Review: South Park “Franchise Prequel”

Will there be a sequel?

Overview (Spoilers Below)

On this week’s episode of South Park, Coon and Friends want to launch a tentpole slate of superhero properties that start on Netflix, because apparently, they’ll take ANYTHING. Problem is, someone’s going around and posting false accusations about the guys leading Coon and Friends to investigate who the hell is doing all of this and even Netflix doesn’t want to touch that.

The viewer is obviously let in on the caper, noting that Professor Chaos has recruited an army of kids to help perpetuate false accusations about people on Facebook. The operation is actually quite impressive, a one-time Circuit City retail store that is now dilapidated and transformed to look like the hideout for Professor Chaos.

It doesn’t take long before the parents of Facebook are fed up with the social network and demand that Mark Zuckerberg show himself. It doesn’t take long, but the parents soon regret their decision because Mark is ALWAYS AROUND and is constantly stalking the other parents while performing an obvious homage to classic English dubbed live-action films.

Coon and Friends opt to team up and to wipe out Facebook by beating the shit out of Mark and then getting Butters’ parents to shut down Professor Chaos’ evil operations…or did they? With Chaos out of the picture, Coon and Friends have an argument about what direction in which to take their characters’ heroes which causes a “Fracture” in the superhero squad that leads to Civil War.

Our Take

I’m sure the producers of South Park are well aware of the fact that their critiques of selling out to Netflix are warranted, they are ironic given that this week’s episode is a blatant prequel to the upcoming South Park: The Fractured But Whole game that releases next week on XBone, PS4, and PC.

In any event, the morals stemming from Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s slant on Facebook are rather profound and probably should be advertised more as our country is perpetuating a constant sense of reacting to everything they read on social media and not instead checking sources for factual integrity, not condemning the innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, and of course, the rabid fandoms of Marvel and DC movies that constantly go to war in online forums either over which side has the better movies or where the fuck we are in either tentpole’s “Extended Universe” where in some cases we have multiple.

The actual plot is somewhat derivative of a number of South Park episodes, but Mark Zuckerberg has officially been put on notice much in the same way Tom Cruise, Bono, and Jersey Shore have in the past, and the consequences of this show getting the word out there about Mark’s lack of leadership in times of controversy could have ripple effects on Facebook’s user base.