I'm as big of a fan of 'The Simpsons' as they come. I think that it's a trully great show. But in many ways, 'The Simpsons' isn't really all that culturally relevant anymore. I think that part of the drawback of a show like 'The Simpsons' is that it seems like the animation style (as crude as it is) is too advanced for the writers to be topical enough. 'The Simpsons' relies on fantastic writing sure, but all of the writing on the Simpsons happens in the offseason. So they have to come up with ideas well ahead of the season, and rely on past events for inspiration.

But in many ways, 'South Park' has become more of a cultural lightning rod of what's going on TODAY. And not only can they remark on what's going on today, they can do a more credible job of making their social satire funny, and not just wacked out crazy.

Have you noticed that with 'The Simpsons' it seems like the writers will start off with one topic, and then abruptly shift into this really wacked out idea that more or less, completely disregards what happened in the first ten minutes of the episode. 'The Simpsons' seems to paint more in broadstrokes. Part of this is due to the way that 'The Simpsons' is set up. Because it takes so long to produce an episode of 'The Simpsons' they have to deal with issues from not only a distance, but also from a less detailed approach.

But a show like 'South Park' is able to pump out shows in seemingly no time at all. It took 'South Park' all of about 3 weeks to pump out a hilarious, spot on take of how September 11th affected people and the world around them. And as been always been the case with the people at 'South Park,' they walked that line of being offensive and being highly satirical at the exact same moment.

It just seems like sometimes the people at 'The Simpsons' don't attack issues head on like the way that they do at 'South Park.' 'The Simpsons' relies more on broadstrokes when dealing with their social commentary. So they'll talk about environmentalism or religion in more of a broad way. Which is fine. But the people at 'The Simpsons' rarely put their own spin on things. They'll leave it more open ended. And I think sometimes that's detrimental to good social satire. I think that it's important to have open ended themes, because it opens dialogue, but I prefer satire where you know exactly what the creators stance is.

But as I type this, maybe I should clarify my stance to say that what I'm saying mainly applies to new Simpsons episodes. The old Simpsons was a lot more daring and a lot more willing to stay focused on one issue per show. But now they tend to wander all over the map.

Why I bring this up is because I just saw a HILARIOUS episode of 'South Park' where the kids go out and buy some "ninja" type weapons from a weapons store. And it was really funny because when the kids would start pretending that they were ninjas, the animators would go into ultra-stylized/real mode, and would make the characters look like a really kick ass anime episode. But even with the anime animation style, the characters retained their same voices that they have throughout. It was really clever that with the anime action style of animation, you kind of got a glimpse of the way that kids use their imaginations.

BUT the killer part of the episode is that this kid named 'Butters' got a chinese star stuck in his head. And at one point, Cartman uses one of his "magic powers" of invisibility to go save Butters from this auction where all the kid's parents were. But in order to become invisible, Cartman stripped down to his birthday suit. But of course, he wasn't invisible (except in his own head) so all the parents saw this naked kid walking across the auction floor.

The real kick of the episode was that instead of the parents being outraged over a chinese star stuck in a kids head from an obvious moment of violence, they were outraged over Cartman's "wardrobe malfunction" and subsequent nudity. I don't know. It just struck me as being more relevant than the Simpsons. How long would it take for 'The Simpsons' to make a show that addressed what happened at the Super Bowl? I don't know. They may have already done it. But I'd be hard pressed to imagine that it would have been as clever as tonight's South Park episode.

matt out