South Park "Britney's New Look" Talkback (Spoilers)

I got it, once that old guy said the stuff about stones in the old days. i knew it was a dead-on reference to The Lottery. That's pretty high-brow to reference such an old story like that.

YES! KILL MILEY CYRUS!
 
Oh, they were referring to something called "The Lottery". I had never heard of "The Lottery" before. I thought they were parodying "The Wicker Man". ;)
Now I wonder if the ending will seem less powerful to me.

The ep tended to drag in the first two thirds. You couldn't get enough material from Britney's "new look", and man Kyle and Stan are boring. But I thought the ending was effective. I think they have a valid analogy between human sacrifice/killing for spectacle in the past, and how we like to torture celebs in the media by making big scandals about their problems. The attack on Britney with the cameras was a dramatic image. I also liked how the scenes smoothly flowed into the harvest that the townsfolk blissfully enjoy, and how Kyle and Stan ultimately got caught up in the societal pressure.

That's the cool thing about cartoons, you can have characters survive getting half their heads torn off. :D I still was pretty grossed out though. That WAS a nasty image to look at. I wonder if T&M were making a reference to this :sad:
 
I didn't catch onto "The Lottery" reference until after the episode was done. I can see Matt and Trey did this. People watching and taking pictures of a celebrity is just sad, but they do this for profit just like people hoped for a great corn harvest the season. Still the episode only followed one plot and there weren't any subplots besides the minor plot where Butters is in a squirrel costume.:anime: Making fun of Brittany Spears was a mistake, but I understood what was going on and why they did it.

The episode was wierd in way and average. You can hits or misses and not every episode can be good. Don't worry they got 12 more chances for the season. Maybe they sacrificed this episode in order have a great season.
 
Basically, "The Lottery" is a story about a town in the semi-olden days where each year (or maybe a different time interval, I'm not sure), someone in the town is randomly chosen to be sacrificed. The way the story is told, you don't quite realize this until the end, in which children and adults join together in throwing stones at the person. So in this episode, the old man who mentioned stone-throwing was probably a reference to "The Lottery", as well as the mother giving a camera to her child.

Getting the reference isn't really necessary, since both stories make more or less the same point, except this one very directly criticizes something that's actually happening right now.
 
For such a lame concept they actually made a funny episode. The preachyness of South Park didn't affect this episode. I really didn't expect a Britney episode to make me laugh so thumbs up.
 
Britney was still alive but headless until she turned into corn at the end.

I notice another South Park/Rankin-Bass reference: The ticket to the North Pole via train and the riding on the train narration by a Jimmy Durante impersonator both borrowed from Rankin-Bass' Frosty the Snowman.

Is Butters now in rehab or something now that the animal control caught him disguised as a squirrel?
 
I could make a lame furry joke about Butters, but I won't.

Lot of references out tonight. The Lottery, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the shrill from the papparazi), some bits from Wicker Man, and apparently at the end, Latin (I think that means, "butt master" or something in English)
 
I still think it's a bit misguided to call this episode a parody of "The Lottery". Parody is like, "Ha ha, we took this thing and made it seem similar to The Lottery." This was more like, "Dude, what's happening right now is The Lottery. The next level of it." They actually implied that what's happening to Britney Spears is the next phase, the thing that happens after The Lottery isn't good enough anymore (the townspeople said stoning people was too brutal, so now they make them kill themselves). Of course, the stuff about the corn harvest does venture more into parody territory; maybe it would've been better if they had found a modern parallel to that, something that actually made sense.

And I really am worried about Miley Cyrus. Her fate seems inescapable.

Speaking of which, I would argue that Britney's predecessor was Anna Nicole Smith. They made a spectacle out of her misery and then when she died, they mourned her as if she were their queen. The disingenuousness of it all was truly astonishing.


According to Wikipedia they were chanting "Rectus Dominus". Not quite proper Latin, but it does more or less correlate to "Butt Master".
 
The annoying thing about this episode was that even though the media commentary was pretty dead-on and the parallel (I agree, not parody) of "The Lottery" made the point pretty well, it just wasn't funny.
 
This just recently came to me... does anyone feel like this episode should have been in the last seasons batch of episodes?

I mean bashing Britney jokes they used felt like something they would be using for the previous season material for some reason. Didn't even see anything recent that the woman did, but then again, I don't read the Tabloids they sell at supermarkets, or celebrity gossip pages.
 
(In my best Peter Griffin voice) What?



I wouldn't worry about it. Butters will be back next week like nothing ever happened, I'm sure. Gotta love him.
 
I ended up catching the last 5 minutes at the 11:00 pm showing after work and wondered what the heck was going on. The whole time I was just sitting there honestly shocked at how everything wrapped up without knowing the actual story behind it all.

The cool thing about the internet is, South Park is on it. So I watched the episode, and I gotta say, I laughed about 2 times (that was before both jokes were beaten) and the rest of the time I just sat there watching it. It wasn't funny, but it definitely was dark enough to hold my interest - Brittany attempting and not pulling off Suicide with just a half of a head the entire episode was very distracting. And the whole ending - wow. Neat to know that Park doesn't have to get stupid and can actually attempt to do something actually dark even if it borderlines allusions and parodies.

While the episode was not perfect, especially because Matt and Trey love to parody their little hearts out, I still found it enjoyable to watch.

Definitely not an A, but more like a B-.
 
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