South Park: Imaginationland

Rating NR Formats DVD Genre comedy Starring Trey Parker , Matt Stone Directed by Trey Parker Publisher Comedy Central External Links Official South Park Website

For its entire eleven-year run (has it really been eleven years?), South Park has shown us our blind spots, commented on injustice and prejudice, and exploded stereotypes. By all rights, any show with this kind of nerve should have been cancelled after four episodes. South Park has managed to get away with it all these years by cutting through any treacle with a full barrage of poop, dick, and fart jokes, a style that is executed masterfully in the new uncensored three-episode DVD collection Imaginationland.

In South Park: Imaginationland, the boys travel to a make-believe land, save two worlds from terrorism, and fend off Alien, Predator, Manbearpig and the Woodland Christmas Critters. Most importantly, though, Kyle sucks Cartman's balls. By betting that Cartman cannot produce a leprechaun and offering to suck Cartman's balls if he can (if Kyle wins, he gets ten dollars, which, for those of you scoring at home, are bad odds), Kyle spins off a series of events that leads most of the boys to Imaginationland, and leads Cartman on a cross-country hunt to force Kyle to make good on his side of the bet.

Kyle, Stan, Jimmy, and Butters are collected in a flying machine and whisked off to Imaginationland by a stranger who will be horrifyingly familiar to anyone who was dragged through Epcot Center's Journey to Imagination as a child when you really wanted to go on Space Mountain, right down to his tuneless and incessant "Imagination Song." As the boys marvel at the towering mushrooms and the bright, shiny imaginary characters who rush to welcome them, Imaginationland is thrown into Saving Private Ryan-style slow-motion, ear-spinning chaos as a suicide bomber rips open his vest and wipes out the gathered crowd. Good luck getting the image of Dorothy and Toto's bullet-ridden bodies or a flame-engulfed Santa Claus out of your head. Kyle, Stan, and Jimmy escape the carnage on the back of Draco from Dragonheart, leaving Butters behind to read terrorist demands at the point of a rifle and a severed Care Bear head.

The government's attempts to cope with the attacks could easily become a one-note joke ("Our imagination has been attacked by terrorists!" "Our imagination is running wild!" "We have to get our imagination under control!"), but Cartman, as usual, has only his own interests in mind and could care less about the terrorist threat to our imagination. He wants what he was promised – for Kyle to suck his balls. While Imaginationland earns its critical praise by riffing on the abstraction of terrorists attacking our imagination, Cartman's quest for justice is what keeps everything moving. Over and over, he has Kyle dead to rights, and over and over, the government's problems in Imaginationland thwart him. As Matt Stone and Trey Parker put it on the accompanying commentary track, Cartman's story is an attempt to apply the structure of an episode of 24 to the topic of ball sucking.

Butters, left for dead in Imaginationland, is the perfect proxy for the put-upon child who discovers he has magical powers in a secret kingdom, a la Harry Potter or the Pevensie children. With the help of the Imaginationland Council of Nine (Zeus, Morpheus, Luke Skywalker, Jesus, Wonder Woman, Aslan, Gandalf, Glinda the Good Witch, and Popeye, naturally), he uses his imagination to restore order to Imaginationland after the U.S. government's nuclear reprisal. In the aftermath, Kyle reminds us of the important roles imaginary characters have played in our lives, from Luke Skywalker to Cap'n Crunch to Jesus. We need our imagination since Imaginationland is the only place where anything is possible, so we can't be abandoned to terrorists. Unfortunately for Kyle, its power may even help Cartman finally find justice.

Stone and Parker take shots at celebrities on all sides, as usual. The government finds few useful ideas when consulting Hollywood directors M. Night Shaymalan (who provides only twists) and Michael Bay (who provides only special effects), though Mel Gibson is surprisingly helpful, albeit completely insane. Kurt Russell, after entering Imaginationland in an exact re-creation of a scene from Stargate, meets an undignified fate at the hands (and, um, not hands) of the Woodland Christmas Critters. Al Gore will stop at nothing to rid the world of his nemesis Manbearpig, flying to everyone's rescue with a cape, his Nobel Prize, and homemade whooshing noises.

The extras on the DVD are welcome additions. The two bonus episodes ("Woodland Critter Christmas" and "Manbearpig") introduce the uninitiated to some of the most terrifying characters from Imaginationland, and the commentary track by Stone and Parker lasts much longer than the five minutes they offer on most episodes. In fact, they make it nearly three-quarters of the way through the movie before running out of things to say. Which is fine -- while the pair offer plenty of insight into the creative process (I am eternally amazed that they make these things in a week), the brevity of the commentary reminds us that while South Park is relevant and satirical enough to make us stop and analyze the way we think and act, it's the poop, dick, and fart jokes that keep us coming back for more.