South Park

South Park

Episode 4: Big Gay Al's Big Gay Boat Ride

Episode 5: An Elephant Makes Love to a Pig

By: Carlos Uribe

South Park is a cartoon that follows the adventures of four children. It has aired since 1997 on Comedy Central.

Spoilers Ahoy!

From now on, I'll be reviewing two episodes at once.

The thing about “Big Gay Al's Big Gay Boat Ride” is that the episode tackles quite a bit. It tackles the whole silliness of high school football by giving South Park Elementary a football team. It makes sense that all of the students happen to be in the football team, including Pip. The team isn't any good and the spread has them at “70-0”. There's a whole plotline about whole Stan is the best quarterback that the school has seen, which means they have a chance at actually beating the spread. This leads to Rambo and the town throwing their live savings into the game, betting that the South Park Cows (the football team) will beat the spread. When Rambo realizes how much is at stake, he even sets up a bomb. It's a story that not only comments on how serious people take it, but how it affects educational excellence when Stan gets a good grade for making something up while Cartman gets a D-. This whole plot could have been an episode in-and-of itself, but it finds itself having to go to the sidelines thanks to the other plot of the story, even though they do converge together. Oh, and in a “surprise” move-the spread is beat despite numerous setbacks and the bomb goes off at the wrong time.

The main plot is what gives the episode the title. It deals with homophobia. Stan gets a dog, Sparky, at the beginning of the episode, who turns out to be gay. Stan isn't ready to accept Sparky as a homosexual, as he wants a tough straight dog. This leads to the dog running away and Stan going after him. This is when Stan meets Big Gay Al and after a boat-ride, Stan accepts his dog's homosexuality. The theme is obvious: homophobia is stupid. It doesn't do it in a way by stating that gay people are just like us, since Big Gay Al isn't like the South Park denizens. He even gets into a magical suitcase and flies away. It simply seems to state that not accepting homosexuality doesn't make a lot of sense. There's also a scene with Jesus where the series seems to imply that Jesus would actually accept homosexuality, despite the biblical passages. This is a main plot that had to share it's time with the football plot and it was hurt because of it. The problem with this episode of South Park is that it should have focused on one thing to satirize and do it well.

The episode “An Elephant Makes Love with a Pig” is more focused but it deals with an issue that wasn't as funny as the creators intended it to be: genetic engineering. This isn't to say it didn't get some laughs. The genetic scientist being obsessed with giving creates more than one ass is funny, as well as some of his other creations. It's just that the fake loverboy song didn't do anything for me and neither did the whole sequence that led to the actual elephant and pig having sex. The Stan clone wasn't funny either (except for the newscasts). While there were some good jokes, most of them ultimately fell flat and this created an episode that didn't really work out that well. The episode ended with the seeming “lesson” being that genetic engineering is bad, but then promptly had the pig's baby (from her pregnancy after having sex with the elephant) that looked sort of like Mr. Garrison get first place. The other experiment, a monkey with five asses, got an A.

While the main plot dealt with genetic engineering, Stan gets a sub-plot where he is beat up by his sister, Shelly. It's about domestic abuse, although it seems to be made slightly funny by the crude drawing of South Park. That is until Shelly crashed the television into Stan's head and that's when it went from being somewhat funny to simply having gone too far. The sub-plot didn't distract from the main plot, and they even managed to cross, but it simply wasn't a very good or very funny one. This is the first episode that establishes Randy as Stan's father. Overall, this episode was way weaker than the other one I'm reviewing-which while unfocused, was at least consistently funny.