USA TODAY ARTICLE (not sure of date..but old)
USA Today: The masters of the chaotic 'South Park' universe By Elizabeth Snead
LOS ANGELES - Inside a signless three-story brick building, a dozen young animators are hunched over computers, breathing life into the foulmouthed third-graders of Comedy Central's South Park.
They're concentrating on making alien flames shoot out of Cartman's rear, Stan vomit on his crush Wendy, Kyle kick his baby brother like a football and oh, my God, they killed Kenny!
The perverse Colorado kids in the twisted new cartoon series (airing Wednesdays at 10 p.m. ET/PT) were born four years ago at Colorado State University when buddies Trey Parker and Matt Stone made some animated shorts for film classes. The videos were primitive stuff, patched together from construction-paper cutouts glued with Elmer's, photographed frame by frame.
"We weren't there to become animators," recalls Parker, 27, of Conifer, Colo. (Stone, 26, is from Denver.) "But we got inventive and came up with a really cool look."
For the series, they've graduated to computerized animation but stuck with their crude, one-dimensional style.
The college cartoons became part of their video rÀesumÀe, shown to talent scouts when they landed in Los Angeles to look for TV and film work. In 1995, then-Fox executive Brian Graden commissioned Parker and Stone to make a holiday cartoon video to send out to pals on his Christmas card list.
"Basically, he said, 'I'll give you enough money to buy Christmas presents for your family and friends,' " Parker recalls. With $3,000 in their pockets, they cranked out The Spirit of Christmas, featuring a quartet of ill-behaved brats cursing each other and watching a kung-fu fight between Santa Claus and Jesus Christ.
Within weeks, Parker and Stone were getting inquiries from New York and London. "It was like . . . a virus," Parker says.
"Yeah . . . like Outbreak," a deadpan Stone says.
They landed at Comedy Central and began making South Park, which is earning the highest ratings for an original series in the network's history. (About 57,000 households tuned in for South Park's premiere; almost 65,800 watched the second episode.)
So who are these guys?
South Park's creators resemble harmless post-college slackers in their Nikes, T-shirts and baggy shorts. Stone's dad, Gerald, is a semiretired economics professor, and mom Sheila, a homemaker. His younger sister, Rachel, a social worker, is pictured in the framed photo next to Cartman while he eats Cheesy Poufs in the pilot.
"My parents think I'm completely warped," admits Stone, who has a mathematics degree. "But my dad is probably our biggest fan."
Parker is the youngest son of Randy, a government geologist, and Sharon, an insurance broker. He has an older sister, Shelley. "My mom realizes the show is a big deal since we were in People."
The creators do draw from their own childhoods. "Stan, the leader kid with the blue hat, is basically me," Parker explains. "Kyle, the Jewish kid with the green hat and ear flaps, is Matt. Kenny is just a poor kid who's always around. We're both kind of Cartman."
Chin-scratching critics already are dissecting South Park's politics. Stone read one review postulating that Kenny represents the underclass because his voice is muffled and he dies in every episode. (The character is inexplicably resurrected each week.)
"Oh yeah, we put a lot of thought into that," Stone says. "You know, Trey, I think we should do a character who represents the underprivileged."
Stone is still reeling from a review that pointed out that while The Simpsons reveals the emptiness of modern suburban life and Beavis and Butt-head explores juvenile nihilism, South Park doesn't have a "subtext."
"Subtext, my a - -," Stone scoffs. "Both those series have over 200 episodes. We have three."
These guys are more than in touch with their inner children. They're torturing them. But to critics of the show's animated bloodletting, their response is amazement.
"The other night, we were watching Cops, which is rated TV-14," Parker says. "And this woman falls on a big knife, it goes through her chest, blood is spurting everywhere."
"It was the most horrible thing I've ever seen," Stone says. "But our construction-paper cutouts are rated TV-Mature?"
Their real-life language is less censored than their cartoon counterparts', which they had to tone down for TV. "If it feels right, we'll just say it, then bleep it," Parker says.
"In a way, it (the language rule) is good," Stone says. "Otherwise we'd end every scene with Cartman saying 'F - - - you' because we think that is hilarious."
Around the office, larger-than-life cutouts of the South Park denizens are propped up in corners and loom over scattered all-nighter futons.
Upstairs is a small recording studio with a rack of five guitars and a drum set (used for the songs on the show) and the sound booth where Parker and Stone do the kids' high-pitched voices and scream obscenities at each other. The screaming is scripted but they usually improvise to give the banter a more adolescent feel.
Voices are first, then the animators fit action to dialogue. In four months, Stone and Parker's fledgling team has put five episodes in the can.
"It can't be just me and Trey sitting under a camera anymore, so now we've got 35 people working with us," Stone explains. "It takes three weeks to animate an episode, which is blindingly fast by industry standards."
Their schedule leaves little time for social life. "We sleep," Stone says.
"And we play Nintendo," adds Parker, admitting, "There were many times when we thought, we can't do this."
But they also just finished their first feature film, Orgazmo (about a wholesome guy who goes to L.A. and gets involved with adult films), showing at the upcoming Toronto Film Festival. And they are in a band (negotiating with major labels) called DVDA. Stone plays the drums (by default, he says) and Parker plays keyboards and sings.
These avid fans of Beavis and Butt-head now understand why its creator, Mike Judge, recently cashed out.
"I can't imagine doing this for five years," Parker says. "But it's cool that he stayed totally involved the whole time. We learned from him that when the animated world is yours, you can't just leave and think it will stay the same."
Stone and Parker's world may never be the same, thanks to their ornery little alter egos.
This month, South Park T-shirts, hats and boxer shorts hit stores such as TV Land (Boston, Chicago) and Hot Topics (throughout California).
By the holidays, more novelty items are expected. Possibilities are being discussed, such as a Kenny doll that oh, my God, you can kill. Or a Cartman doll, complete with Cheesy Poufs.
"It's pretty weird how quickly they became personalities," Parker says. "And the thought of South Park ending. . . . It would be like those four boys died."
"Yeah," muses Stone, with a straight face. "We'd have to have a funeral and everything."