South park: bigger, longer & uncut
MARC SHAIMAN AND TREY PARKER / ATLANTIC
Love it or not, this much is undeniable of South Park’s big-screen emission: its farts are in the right place. Just ask Marc Shaiman, who co-wrote its dirty ditties with co-creator Trey Parker. In 1999, Shaiman was at an Oscar-nominations lunch (his Patch Adams score was in contention), when a “tasteful lady” asked him what he was working on. Shaiman blanched: “I didn’t know how to tell her that just that morning, I had called down to South Park and said, ‘Send me all of your fart sound effects.’”
The song he was writing at the time was the exuberant ‘Uncle F**ka’, an Oklahoma!-esque hoedown in which Shaiman mimicked a tap-dance solo with trumps. Crucially, Shaiman wasn’t just blowing the notes out of his ass: he ensured the flatulence was properly sculpted, helping to establish the movie offspring of Parker and Matt Stone’s filth-flinging TV hit as a musical of note.
Parker and Stone’s voice-work also pulls its weight, ranging expressively from Cartman’s goblinchild eruptions to Saddam Hussein’s purr. The songs, meanwhile, drive plot, character and theme ingeniously, as musicals demand.
Further evidence lies in the soundtrack’s on-point parodies of renaissance-era Disney, not least Beauty And The Beast. ‘Mountain Town’ is a graceful riff on ‘Belle’, with added in-jokes and plot details, while the vaudevillian self-help satire ‘It’s Easy MMMkay’ nods cheekily to ‘Be Our Guest’. The Little Mermaid is targeted, too: ‘Up There’ reels in a pungent parody of ‘Part Of Your World’. And then there’s Saddam Hussein’s ‘I Can Change’, recalling Ursula’s ‘Poor Unfortunate Souls’.
Elsewhere, Park’s net stretches wider. ‘Kyle’s Mom’s A B**ch’ re-imagines ‘Supercalifragilistic expialidocious’ with deliciously frantic glee. ‘La Resistance’ riffs energetically on Les Misérables’ ‘One Day More’; ‘What Would Brian Boitano Do?’ is another buoyant, Oklahoma!-style knees-up; and ‘Blame Canada’ stomps to a stinging satire of blame culture.
If ‘I’m Super’ and ‘Good Love’ don’t quite match up, that’s because standards are so high elsewhere, even banking the songwriters an Oscar nom for ‘Blame Canada’. Disney got its own back when Phil Collins’ Tarzan tune ‘You’ll Be In My Heart’ won, but Parker/Stone responded by shoving Collins’ award up his ass in Park episode ‘Timmy 2000’.
Bigger, Longer & Uncut left a lasting mark: it (arguably) sparked a moviemusical renaissance; earned the respect of musical godhead Stephen Sondheim; and inspired composer Robert Lopez (Frozen), who later joined Park’s auteurs to co-create The Book Of Mormon. Twenty years on, we’d take Park’s ass gags over Collins’ effusions any day. Kevin Harley