- Title: 'South Park' creators offer mocking 'apology' to China over episode
- Date: 8th October 2019
- Summary: NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES (FILE - MARCH 18, 2011) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (English) "SOUTH PARK" CO-CREATOR, TREY PARKER, SAYING: "No, we didn't really cut anything out because we didn't come at it from a point - you know we didn't sit down and say, all right let's bash Mormons how should we do it, let's spend seven years of our lives writing a Broadway musical so that we can rip on Mormons." / (SOUNDBITE) "SOUTH PARK" CO-CREATOR, MATT STONE, SAYING: "Even if we did hate Mormons that would be a weird thing to do." / TWO-SHOT OF PARKER AND STONE DURING INTERVIEW / (SOUNDBITE) (English) TREY PARKER, "SOUTH PARK" CO-CREATOR, SAYING: "Yeah, that would be a big waste of time. I mean we really wanted to just make a very traditional classic musical and you know, just like a Rogers and Hammerstein kind of musical but you know, instead of it being about people in Oklahoma or in the islands during World War II we wanted to make it about Mormons. And so you know, right away we knew what we were doing, we knew this wasn't just a big, you know, F you to Mormons and so."
- Embargoed: 22nd October 2019 11:01
- Keywords: South Park satirical animated series China Matt Stone Trey Parker
- Location: INTERNET / UNIDENTIFIED LOCATION / NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES
- City: INTERNET / UNIDENTIFIED LOCATION / NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES
- Country: USA
- Topics: Arts / Culture / Entertainment,Television
- Reuters ID: LVA003B08JY9Z
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text: The creators of satirical animated series "South Park" issued a mocking "apology" to China, following media reports that episodes of the show were no longer available on some Chinese websites.
The "Band in China" episode released on October 2 critiqued China's policies on free speech as well as the efforts of Hollywood to shape its movie and television content in recent years to avoid angering censors in the vast Chinese market.
"Like the NBA, we welcome the Chinese censors into our homes and into our hearts. We too love money more than freedom," Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of the irreverent Comedy Central show, wrote in a Twitter post titled "Official apology to China".
"Long live the Great Communist Party of China! May this autumn's sorghum harvest be bountiful! We good now China?," Parker and Stone added.
A Reuters search online showed that iQiyi and Youku Tudou, two Chinese video streaming sites, both listed episodes of South Park available to view, but the actual episodes did not play when requested.
Searching for the show's name on Baidu Tieba, a popular online forum, and on Douban, a popular movie ratings site, did not yield any results.
The long-running "South Park" series is one of cable channel Comedy Central's biggest and most controversial hits, built around the misadventures of four foul-mouthed fourth graders.
The episode at the center of the latest dispute saw character Randy Marsh being arrested after trying to smuggle marijuana into China.
In jail, he meets two Chinese prisoners called Winnie the Pooh and Piglet, and is subjected to slave labor and re-education.
China has in the past proved sensitive about the British children's characters because Pooh is sometimes used as a nickname on social media for Chinese President Xi Jinping.
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