‘South Park’ Creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone Would Get Kicked Out of College Classes for Doing Cartman's Voice
Pissing off your teacher with your best Eric Cartman voice is such a hallowed tradition for young trolls that it even predates the very creation of South Park.
At some point during their childhood, every member of the Millennial generation or younger was exposed to the crass, iconoclastic comedy of South Park, usually by an older sibling or a classmate whose family never figured out how to work the TV’s parental controls. I imagine that, ever since 1997, public school teachers have shuddered the first time a student in their elementary or middle school class shouts out, “No, Mr. Kitty! That’s MY Hot Pocket!” knowing full well that South Park fever will soon spread throughout the class faster than a nasty strain of conjunctivitis.
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Well, in the South Park Season One creators’ commentary, Trey Parker and Matt Stone admitted that, during their time at University of Colorado Boulder, even before they began to work on the original The Spirit of Christmas shorts, they would disrupt their classes together by joking with each other in their proto-Cartman kid voices. Little did the South Park creators know that every subsequent generation of teachers would soon be terrorized by hordes of their young fans who would similarly refuse to respect authoritah.
In the commentary track for the South Park pilot, “Cartman Gets An Anal Probe,” Parker and Stone recalled how it took them three and a half months to make the first South Park episode due to their commitment to the cut-paper stop-motion style of the original The Spirit of Christmas shorts. An especially tricky step in the pilot’s production was matching up the frame-by-frame action of the animation to the vocal track — but coming up with the voices for the core South Park characters was the easy part.
“We matched that with the voices that we kind of came up with in college,” Stone said of the brutally tedious “Cartman Gets An Anal Probe” animation process, admitting, “We actually got in trouble for (the voices) in college. Trey and I would always get thrown out of class, because we did this one stupid voice that basically sounded like Stan and Kyle, or Cartman.”
Stone understated, “So it’s kinda nice now that we make a lot of money doing that voice we got kicked out of class with. That’s cool.”
Parker then added, “The whole idea behind the show was, you know, kids acting the way kids really act, because there were all these things at the time about ‘the precious innocence of a child,’ and how adults were all corrupt and children were all wonderful.”
Parker and Stone, however, had a different outlook from the entertainment mainstream of the mid-1990s, as Parker continued, “From what we remembered, it’s children who are all corrupt, and you sort of learn to be a decent human being, hopefully by the time you grow up.”
Clearly, Parker and Stone didn’t grow up before they showed up to college ready to derail their very expensive film classes with the voices that would later become the foundation for a multi-billion-dollar multi-media franchise. And, honestly, judging by how the South Park creators continue to act toward authority figures, a certain network is probably still hoping that they’ll grow up any day now.
