FireBlade DVD Review: South Park Volume 5

Review by Jerry Stratton, 12/31/1999

No, I wasn’t in Vietnam. But sometimes I like to pretend I was.

I was first introduced to South Park through the movie (which also kicks ass). The television shows are amazing. Variety, of all things, calls it “gloriously subversive art”. Yeah, whatever. It’s great shit that you must eat. I recommend buying the collected three-DVD sets. Make sure you check the pricing, however: at Amazon, the sets are more expensive than buying the individual disks! The first set, at least, contains nothing but the individual disks: there is no bonus to buying the set. (In fact, now that the second 3-pack is out, the pricing is all fucked up for South Park, so pay attention.)

This DVD includes episodes 17 through 20 of South Park (if you don’t include “Not Without My Anus” in the count, which apparently they aren’t).

“Conjoined Fetus Lady” is probably the most “normal” of the shows. It has a clear moral and even a speech explaining what that moral is! Nurse Gollum, the school nurse, has a dead fetus attached to her head: her twin died before childbirth. South Park’s queen of movements, Sheila Broslofski, decides to raise the community’s awareness of this horrible disfiguring disease. In practice, of course, this means parading the nurse around like a circus freak, exactly what she doesn’t want.

“The Mexican Staring Frog of Southern Sri Lanka” pits Stan’s uncle Jimbo in a ratings war against Jesus (of “Jesus and Pals”).

“Flashbacks” lets the busdriver, Ms. Crabtree, fall in love, and also affords the kids with the opportunity to reminisce about old times as they hover on the verge of death. Everything ends in ice cream.

“Summer Sucks”, because fireworks have been banned. Ned and Jimbo try to smuggle some up from Mexico. (“Everything’s legal in Mexico.”) And the mayor hires out for the best “safe” fireworks show ever, the world’s biggest snake! Fourth of July will never be the same for South Park. This episode has possibly the best ending line of any episode so far.

The introductions on this DVD continue from the nursing home for the first two, and then go to a cooking show, “Makin’ Bacon with Macon” for the second two. This is probably the most disgusting of the intros so far: every recipe is almost all bacon, with a bit of processed cheese and eggs thrown in. But the disgusting part is that “Macon”, the “mascot” for the fake show, is a pig, and they keep feeding Macon bacon! It’s like cannibalism or something, man, totally gross. The recipes themselves, if you like bacon and cheese, sound like they’d work. I’d take the baking temperature and cooking times with a grain of salt, however.

Recommendation: Purchase
Alternative: Volume 2 3-Pack

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Jerry

	“	Give a man a fish, and you’ve fed him for a day. Teach him to fish, and you’ve depleted the lake.	”
		It Isn’t Murder If They’re Yankees