We’re Getting a New Documentary About Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s First Movie
¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!, the new documentary about Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s restaurant side-hustle/$40 million midlife crisis, is a big hit with audiences so far. Which isn’t all that surprising considering that cable TV has already proven that people like both South Park and watching strangers go through hellish ordeals in restaurants.
Well, soon we’re going to be getting yet another feature-length doc about the exploits of Parker and Stone, thanks to good old physical media. And it also involves the culinary arts — to some degree at least.
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Parker’s directorial debut, 1993’s Cannibal! The Musical, is receiving its first ever Blu-Ray release, meaning that we’ll finally be able to see the alleged flesh-eating exploits of Alfred Packer in high definition. And just imagine how crisp the audio will be on songs like “Let’s Build a Snowman” and “Shpadoinkle.”
The film is actually being released by two different companies. One Blu-Ray is coming from the U.K.’s Refuse Films as part of its TromArchive Collection. According to the company, they laboriously restored the movie using “the original Betacam master tape” (the film elements have been lost).
Cannibal! is also getting a release from Vinegar Syndrome, and their new label Degausser Video, which specializes in movies that were either shot on tape, or shot on film but edited on tape. In the case of Cannibal! The Musical, it was the latter — it was originally shot on 16mm film, using equipment borrowed from the University of Colorado, Boulder (at least one professor was borrowed from the school, as well). And apparently theirs is an exclusive “new restoration.” That means that two companies painstakingly worked to restore this goofy-ass movie made by college students.
Each release has its own list of special features, and the Vinegar Syndrome’s disc reportedly comes with a new “feature-length making-of documentary” including “appearances from several never-before-interviewed crew members.” Considering that the Cannibal! shoot was plagued with problems — including a “near death” experience involving an avalanche, and the time Parker was thrown from his horse and fractured his hip — it should be a pretty compelling doc. Although the other release has the infamous “inebriated audio commentary.”
Don’t expect this to be the last documentary we get about Parker and Stone either. As Vanity Fair recently revealed, Arthur Bradford, the documentarian who made ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor! and 2011’s 6 Days to Air: The Making of South Park, has been following the “creative partners around for more than a decade.” While some of that footage has been used for the Casa Bonita movie, there’s still obviously a lot of material left over.
Who knows, maybe one day we’ll get an epic eight-hour documentary in the vein of Get Back, but instead of chronicling the minutiae of crafting a classic album, it will be about ripping on World of Warcraft or scrambling to come up with an episode after Trump was elected.
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