South Park: Over Logging
By fred | April 17, 2008
(S12E06) Alright, so this season of South Park has been pretty good I would say. I’m sure some will argue that we’ve had episodes that weren’t so good/funny, and I’ll be the first to agree with that, but overall it is still a pretty good season season, there hasn’t really been any weak episode, and most of the time it was quite hilarious. Take last week for instance, which was simply awesome.
But while this season has been good and I do love the show so I might be willing to see the best in it no matter what, it hasn’t been perfect. I have said before that more than once it seemed that they focused more on what they wanted to say, the message underlying in the episode, than actually comedy. And even when said message is dead-on, if I don’t laugh I don’t really like it, because the first thing I want from the show is to make me laugh for half an hour.
Now I wouldn’t say that this episode suffered from this, at least that’s not the impression that I had watching it, but I wasn’t entirely pleased with it either, and to put it simply it was due to a lack of humor.
Not that is wasn’t funny, but it wasn’t very funny, not all the time. Let’s look at what worked : yes, it was another great and so South Park-move to have the whole world to panic and have no idea of what to do, when the Internet is gone. I have to say, as someone who spends lots of time online, that I could relate to that pretty easy. If tomorrow I was to wake up with in Internet, I tell you I’m not sure I’ll be able to do anything. How many times have you find yourself talking or writing or just thinking about something, only to have a question that you simply googled to get your answer ?
I do that all the time, and we all waste incredible amount of time online doing things we don’t really need to do, but we feel we have to do it, right now. And yes, I know I once lived without it, but today if I don’t have Internet, I’m not sure how I can survive. That was great, and so was the idea that quite an lot of Internet activity goes to porn. Although I have to admit that Randy’s vision of porn, which includes bestiality or Japanese girls throwing up in each others mouths, isn’t really what I think of when I hear porn…
But while all of that, or the way Kyle eventually “fixed” the Internet, but unplugging it and plugging it right back, something we’ve all done, because that’s actually how you fix the Internet, while all of that was actually great (or extremely gross when Randy was, well, say “attacked by a Tiger”) the problem I have with this episode is that first, it was lacking a bit in the humor department, and second I had seen it already.
I don’t mean because they “used” stories we’ve all seen in many movies in the past, I mean I’ve seen episodes of South Park using such action/drama/zombie-movie plots only with a quite different topic, it’s how they work and I have no problem with that. Except that for it to work, it needs to be funny, not once or twice, but all the time, and this episode wasn’t.
Take that scene in black & white. I get it, what it was, that there was some Great Depression in the air, but in the end there was nothing in there. Basically, it was supposed to be funny because they weren’t talking about the economy falling down, or the lack of natural resources, but Internet. Only that’s exactly what the entire episode is about, so if there’s only that, then there’s nothing in that scene. That is how it felt to me, like there was nothing there, and it was actually a bit boring, and not funny at all. Even Randy’s speech at the end wasn’t that good, and if it wasn’t for him being dressed up as an Indian, I’m not sure there would be anything funny in there.
And that is something I’ve felt many times this week, that nothing was really funny, that I had seen them make parodies of such movies in the past, so it was not new, and let’s be honest, they were a lot more inspired back in then than they were this time. Almost feels like they rushed a bit with this one. If they had put more jokes, focused more on the comedy than parodying some movies, maybe then this episode could have been a home-run, but as it was done, it wasn’t bad, I laughed a few times, but it was just above average, nothing more.
Posted in Reviews
Shows: South Park
