South Park is part of the problem?
A writer at the Daily Caller makes the argument that Trey Parker and Matt Stone's long-running cartoon series, South Park, isn't a very good influence, and is more a problem than an avail:
On the other hand, The Federalist seems to have a more favorable view of the series and episode, although the following could surely be disputed:
As for South Park, if the producers no longer have what it takes to lampoon where the USA's been going with PC, then maybe it's time to retire the cartoon series already. It's been going for over a quarter century now, almost as long as the Simpsons has, and arguably much too long at that to boot. And, much like the Simpsons, has clearly lost any edge it once maintained. So, it'd surely be for the best if both TV cartoon series would be put out to pasture, and save everyone a lot of time.
The 45 minute special, “Enter The Panderverse,” tore into Disney’s ham-handed diversity casting and mad dash for remakes. The title references the Disney-owned Marvel “Multiverse” of alternate dimensions, a “lazy” way to interlink endless spin-offs that pander to various ethnic groups.Well there were occasions in which South Park did regrettably succumb to PC, recallling a time when the studio refused to include any Muhammed drawings at the time of the Danish Muhammed Cartoon riots in the specific episodes proper. Making matters worse is that just a year ago, HBO wouldn't broadcast such episodes anymore, no matter how they were originally prepared. And if South Park and its creators have failed to keep up with the times, and are less likely to show any courage to confront challenging issues, that only makes clear what severe damage wokeness has wrought in the long run.
Creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker mock Disney for incorrectly assuming this approach would appeal to broader audiences, but despite the evident failure, remaining unable to turn away from such a “lame and gay” model. In a hilarious critique of forced diversity, Stan, Kyle, Kenny and Cartman are replaced by “diverse women” from an alternate universe where everyone “complains about the patriarchy.”
Clips from the episode quickly went viral over the weekend, with conservatives cheering a powerful cultural icon seemingly taking their side. Some took it as a sign that the tide of the culture war was beginning to turn, and even Elon Musk voiced his support. But this is not the victory that many believe it to be. [...]
No one is spared, but neither is anyone truly demonized. Rather, episodes often come together with a didactic lecture from one of the boys: everything is fine in moderation and we should all take a humble skepticism to our own most cherished beliefs. Extremes are always morally equivalent.
For decades, this was a powerful message in an eminently moderate country like America. When the show first aired, Americans could still agree on the basic foundation of our common life and extremists on all sides were largely relegated to the fringe. But we no longer live in this country. One side has fully embraced the extremists in their ranks, and now works symbiotically to brand anyone who opposes them — the average South Park viewer of 10 years ago — as the true extremist threat.
Yet Stone and Parker remain blind or ignorant — perhaps willfully so — to this trend over the past 10 years. As a result, South Park has lost its once exemplary moral clarity. Recent seasons have increasingly focused on the America First movement and the moral panic over political correctness. The juxtaposition always leads back to the same message: both sides feed off each other, and in the end, partisans in each camp are just plain stupid.
But these platitudes reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of the current moment. One side stands for civilizational ruin, the destruction of 2,000 years of accumulated knowledge and morality and the end of America as we know it. The other stands in the breach — stemming the tide of imminent collapse and holding out hope for a return to the normalcy that Parker and Stone ostensibly advocate for. There can be no moral equivalence here.
“Panderverse” shows that even with all the progressive left’s escalatory aggression under the Biden administration, Parker and Stone’s understanding has failed to evolve. In the new special, it’s eventually revealed that Disney has only been producing more diverse spin-offs as a knee jerk reaction to Cartman, who sent “racist” hate mail after the company’s earliest foray into racial pandering. Cartman’s big epiphany is that wokeness and anti-wokeness are morally equivalent, feeding off each other and turning both camps equally stupid. Sure, Disney’s diverse remakes are lazy, but “railing about woke stuff all the time is pretty lazy too.”
Yet Cartman’s revelation could not be farther from the truth. Wokeness is a death force; everyone and everything must submit to its vision. It aims to make us accept that America is a fundamentally racist country, that Christianity and capitalism uphold a racist system and that bourgeois sensibilities like perseverance, rationality and respect for authority are mere veils for white supremacy — all through seemingly harmless platitudes like “Diversity is our strength!” Only once we accept these claims will the true believers have the power to remake society anew.
