Pretty fun episode. The 2000 election commentary is a little on the nose, even if there's some good lines and satire involved. The Terminator/2001 parody is dumb fun, with Cartman's obliviousness hitting its natural peak. Entertaining, but not the cleverest thing the show would ever do.
EDIT 9/26/2020: [7.3/10] On rewatch, this one is a bit of a mixed bag. The A-story, a zany take on sci-fi thrillers, is an absolute hoot. The B-story, a commentary on the 2000 U.S. Presidential election recount controversy, is a lot less successful.
I rewatched this one because I recently saw Akira, and I have to say, I love South Park’s homage to the classic anime. I think it speaks to how good the tribute is that the episode still worked wonderfully despite the reference going over my head on the initial watch. Still, the shot-for-shot (in some instances) pull from the 1988 animated in the loony South Park contexts works wonderfully as both paying homage and having fun.
There’s also just the sheer irreverence of a crazy sci-fi plot hinging on Cartman and his Dawson’s Creek trapper keeper. The presence of a robot from the future who keeps inserting the word “human” before his nouns in a failed attempt to fit in is a good running gag, and the show does a nice job of poking fun at those thriller tropes while using them for their best comic ends. It’s worth noting that the artwork is surprisingly good here, especially for the show’s paper cut out style. The design work on both the Trapper Keeper-a-fied Cartman and on the bleak dystopian future is unexpectedly great.
The catch here is that, in hindsight, I have very mixed feelings about the 2000 election done miniature via Ike’s kindergarten class. There’s some implicit satire in the implicit notion that our presidential candidates and their campaigns were acting like children through this event, but the other side of the coin is that it was a legitimately important and stakes-filled event in American politics, so it’s not crazy for both sides to try to stand their ground here. If you can take off your politics hat, there’s some pure fun in just reducing that event to a kindergarten squabble, but when Trey & Matt start soapboxing, the whole thing feels a lot less sharp or incisive than when I saw this as a teenager. That’s not a unique phenomenon when revisiting South Park episodes.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2015-07-08T05:03:20Z— updated 2020-09-26T21:37:37Z
Pretty fun episode. The 2000 election commentary is a little on the nose, even if there's some good lines and satire involved. The Terminator/2001 parody is dumb fun, with Cartman's obliviousness hitting its natural peak. Entertaining, but not the cleverest thing the show would ever do.
EDIT 9/26/2020: [7.3/10] On rewatch, this one is a bit of a mixed bag. The A-story, a zany take on sci-fi thrillers, is an absolute hoot. The B-story, a commentary on the 2000 U.S. Presidential election recount controversy, is a lot less successful.
I rewatched this one because I recently saw Akira, and I have to say, I love South Park’s homage to the classic anime. I think it speaks to how good the tribute is that the episode still worked wonderfully despite the reference going over my head on the initial watch. Still, the shot-for-shot (in some instances) pull from the 1988 animated in the loony South Park contexts works wonderfully as both paying homage and having fun.
There’s also just the sheer irreverence of a crazy sci-fi plot hinging on Cartman and his Dawson’s Creek trapper keeper. The presence of a robot from the future who keeps inserting the word “human” before his nouns in a failed attempt to fit in is a good running gag, and the show does a nice job of poking fun at those thriller tropes while using them for their best comic ends. It’s worth noting that the artwork is surprisingly good here, especially for the show’s paper cut out style. The design work on both the Trapper Keeper-a-fied Cartman and on the bleak dystopian future is unexpectedly great.
The catch here is that, in hindsight, I have very mixed feelings about the 2000 election done miniature via Ike’s kindergarten class. There’s some implicit satire in the implicit notion that our presidential candidates and their campaigns were acting like children through this event, but the other side of the coin is that it was a legitimately important and stakes-filled event in American politics, so it’s not crazy for both sides to try to stand their ground here. If you can take off your politics hat, there’s some pure fun in just reducing that event to a kindergarten squabble, but when Trey & Matt start soapboxing, the whole thing feels a lot less sharp or incisive than when I saw this as a teenager. That’s not a unique phenomenon when revisiting South Park episodes.