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South Park mania began almost as soon as the show debuted on Comedy Central last summer (it is shown on Wednesdays at 10 p.m. E.T.), and it has become the top-rated series on cable, seen by some 5 million people every week. While that is less than a third of the audience for the other animated adult hits, The Simpsons and King of the Hill, it is an impressive number, since Comedy Central is available in only about half the nation's homes. Not surprisingly, South Park is particularly strong among the 18-to-24-year-olds so coveted by advertisers. Viewing parties are the rage on many college campuses, where activities grind to a halt at showtime. Five percent of the audience is under 11 years old. It is the only regular series on TV to carry a Mature or MA rating, the harshest, and it can be blocked by the V chip. The best-selling T shirt last year was based on South Park; a movie deal is all but set; a sound-track album is being produced--can a theme-park ride be far behind?
Parker is from a small town in Colorado, and Stone grew up in a Denver suburb; they met when they attended film school at the state university in Boulder. In 1994 Brian Graden, who was an executive at Fox, saw their live-action film Cannibal: The Musical, and the connection that led to South Park was made. Graden says he couldn't get anyone interested in Cannibal, South Park or other ideas he tried to develop with Parker and Stone, among them a TV series about two apes who hang upside down and sing. To help his proteges pay the rent, Graden hired Parker and Stone to make a video Christmas card for him.
The result was The Spirit of Christmas, a 5-min. animated short in which Jesus and Santa Claus fight and curse each other over who has the bigger claim to the holiday. "I was supposed to send it to 500 people on my executive kiss-a__ list," says Graden, who has since moved to MTV. "And I saw it and thought, O.K., this is the funniest thing I've ever seen, but I can't send it to studio heads. So I sent it to about 40 friends, most of them not even in the business." Nevertheless, the tape was copied and passed around, and became an insider sensation.
Now everybody wants a piece of Parker and Stone. All the networks are interested in whatever they do for their next TV show, as are various production companies ranging from DreamWorks to Warner Bros. to Fox to Paramount. But Comedy Central isn't about to let them go. The network is renegotiating their contract upwards, and will make the change retroactive to South Park's debut. It is also seeking a long-term commitment from the pair.
Meanwhile, October Films will bring out Orgazmo, a feature-film porn parody written, directed and starred in by Parker, and produced and acted in by Stone. They are writing the screenplay of the prequel to Dumb and Dumber for New Line Cinema, and they are acting in BASEketball, a film by David Zucker, part of the team that made the Airplane! movies, which Stone and Parker greatly admire. BASEketball is shooting now, and Zucker says of his stars, "They're up all hours. They work all day on this movie, then they go and write South Park. They have people on the set constantly coming up to them with plotlines and other things that demand their direction."