South Park has courted controversy since its inception. The long-running animated series began its life as a series of shorts created via construction paper and passed around via VHS copies, the second of which featured the iconic fight between Jesus and Santa Claus over who had the rights to Christmas. When it was finally ordered to series, they wasted no time following a similar path, such as the very first episode, \u201cCartman Gets an Anal Probe,\u201d which eventually led to \u201cMecha-Streisand\u201d and other wildly out of pocket moments in the first season. Across 28 seasons, they\u2019ve never once pulled their punches or slowed down.<\/p>\n
Today, though, marks the anniversary of a distinct place in the history of South Park<\/em>\u2018s many controversies, as it marks the first time that the series was ever censored upon its initial premiere, with an episode that remains banned to this day. On April 21, 2010, sixteen years ago today, South Park<\/em> released the episode \u201c201,\u201d which not only marked the 201st episode of the series total but picked up on several major plot threads from throughout the series. Among those threads was the use of the Prophet Muhammad, which stirred a hornet\u2019s nest, with death threats made at the creators and resulting in the parent company actively engaging in censorship.<\/p>\n \u201c201\u201d picks up from the cliffhanger of \u201c200,\u201d the episode that initially spurred the controversy around South Park<\/em>. In that episode, a group of celebrities threatens a lawsuit against the town but offers a solution to settle: bring them the Prophet Muhammad. The town is naturally wary of this, as depicting Muhammad is forbidden in the Muslim religion and was believed to be the source of violent retaliation. All across \u201c200,\u201d Muhammad is never actually seen, only heard from behind a closed door or inside a giant costume, but ahead of its premiere, it was believed that \u201c201\u201d would go all the way and reveal Muhammad entirely.<\/p>\n This was, of course, a quite silly controversy at the time, because South Park<\/em> had already depicted Muhammad in a past episode, all the way back in the Season Five episode, \u201cSuper Best Friends,\u201d where his appearance spurred no controversy. Despite this, Revolution Muslim (a defunct radical organization out of New York) wrote a vaguely threatening post about it, saying that what creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone \u201care doing is stupid and they will probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh for airing this show\u201d (Theo Van Gogh was a Dutch filmmaker murdered after directing a short critical of the treatment of women in Islam). That, combined with the larger belief by media companies not to depict Muhammad, immediately created a firestorm, splitting the sides between \u201cSouth Park shouldn\u2019t do that\u201d and \u201cSouth Park should have the freedom to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n As a result, a lot of eyes were on \u201c201\u201d when it arrived, with the episode earning higher viewership than episode 200. When the episode aired, though, it arrived with multiple moments of censorship, with every mention of \u201cMuhammad\u201d bleeped out, the character himself covered by a giant black \u201cCensored\u201d bar, and the final monologue to wrap up the storyline also censored (with more than thirty seconds of the episode fully censored, including multiple characters). <\/p>\n Initially, some believed that the censored elements of the series were part of the joke, only for the South Park<\/em> team to confirm the next day that all of these decisions were made after they delivered the episode to Paramount\/Viacom. In a statement on their South Park Studios website, the team confirmed that Comedy Central \u201cadded the bleeps\u201d to the episode, including Kyle\u2019s big line that itself was about succumbing to the fear of the threat of violence.<\/p>\n \u201cI learned something today. Throughout this whole ordeal, we\u2019ve all wanted to show things that we weren\u2019t allowed to show, but it wasn\u2019t because of some magic goo. It was because of the magical power of threatening people with violence. That\u2019s obviously the only true power. If there\u2019s anything we\u2019ve all learned, it\u2019s that terrorizing people works.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nSouth Park Episode \u201c201\u201d Was Controversial Before It Even Aired<\/h2>\n
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South Park\u2019s \u201c201\u201d Remains Banned<\/h2>\n
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