‘South Park’ Had to Hide the Names in the Credits for This Classic Episode, Thanks to Tom Cruise

To this day, Tom Cruise and the Church of Scientology still haven’t been able to track down and silence the many writers, animators and voice actors who made the 2005 South Park episode “Trapped in the Closet” a hit, but they’re pretty sure it was a family affair. 

It’s no secret that the politically aggressive organization founded by science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard is a litigious group, though the Scientologists will probably sue me for saying so. The Church of Scientology famously bombarded the Internal Revenue Service with more than 50 lawsuits in their fight to gain status as a tax-exempt nonprofit organization, a war the Scientologists won handily. As such, the Church of Scientology takes decisive action to protect its most internationally popular and recognizable figurehead from embarrassment or mockery, no matter which 10-year-old’s closet he may be hiding out in.

When South Park’s first and certainly not last takedown of Tom Cruise and Scientology hit television in 2005, the incensed agents of the organization who watched “Trapped in the Closet” to the end credits were dismayed to find that, in the place where the names of their next targets should be, every single person involved in the making of the South Park episode was credited as either “John Smith” or “Jane Smith,” including the show’s world-famous pair of creators, John Smith and John Smith.

In “Trapped in the Closet,” Stan undergoes an Scientologist audit that determines that his thetan levels are the highest ever recorded, causing the highest-ranking members of Scientology to declare him to be the reincarnation of Hubbard. Cruise, eager to meet the second coming of his religion's founder, sneaks into Stan’s room and asks the new L. Ron what he thinks of Cruise’s acting career. After Stan correctly states that Cruise is a good-not-great actor, the movie star falls into a depression and locks himself in Stan’s closet. The rest of the episode is centered around the actual bullshit that Scientologists believe and Cruise refusing to come out of the closet.

Though Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s move to protect their entire cast and crew with generic pseudonyms succeeded in stopping the Church of Scientology from harassing South Park artists and producers individually, the episode did generate plenty of controversy for the series, and Comedy Central briefly pulled “Trapped in the Closet” from the rebroadcast schedule. Some reports at the time claimed that Cruise threatened to pull out of the Mission: Impossible series at Paramount Pictures, which was owned by Comedy Central’s parent company Viacom at the time, if Comedy Central did not pull “Trapped in the Closet” from syndication.

But the long-term retributive damage that the Church of Scientology inflicted on South Park in the wake of “Trapped in the Closet” was much more serious. Shortly after the episode aired, Scientologist and soul music legend Isaac Hayes, who played the fan-favorite character Chef, supposedly put out a public statement in which he condemned the episode and stepped down from the series. However, Hayes' son still maintains to this day that, given his father’s declining health at the time, there was no way Hayes himself could have made such a statement and that a representative from the Church of Scientology must have tendered Hayes’ resignation without the singer’s consent.

All because Cruise couldn’t take a joke about coming out of the close. God forbid anyone call him a fudge packer, either.