Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Attention South Park fans: now’s your chance to hang out with your favorite Coloradans, including Eric, Kenny, Kyle, Stan, Chef, Terrance & Philip, and even Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo. It’s all part of the “South Park 20 Experience” at the Paley Center for Media in Los Angeles, which is being held from August 24 – September 25.
The “South Park 20 Experience” features twenty life-sized scenes built out in 2-D/3-D format allowing fans to jump into some of the most memorable moments in South Park history for photo opps to share on social media. The exhibit also showcases twenty artist interpretations of the series, hand-picked by famed street artist and pop surrealist painter, Ron English, who also curated the collection done for the show’s fifteenth season.
There’s also a gallery featuring twenty original animation cells from the pilot episode of the show. In case you didn’t know, South Park created a new animation process that allowed them to produce episodes in a week, far faster than most animated shows, allowing creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker to respond quickly to current events. That process became the long-running show’s signature visual style.
Decider got a sneak peek at the Paley Center exhibit and spoke to Chris “Crispy” Brion, Creative Director of South Park Digital Studios, about how the “South Park 20 Experience” came together.
DECIDER: There are so many great episodes and moments. How did you decide what to include?
BRION: We didn’t have to decide what to do for this – it’s all fan-driven. We actually started polling the fans eight months ago asking on Twitter and Facebook what their favorite moments were, what their favorite quotes were, what their favorite episodes were, and then started pooling all the favorite moments for this. On social media, the nice thing is you have fans who start commenting and then commenting on the comments and so on. The fans are so passionate. As far as all these moments – I think we’ve been streaming episodes for eight years now – the great thing is we know what fans are watching, what they’re enjoying, and I think the really great thing about this entire experience is that we boiled that down. Fans will say “But what about this?” I got that at ComicCon, fans would say “I really like this but I can’t believe you don’t have this character.” And I’d say, “You know what, you’re absolutely right, we don’t have them but we also don’t have 1,650 other characters (laughs).” It’s hard to pick! We have over 1,700 characters in the series now.
How did you gather the original artwork for the exhibit?
BRION: We did a similar event for the 15th season and Ron English commissioned 15 artists to do original work for that, so for this, we thought, let’s do it with 20 artists this time. And this time, we have 20 original production cells on the wall.
Brion has been with South Park since the show began, so we had to ask about his personal favorite. Brion smiled and said, “I’ve been with the series so long, it’s hard to pick any one moment.”
Fans can also watch free daily screenings of select episodes from the first nineteen seasons of the series. All twenty seasons of the iconic animated series will join the Paley archive.
Don’t forget to tune in for the Season 20 South Park premiere on September 14 at 10:00pm on Comedy Central!
