How They Did It: South Park’s Election Episode

By Andrew

When it comes to social commentary, South Park takes the proverbial cake, constantly cutting through the bullsh*t to get to the nut of the matter with hilarious vulgarity and awesome story-lines. But anyone who watched last Wednesday’s South Park election episode, “About Last Night” was crapping their pants in amazement at the timeliness of the show, which included the results of Tuesday’s election, lines from both John McCain and Barack Obama’s speeches from less than 24-hours before and the explosive celebration of Obamaniacs after his big win that perfectly matched their real-life drunken euphoria.

Immediately, we started asking, how the hell did they do it? Did they make two episodes, one for an Obama victory, one for McCain? Did they have some inside info only available to elite cartoonists? Did they just bank on the polls being right and go for broke? Fortunately, IGN TV was able to get co-creator Matt Stone on the line for an answer. 

IGN TV: First and foremost, I want to ask you: how did you get this episode finished in time?

Matt Stone: We talked about doing an election episode for a couple of months. Usually we start talking about these things when we start talking about the whole run, about a month ago. So we started talking about what episodes we’d like to do. When we started talking about the election, we were like “That’s on a Tuesday. Wednesday is the next day… We could have a whole episode!”

So we started talking about stories that would be neutral to who won. And that’s when we came up with the whole diamond heist thing. We were going to produce a couple of different shows, but we don’t do the show that far in advance. So as it got closer, in the last few weeks – it was so obvious that Obama was going to win that we just produced the Obama show. We just did it and assumed the polls would be right.

IGN: Okay, wow.

Stone: So we didn’t really start in earnest on this show until one week ago. For the speeches we had a blank space in there, with the acceptance and concession speeches in there. That only takes us a couple hours to do. It’s a very easy animation. The main thing was waiting until they gave the speeches so we could get the backdrops and see what it looked like. Then we copied down the speech and put it in there.

What was funny is that we’d written placeholder crap and put it in there. It was “I want to thank my fellow Americans and blah blah blah” and “Change is going to come..” We just wrote some junk to put in there as temp, and it was amazing how much the temporary stuff matched the boilerplate in there. We then took a few things that people would remember, like Obama promising his kids the dog. We copied the words and put that in, but that was easy for us because we do the show so quick. We were here all night, but we usually are on Tuesday finishing the show.

Check out the rest of the interview here.