On the other hand, The Federalist seems to have a more favorable view of the series and episode, although the following could surely be disputed:
Furthermore, the episode makes the important point that diversity in itself is not a bad thing. Well-crafted plots and characters work with diverse and non-diverse characters alike — one character mentions Miles Morales from “Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse” as an example of this. This only degenerates into pandering when poorly developed yet diverse characters are shoehorned into an idiotic storyline, as it’s self-consciously demonstrated in “South Park: Joining the Panderverse.”Considering Morales may have been an early example of pandering for PC diversity's sake, when first introduced by Brian Bendis over a dozen years ago, I'm not sure you can uphold the example so well, when the cartoon film itself apparently builds off some of the most trivial concepts to come out of Marvel in the past decade that did build mostly on wokeism, and though Peter Parker survived as a character (which is probably more than can be said of his marriage to Mary Jane Watson in-story), the ensuing wokeness hurt him and the Spidey legacy as a creation, because a short time after Morales was introduced in the Ultimate line (and the alternate Peter was sent to the grave there), he was shoehorned into the flagship 616 universe proper, effectively rendering whatever impact Morales might've had meaningless, and that certainly makes an apt description of the "quality" of Marvel's writing for years on end now.
Of course, there’s a reason the episode specifically targets Disney, which has spent the last decade burning through its beloved franchises and is now out of material. The company has been addicted to producing sequels, reboots, spinoffs, and every other possible derivative. This was taken up a notch when it launched its streaming channel, Disney Plus. And it all went well … until it didn’t.Even so, the columnist would do well to consider what went on back at the comics division of Marvel in the past decade is what some of their movie adaptations are building upon, and is very tasteless and pointless in hindsight. It may be possible to draw from certain wellsprings that're contaminated, and come up with something more palatable. But if we take adaptations of modern Marvel as an example, it just doesn't excuse that the sources they're drawing from are very poor, and that can cast quite a pall over these modern film adaptations, which are becoming increasingly worthless this very moment. There's surely a lot of much older takes on the Marvel creations up to the turn of the century that make far more palatable source material, yet modern standards have led to a situation where only what's come after the mid-2000s is considered worth adapting. And that's just not a good way to develop screenplays, if they're going to resort to such a cheap method.
Once popular IPs such as Star Wars, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and even the Disney princesses are now routinely derided upon arrival and collectively ignored. Already, “The Marvels,” one of the most expensive Marvel movies ever made, is set for a terrible opening weekend, and the live-action “Snow White” has been delayed for a year for the bad press it has received.
[...] Instead of prioritizing a good story and relatable characters, as it used to do, filmmakers at Disney now aggressively push diverse characters and leftist narratives above all else. As a rule, its protagonists will always be women, LGBT, or nonwhite people (or all three); its antagonists will usually be straight, white males; and the plot will usually involve casting aside old characters to clear the way for the new girlboss (see: Star Wars, Indiana Jones, phases four and five of the MCU, and the live-action “Little Mermaid”).
Of course, anyone who happens to notice this will be labeled a “racist sexist bigot” by the cultural gatekeepers, which then emboldens Disney and others to create ever more lousy woke content. And just as “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” there is a great deal of ruin in entertainment behemoths like Disney, which means that fans will be subjected to so much more of this garbage in the years to come. As the episode’s hopeful resolution suggests, the fact that it’s possible to have a diverse cast without being woke makes it relatively easy for companies like Disney to return to a place of sanity and stop alienating their fans. Instead of doubling down on what they’re currently doing (presumably as a response to criticism and hate mail from obsessed fans), they can start creating quality programming again that allows diverse characters to be actual characters, not tokens.
As for South Park, if the producers no longer have what it takes to lampoon where the USA's been going with PC, then maybe it's time to retire the cartoon series already. It's been going for over a quarter century now, almost as long as the Simpsons has, and arguably much too long at that to boot. And, much like the Simpsons, has clearly lost any edge it once maintained. So, it'd surely be for the best if both TV cartoon series would be put out to pasture, and save everyone a lot of time.
Labels: animation, censorship issues, dreadful writers, Europe and Asia, history, islam and jihad, marvel comics, moonbat writers, politics
