South Park fans should have known that something was up when the Season Two premiere was scheduled for April 1, 1998.
Back when South Park was first starting out and hadn’t yet evolved into a billion-dollar multimedia franchise, series creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone had no way of gauging exactly how passionate their fledgling fanbase would be. Hell, even 28 years after South Park premiered, Parker and Stone are still waiting for the other shoe to drop and for interest in the show to instantly evaporate along with their lucrative contracts. But somehow, in its first season, South Park earned a renewal from Comedy Central, which inspired Parker and Stone to plant a fake cliffhanger in the Season One finale to set up some inter-season shenanigans that would lead to one of the biggest controversies of the early series.
In the Season One finale “Cartman’s Mom Is a Dirty Slut,” South Park teased the results of a paternity test that would determine who Cartman’s father was, only for Season Two to open with the infamous episode “Terrance and Phillip in Not Without My Anus,” which both refused to reveal Cartman’s father and featured zero appearances from Cartman — or from the rest of the main cast — in a single scene. Shortly after the “Terrance and Phillip in Not Without My Anus” bait-and-switch incensed the early South Park fandom, Parker and Stone appeared on Dennis Miller Live where they confessed that they didn’t expect their viewers to care about the identity of Cartman’s dad.
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In fact, the furious reaction to “Terrance and Phillip in Not Without My Anus” made it their all-time favorite episode.
“We did this thing where we set up this big cliffhanger: ‘Who is Cartman’s father?’” Parker explained of the April Fool’s Day prank that pissed off America, “(We were) thinking, ‘Who is going to give a fuck who Cartman’s father is?’”
As it turns out, a lot of people gave a fuck, and they expressed their anger in thousands of phone calls and emails sent to Comedy Central in the week following the premiere of “Terrance and Phillip in Not Without My Anus.”
“So we’re like, we’ll do a whole side episode that’s Terrance and Phillip, and we won’t even have the kids in it at all, right?” Parker continued. “We’re rebelling against our own show, basically.” And, critically, Parker and Stone assumed that their fans would be in on the joke, especially considering the timing of the episode’s premiere. “It aired, and we’re thinking, ‘Ah, people are going to love it, they’re going to be so stoked that we fucked with them!’” Parker recalled. “And, boy, Comedy Central just got flooded with calls (saying), ‘Fuck you! I’m never watching this show again!”
Stone added, “There were things on the internet that was like, ‘Fuck you Matt and Trey, I hate you. I wish you were dead, I’m never watching your show again!’”
Now, if any Season One fans were serious about their threat to never watch South Park again, they’ve certainly missed out on the last 26 seasons of fuckery — just imagine how they would have reacted to those banned episodes.