South Park: Dead Celebrities

I'm gonna try to get the first 2 new South Park episode reviews of this month done today, and do the third one tomorrow. The first one is titled Dead Celebrities. As far as the standard for South Park episodes has been these past few years, I thought this was a very solid episode. I had figured Trey Parker and Matt Stone were going to do something about the 137(exaggeration) celebrities that have died in the last few months. There were pros and cons about this episode, so I'll go through both.

The episode starts off with Kyle's parents doing it, which I really didn't need to see, being interrupted by Ike. The first thing I noticed was that Ike can actually talk and form sentences. The old Ike could only say a few words at a time, so it was interesting to hear him actually talk. Ike claims that he sees a ghost, and is told to go back to his room, where we first see the ghost. I love the integration of seeing the stereotypical ghost figure turn into Billy Mays. I though Billy Mays was great when he was alive, and I loved South Park's interpretation of him. He was viewed as this annoying loud guy that would never stop advertising products, even in the afterlife. I laughed at pretty much everything he said in this episode, especially the Chipotlaway infomercial and the "With 2 easy steps, I can climb over these chairs and kick you right in the fucking balls" comment. The scene where Kyle is trying to tell Ike there's no ghosts and Billy Mays is right next to him selling the Big City SIider station was great. Ike's face was priceless. Speaking of Chipoltaway, I though the parts in this episode where Kyle is more concerned about the fact that people will still eat Chipotle even though it makes them bleed in their underpants was a nice touch. It took me away from the story a little bit but made me laugh in the process.

I thought the metaphor for purgatory was brilliant. It really is the perfect comparison, because you wouldn't want to be stuck in purgatory just as much as you wouldn't want to be stuck in an airplane that isn't taking off and you can't do anything. It was a very amusing visual to see all the dead celebrities stuck in airplane seats and getting more and more pissed off. Plus, it fit the South Park style that after everything was over, they all ended up going to Hell and they had to be stuck on the plane for even more time.

I knew it wasn't long before they brought up Michael Jackson. This was the part of the episode where it kind of died down a little. The whole Ike acting like Michael thing was amusing, but it wasn't THAT funny. The scene with the Little Miss Colorado pageant was funny, and I thought the judges were hilarious, even if it might have been over-the-top for some people.

This episode was good. Not great, but good. If it wasn't for Billy Mays, the score would have been much lower.

I give this episode an 8.2

R.I.P Billy Mays