The world has changed a lot since 1997.
That’s when the creators of South Park brought the stop-motion cartoon to life and brought plenty of foul-mouthed humor into American homes. While they shunned the idea of wholesome Christian values, the right to free speech was something they embraced with a warm heart. They never would have thought that the same liberal crowd that originally welcomed them would now be pushing for their censorship.
Given the impregnation of the liberal censorship into HBO programming since the mid-2000s, they have gone from being the advocates of the ugly truth to the advocates for the ugly desecration of the American family. If it would bring them the soft minds of the left, they were jumping on the program and trying to make money from that.
So when they licensed South Park for HBO Max, many hoped they were just going for the nostalgia factor. With the censorship of five episodes that depict Muhammad: “Super Best Friends,” “Cartoon Wars Part I & II,” “200,” and “201,” scrubbed from their in-demand list, they have challenged the very basis of South Park.
Even back in 2006, this caused controversy, with Comedy Central only airing the episodes with black boxes over the depiction. So, when HBO Max pulled the episode, they were censoring something that had already been censored. With other episodes including long speeches from Kyle being censored, HBO Max is just trying to erase the history of the series.
South Park has ventured more into the liberal arena of comedy in the last 10 years, but they still love taking the frat boy jokes on here and there. It’s this same low-brow comedy and action that attracted many teens and young adults to TV over the last 25 years. It tickles the young person in most of us and makes us remember the fond moments of being young. Why can’t they just let us enjoy it? It’s fictional, it’s not like anyone should be hurt here.
