Starring Matt Stone, Trey Parker
Written By: Matt Stone, Trey Parker
Directed By: Matt Stone, Trey Parker
Studio: Paramount
Buy on Amazon.com link

After a lackluster 7th season, South Park comes back very strong with some of the best episodes the series has ever done. I found some of the 7th season episodes kind of annoying but this season is when Matt & Trey really knock one out of the park..no stupid pun intended. But this isn’t a South Park DVD to pass up because every episode is great and worth watching over and over again.

The 8th Season starts off with one of my favorite South Park episodes ever! It’s when they all decide to buy dangerous weapons like throwing stars, and stars and play as anime characters. Most of the episode is done in Japanese anime style and it’s quite funny seeing Cartman as this giant sumo wrestler warrior with his voice. I believe that’s what Matt and Trey said is how they thought of this idea for the episode. But anyway, the inevitable happens when kids mess with weapons; Butters gets a nice ninja star to the eye. But that’s not the only good episode of the season, there is plenty of hilarious moments of the season. Some of the Season 8 episodes are: Jimmy takes steroids for the special Olympics, Mel Gibson goes crazy and shits all over the place (before the Malibu incident might I add!), Cartman dresses up as Awesom-O for Butters and goes along just to secure a blackmail tape butters has on him, “Mr Jefferson” (aka Michael Jackson) comes to South Park and the police go after him because he’s supposedly black, humans from the future take all the South Park residents jobs, people try to vote for either a giant Douche or Turd Sandwich. There’s a lot more episodes but I can only talk about so much.

Like I said in the intro, I really liked this season of South Park. Matt and Trey were doing these episodes around Team America time but they still continued to make the show fresh & funny. Towards the end, you can tell they were started to get burnt out and run out of ideas, like they said in the mini-commentary. I still think they made one of the better South Park seasons in recent memory. They tackled different issues & attacked certain celebrities like steroid use, Mel Gibson, Walmart, Michael Jackson, immigrants taking jobs, voting and that stupid whore Paris Hilton. Personally, I thought the Giant Douche and Turd Sandwich was a great episode that explains exactly how I feel about politics and voting. I don’t want to vote for either, but people are so brainwashed into thinking you’re throwing your vote away if you don’t vote for one of the 2 big parties or not being “American” if you don’t vote at all. It’s all bullshit and that’s why I stay away from politics. I always like when new current events pop up on the news because I’m curious to see how Matt & Trey are going to handle it. I think they’ve come a long way from just having a cartoon about 4 filthy mouth 3rd graders.

..And who would have thought they would have been right about Mel Gibson going ape shit? The Passion of the Jew episode shows Mel going crazy in his underwear and chasing after Stan and Kyle, “Road Warrior” style. Not really the same thing that happened to him but it’s kind of similar when you think about it. Regardless, it’s quite funny when they attack certain celebrities. I wonder if they are the most hated people in Hollywood? I’m happy they finally went after Michael Jackson and Paris Slutbag as well. One thing I really liked this season was all the songs and montage themes. I remember when they aired the anime episodes, the official South Park website had such a high demand to release the full version of “lick my balls” song. I certainly downloaded it because it’s such a cheesy YET fun song to listen to. But it just seems each episode they had a lot of great montage songs, but then could have just been doing that as filler. I think the reason why they did so many songs is because they were working on Team America. I also like the montage type songs because it’s a nice spoof on movies and television shows that do that.

Like the rest of the South Park DVDs, Matt and Trey do about 2-5 minutes worth of commentary for each episode. They don’t like to talk over the whole episode and ramble on, so they say what they need to say and move on. I sort of like that approach because I end up listening to all of them. Once they are done speaking, I just go back to the beginning of the episode or just continue to watch (whether or not something funny or interesting is happening). They talked about their writing retreats they do and how they came up with the episode ideas. They talked about how they ran out of the ideas for show, and came up with the “Quest for Ratings.” Which is the South Park kids doing a news program for the school and running out of ideas to report on so they make something up. For some of the commentary, they barely remember anything about the episode and talk about something irreverent; it’s still funny though. Check out the commentary for the episodes You Got F’d in the A, Good times With Weapons, Passion of the Jew, Goobacks, Douche and Turd, Quest for Ratings and Stupid Spoiled Whore Video Playset.

Season 8 is filled with a lot of great episodes, regardless of what the creators think…I think this season blows away Season 7 and is ten times funnier. The mini-commentaries are also interesting and funny to listen to as well. Might as well continue buying these South Park sets, they are worth it.

Features:
Mini-commentaries

Audio:
Dolby Digital: English Stereo

Video:
Full Screen

Subtitles:

Favorite Scenes: Good times With Weapons, You Got F’d in the A, Awesom-O, The Jeffersons, Passion of the Jew, Goobacks, Douche and Turd
Rating: NR
Running Time: 308 minutes
Extras Rating:
Overall Rating: