It's hard to imagine the runaway success of Comedy Central's South Park happening without the Net. Many of the show's fans got their first glimpse into the paper-cutout universe of creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker by downloading the show's prototype - a raunchy, hilarious, 53-MB animated video called "The Spirit of Christmas" - from a Web site they heard about via email and animation mailing lists.
Who cared that South Park's lo-res graphics and twitchy stop-motion took a dozen Silicon Graphics O2s to get just right? The show looked like some retro-loving geek's GIF89 creation already - a natural for webcasting. And when Comedy Central launched the series, the powers-that-be made sure that the online hordes felt invited, with a "South Park Booster" email sign-up on the show's official homepage.
Now that the show's been nominated for a Cable Ace award, however, and Parker and Stone are schlepping an oversized icon of one of the characters across the pages of TV Guide, Comedy Central has decided that South Park fans should be able to watch their favorite series in one place only: Comedy Central.
Though no heavy-handed crackdown on unofficial Web sites is planned, Comedy Central creative vice president Larry Lieberman says that webcasting entire episodes of South Park - as Drexel University sophomore Joseph Hager does on his site, This Week on South Park - is a no-no.
It's easy to see Comedy Central's stance as a defense of its intellectual property rights, but its discouragement of webcasting is not about copyright protection, Lieberman says. "It's purely a creative decision. The TV show is the product. We make television shows. We like to stream them out on television."
Though Lieberman calls himself an "early and major ally" of RealNetworks, the maker of the streaming-video software used to move digitized copies of the show across the Net, he says he doesn't "know how [webcasting] South Park serves the world."
Hager, a 19-year-old computer science major, says his site allows viewers who don't have access to Comedy Central programming, or to cable, to watch the show. "The majority of the emails I get are from people in .edu domains who sit up in their dorm rooms with an Ethernet connection," Hager explains, saying that his site gets more than 6,000 hits a day.
Hager himself had to drive 20 miles to see South Park for the first time, he says. That experience - and his love for a show that features "kids saying whatever's on their minds" - was his inspiration for laboriously digitizing each episode, a process that took hours on his old Quadra 630. Hager has recently upgraded to a faster Mac clone, and says he'll be putting the only show missing from his archive - the first episode, "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe" - online in a day or so.
Tim Skirvin, who claims to have been the first to make "The Spirit of Christmas" available on the Web, agrees with Hager's assessment that the webcasts aren't stealing viewers from Comedy Central, but are increasing the audience for the show.
Skirvin, a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says, "A lot of my friends have been unable to get Comedy Central in the dorms here." Skirvin says he likes to think that labor-of-love efforts like his own Spirit of Christmas Official Distribution Site (an unofficial site) "managed to get South Park on the air. I'm not sure if that's true or not, but it's a great way to feel happy about the show."
Yahoo lists a profusion of sites dedicated to the show, including some - like Taison Tan's meta-index, the South Park Information Center - that feature links to games, sound files, icons, and show scripts. So many netsurfers "feel happy" about South Park, says Lieberman, that the official Web site now accounts for half the traffic at comedycentral.com, and the South Park Boosters list has been overwhelmed with sign-ups, clogging members' in-boxes with up to 400 messages a day. Lieberman says that the list administrators are planning to split the unwieldy 16,000-member list into groups of 1,000 each, and publish a "best-of" archive on the site.
Hager says he'll stop webcasting episodes of South Park "if they threaten to sue or something," but takes heart that creators of other shows - like The X-Files' Chris Carter - has voiced support for the proliferation of unofficial Web sites. "It really builds a following. I think it should be at the discretion of the creator."
As of Wednesday afternoon, Stone and Parker were "in production" and unavailable for comment.
