Trey Parker and Matt Stone Nearly Killed Off This Core ‘South Park’ Character to Make More Room for Butters

Now that we’re 26 seasons into South Park, it would be unthinkable for series creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone to ever consider killing off one of the core four characters whom we have loved for nearly 30 years — well, any one besides Kenny, of course.

But back in South Park Season Five, the show’s creators decided to throw their avid fanbase a curveball by putting a button on one of the hit animated comedy’s oldest running gags. In “Kenny Dies,” South Park’s unluckiest immortal pauper came down with a terminal illness that led to his unfunniest death thus far in the series, a bleak end that was in stark contrast to the Rube Goldberg-esque graphic death scenes he’d suffered in so many previous episodes. Kenny wouldn’t return in his corporeal form until the Season Six Christmas episode “Red Sleigh Down.”

But as Parker and Stone revealed in the DVD commentary for “Kenny Dies,” their most perpetually passing protagonist wasn’t supposed to be the muscular dystrophy patient whose odds of survival reached zero when Cartman used all his hoarded aborted fetuses to clone a Shakey’s Pizza. Parker and Stone originally intended to kill off Kyle so that they could do more episodes focusing on Butters, but Kenny ended up getting the short end of the stick instead.

“Our idea was, let’s do a whole episode where Kenny dies but it’s super serious. We’ll play it as a drama, no laughs,” Parker said of the concept behind “Kenny Dies," though, as is the case whenever he and Stone do anything, silliness and stupidity eventually crept into the final product. “We wrote all the scenes with just the boys and Kenny dying, and, just like basically everything else we do, it just ended up being stupid and ridiculous because that’s just the people we are.”

Parker and Stone took their ambitious episode idea to some comedy experts to check if 21 straight minutes of a child dying from a terrible disease could land as a meta-joke, and the answer was entirely predictable. “I remember, we met Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam one time, and they told us they were going to do (an entirely serious sketch) on Monty Python, and then they didn’t do it,” Stone explained. “They were going to do seven or eight minutes without a joke, and they said, ‘That’s a bad idea.’”

While there were certainly serious, tear-jerking scenes in “Kenny Dies,” the end result was drastically different from the original pitch, especially when it came to the main character. “The idea was we were going to kill Kyle. We were going to make it a big thing where we’ll kill Kyle, and then Butters will step in, because this was around the time when we were really starting to like Butters as a character,” Parker remembered. “It always seemed to us that Kyle and Stan are pretty similar, and that’s only because Matt and I are pretty similar, so it was like, let’s kill off one of those two, let’s kill off Kyle, and, since Matt does Kyle’s voice we’ll bring in Butters and he’ll be the other kid.”

Ultimately, Parker and Stone settled on killing off Kenny for real, “because he’s really just a prop anyways, he never gets to say anything and we have to kill him every episode,” and, the very next week, they brought Butters into the spotlight with “Butters’ Very Own Episode,” which was only slightly less tragic for its title character than a terminal disease.