Once upon a time, I knew every fucking word to every fucking song in this donkey dick musical. It’s impossible to understate how bizarre and unexpected South Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut was. Back then, South Park was a cult hit that had only been on the air for two years. The first season was a litany of piss takes where the humor stemmed from seeing how far they could push a show about a group of elementary kids, given that it was animated. Released with a then-rare TV-MA rating, most of the first couple of seasons were all about swearing, absurdist humor, and pissing off celebrity culture, but with an humane even handed touch. The episodes were rough, raw, and frequently meandered through their plot lines.
South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut was released in the summer of 1999, during the mid-season break of Season 3 (back when South Park seasons were 18 episodes long and had a break between Spring and Fall). 1999 was a crowded year filled with an unusually good selection of movies, both independent and blockbusters. This was a year where a cheap independent film like The Blair Witch Project could make $140m while opening against a Stanley Kubrick film and running up against films like American Pie and Tarzan. South Park pretty much got dumped in the middle of this unusual year, but still managed to find its audience on home video.
Running just over 80 minutes, BLU is paced like a bat out of hell. Plotted like a Broadway musical, Parker and Stone crammed 14 different musical numbers into 80 minutes, including an epic homage to Les Miserables. The plot was large and broad enough to encompass censorship, movie ratings, parental responsibility, pop culture, war, propaganda, the apocalypse, Satan, and Saddam Hussein…along with an extended subplot to find the clitoris. And, it still managed to find controversy by being one of at least four movies that year to be given NC-17 ratings and had to be re-edited to garner the coveted R-rating (Eyes Wide Shut, American Pie, and Fight Club also initially received NC-17s).
What makes BLU so unusual was that it was a musical film for adults. This was a time when, if you wanted a musical, you had to go see a Disney cartoon. The last two exceptions were both in 1996 with Evita and Everybody Says I Love You. The musical was pretty much deader than dead. But, Parker and Stone crafted a movie with original songs that drove the plot forward (Blame Canada) with big ideas aimed at adults. Sure, it was couched in a movie that had a song called Uncle Fukka and then had a brief rap reprise of it, but Bigger Longer and Uncut crammed more fully developed ideas in 80 minutes than some movies have in 3 hours.
The best part, it was all in good fun. Critics at the time seemed to enjoy being shocked to see they were giving the movie good reviews. Ebert called it “the year’s most slashing political commentary” even if it was “too long and ran out of steam.” But, its legacy lives on. Terry Gilliam named it in his top 10 animated films of all time back in 2001. In 2006, Empire Magazine had it in the top 250 films of all time. In 2011, Time Magazine had it sixth in its list of greatest animated features of all time.
For me, I still know most of the words to each of the songs. That soundtrack is catchy, y’all. For a show that started from a construction paper holiday cartoon, it left a legacy to be fighting for what’s right, and what’s right isn’t always where the crowd is.
South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut streams on Netflix through the end of December
