‘South Park’ Fans Say Trey Parker and Matt Stone Called Disney’s Current Controversy
The Walt Disney Company currently faces a PR crisis after they moved to have a wrongful death lawsuit thrown out of court on the grounds that the Disney+ terms of service protect them from such litigation, a strategy that’s known in the South Park fandom as the “Steve Jobs Defense.”
Back in February, a man named Jeffrey J. Piccolo sued Disney Parks and Resorts after his wife, Dr. Kanokporn Tangsuan, died after eating food containing allergens at a restaurant within Walt Disney World. In the suit, Piccolo claims that Disney staff assured him and Tangsuan that they would accommodate her allergies, but Tangsuan immediately suffered an allergic reaction from the food served to her by the Disney restaurant and died at a local hospital. Now, Disney is trying to have Piccolo’s lawsuit dismissed and sent to arbitration over a clause in the Disney+ signup agreement that reads, “Any dispute between you and us, except for small claims, is subject to a class action waiver and must be resolved by individual binding arbitration.”
Piccolo had previously signed up for a free trial of the streaming service.
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Predictably, the people of Twitter are reacting to Disney’s apparent claim that their terms and conditions empower them to end lives without facing serious legal consequences with a mixture of outrage and insensitive silliness — especially those South Park fans.
South Park fans will recall the Season 15 premiere, “HumancentiPad,” in which Kyle scrolls past the iTunes user agreement and clicks his approval without reading the fine print. To Kyle’s misfortune, hidden within the terms and conditions is a clause that allows Steve Jobs and Apple to kidnap Kyle and other Apple users, surgically sew them together and create one continuous GI tract attached to an iPad.
The running joke throughout the Human Centipede parody episode is that nobody in the world reads every single word of a user agreement when signing up for a web service, so companies such as Apple could theoretically hide extreme and macabre conditions above the bright green “Agree” button.
In the current Disney controversy, it’s not so much the Disney+ terms of service that are ghoulish and predatory — rather, it’s the Disney lawyer’s interpretation of a benign clause found in every user agreement that is so evil and inhumane that it seems like something only Trey Parker and Matt Stone could write. If Disney gets their way, we could very well live in a world where there is legal precedent for a streaming platform to take the life of a subscriber’s loved one, and the user would have extremely limited legal recourse to seek justice.
If Paramount+ ever gets wise to this clever corporate manslaughter hack, the next South Park special is going to feature Cartman and Cthulhu killing hippies for real this time.
