The Best Non-‘South Park’ Deep Cuts from Trey Parker and Matt Stone
Best known for their mega-franchise South Park, the creative team of Trey Parker and Matt Stone are so much more than a couple of crudely comic animators with a hate-fetish for Barbra Streisand — we also hear they’re fervent foodies.
When Parker and Stone first met in a film class at the University of Colorado Boulder, they couldn’t have possibly imagined that their stupid student projects would turn into a billion dollar animation empire — and, when they started the South Park series in earnest, they probably weren’t planning on using their TV success to jump to Broadway and make the most iconic musical mockery of the Mormon faith in the history of Salt Lake City. Side projects like The Book of Mormon and, of course, the torturously produced Team America: World Police are some of the more recognizable non-South Park productions that Parker and Stone have put together, but the pair’s body of work is even more vast than we realized — it’s even bigger than Kyle’s mom.
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Over in the South Park subreddit, fans recently discussed which of Parker and Stone’s non-South Park productions are their favorite, with a surprising number of deep cuts making it to the top of the thread. Here are some of our favorites…
Orgazmo (1997)
The same year South Park premiered on Comedy Central, Parker and Stone took their first (and certainly not last) satirical shot at the Mormons with Orgazmo, a superhero sex comedy about a missionary who gets caught up in the glitz and grime of the porn world. Written, directed and starring Parker with Stone producing (and providing a cameo as Dave the Photographer), Orgazmo earned an NC-17 rating and saw a very limited theatrical release, with aghast critics calling it one of the crudest comedies of the decade.
Cannibal! The Musical (1993)
Much like South Park itself, Cannibal! The Musical was born from an assignment in the film class Parker and Stone both attended at the University of Colorado, Boulder. A three-minute trailer turned into a 96-minute black comedy musical movie about a party of prospectors exploring the Colorado Territory in 1873, only for their expedition to be beset by Donner Party-esque antics amidst many macabre musical numbers.
Late last year, Parker and Stone’s tech start-up Deep Voodoo secured $20 million in venture capital investments to explore the capabilities of comedy made using deepfake technology and artificial intelligence. The company’s proof-of-concept was a web series produced during the peak of COVID that featured Wyoming investigative reporter Fred Sassy (played by Peter Serafinowicz with former President Donald Trump’s face superimposed over his own) who stops at nothing to get to the bottom of his scandalous scoops.
The world of turn-of-the-millennium Flash animations was a f-ed up one, but few web series were as wonderfully twisted as Princess while still being delightfully, disgustingly funny. The titular Lhasa Apso dog can’t help but end up in depraved, oftentimes sexually criminal circumstances, and each video ends with something dying and something cumming.
Parker and Stone’s first Hollywood gig was a David Zucker-commissioned short film parodying the “Duck and Cover”-style educational films of the 1950s. Zucker hired the duo to make the film for a party thrown by Universal Studios for its employees, and the entire script was written by Parker and Stone in less than one hour before shooting — with bigwigs like James Cameron, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg all waiting for the pair of unknowns to give them their lines.
