Now That Kathleen Kennedy Is Stepping Down, Can We Retire ‘South Park’s Most Misused Catchphrase?

Controversial Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy has reportedly told her closest associates that she plans to retire at the end of the year. Somewhere in the multiverse, Eric Cartman is cackling.

Kennedy, 71, joined the Star Wars production company as co-chair in 2012 shortly before George Lucas sold his empire to Disney, who promoted Kennedy to Lucasfilm president where she immediately became DEI Darth Sidious to the angriest nerds on the internet. Kennedy’s tumultuous 12-year stewardship over the Star Wars franchise and the numerous sloppy, rushed and entirely unsatisfying movies Lucasfilm released on her watch are the subject of fierce criticism and politically charged debate on social media, with the most toxic fanboys involved in the discourse finding their rallying cry when Paramount+ released the South Park special South Park: Joining the Panderverse in October 2023.

Now that Kennedy is on her way out, and companies across the entertainment industry are rapidly reversing course on their diversity policies in order to fall in line with the reinstated Trump administration, will the catchphrase “Put a chick in it and make it lame and gay” finally fall out of fashion among South Park and Star Wars fans who get triggered every time a girl wins a laser sword duel in a movie made for children?

In South Park: Joining the Panderverse, Trey Parker and Matt Stone parodied the state of Disney’s many media mega-franchises with a multiversal storyline about various different versions of Eric Cartman teleporting to dimensions that aren’t their own and causing chaos. Most memorably, a long-haired, bad-tempered Cartman from a bizarro universe takes the place of Kennedy in the main South Park dimension and ruins numerous Disney movies by forcing the company to cast diverse women in ill-fitting film franchises.

Toward the end of the storyline, we learn that the cause of the dimensional disruption was the “real” Kennedy abusing the power of an ancient artificial intelligence called “The Panderstone” after receiving massive amounts of hate-mail over her affinity for diverse casts, all of which came from Eric Cartman. Before working together to fix the multi-dimensional mix-up, Kennedy and Cartman call a brief truce as the executive admits that performative diversity has weakened Disney’s entertainment offerings, and Cartman admits that being an anti-woke warrior is pretty lame, too.

Naturally, too many South Park fans forgot that you’re not supposed to take Cartman’s side on every single social issue, especially when even he admits he was wrong in the third act, and Cartman-Kennedy’s catchphrase became the most popular response to every Disney casting announcement that wasn’t about a white guy.

However, Disney’s past promotion of diversity in its movies evaporated the moment Donald Trump won the presidential election back in November, and the company began its predictable purge of “woke” content the following month when it cut an entire storyline about a transgender youth from its recently released animated sports series Win or Lose. As anyone with critical thinking skills understood during the so-called “Woke Disney” era, multi-billion-dollar corporations will always embrace the most popular position when it comes to social issues, and the decision to go anti-woke was just as profit-motivated as was Disney’s brief push to put gay women of color in its mega-budget blockbusters.

Nevertheless, “Put a chick in it and make it lame and gay” is such a foundational phrase in the anti-woke lexicon that even Disney’s reversal in values and the retirement of the pandering public enemy #1 may not stop these culture warriors from unironically quoting Cartman whenever there’s a woman in a space movie. In the South Park subreddit, news of Kennedy’s impending retirement broke on the front page with the title, "No More Putting a Woman in It and Making Her Gay."

Just like the multiverse’s combinations of pants and shirts, the anti-woke echo chamber is endless.