 17 years finally didn’t (happen),” Parker admitted.
“It didn’t feel good,” Stone agreed.
“I was sitting at the computer trying to rescue the show, as always,” Parker recalled. “At like 7 at night, or 6:30. All the power went out. You just hear this ‘AWWWWW.’ You’ve got all these people, these animators, who’ve been working on a shot for maybe an hour, maybe more, even if they haven’t saved for the last 15 minutes, they’ve just blown 15 minutes of pretty tedious work.”
“Frank, our producer, I hear his voice going, ‘That, that feels like a bad one,’” Parker added.
The team scrambled to find a way to finish the show, even attempting to borrow equipment from a movie set. “We tried to get generators but then that was going to take three hours, so we had generator trucks coming off of some film shoot to come here,” Stone said.
But just getting power up and running wasn’t good enough at a certain point because the in-house servers for rendering the animation took two hours to reboot. “So once we started adding it all up, we’re like, ‘Oh, we’re not working on this show til like four in the morning anyway, and we won’t get it done,’” Stone explained.
“As it went on and on and on, it was like, ‘Oh we’re gonna have to actually call Comedy Central and tell them, we’re really sorry but they don’t have a show to air,” Parker said.
But the duo also conceded that the outage, caused by a car hitting a nearby electrical pole, may have been for the best, since there was a good chance that they weren’t going to meet the deadline anyway. “Honestly, we were so fucked with this episode,” Parker confessed. “Someone ran into a pole, a transformer, a few blocks from here. If that wasn’t on (record), people seriously would be thinking I did it. Because we were that screwed. If I could have done it, I totally would have. But I did not know where to go run my car into a transformer.”
“So whoever that person was that ran into the pole on Centinela, thank you very much,” Stone added. “I think Jesus might be looking down on South Park sometimes,” Parker joked. “Because things like this happen to us, where we just have really good luck with things like this. And so I say it’s Christ.”
Sadly, it seems as though Jesus opted not to cause any major car accidents in Culver City last Tuesday.