Names and faces
■ The creators of the animated television series “South Park” are buying Casa Bonita, a quirky restaurant in suburban Denver that was featured on the show. Matt Stone and Trey Parker said in an interview with Colorado Gov. Jared Polis on Friday that they had come to an agreement with the current owners of the restaurant, which closed to diners in March 2020 as the pandemic took hold. The eatery declared bankruptcy in the spring. “We’re excited to work with everybody and make it the place we all want to make it,” Parker said. The Lakewood, Colo., restaurant has been in business since 1974 but gained wider recognition when it was featured on a 2003 “South Park” episode and when the Denver Broncos football team announced some of its draft picks there in 2018. The Mexican restaurant is known for its decor, which includes a pink facade and a large indoor waterfall, as well as for its cliff divers and skits that feature an actor in a gorilla costume. Stone and Parker, who met at the University of Colorado Boulder, did not offer any details about the sale, which is pending bankruptcy proceedings. But they did say they would make some upgrades, such as having two gorillas in the skits instead of just one.
■ Vince Gilligan, the creator of “Breaking Bad” and its spinoff, “Better Call Saul,” was not attuned to how his television work was inspiring other artists — until the bulletin boards began filling up. To work on “Better Call Saul,” Gilligan and his team moved into offices that were open and sterile. So some employees began filling whiteboards with work downloaded from around the world: thousands of pieces of fan art inspired by Gilligan’s New Mexican desert universe of people baking in moral decay. Finally, two years ago, Gilligan began asking his team: “How do we share this?” The answer arrives Tuesday in the form of a hardcover collection titled “99.1% Pure: Breaking Bad Art,” a 232-page trip into the smash-hit series that persists in pop culture nearly a decade after it went off the air. Gilligan relished the insights from creators in places such as Australia and South America. “People always ask: ‘What does this mean? What does that mean?’ And I always try to come up with a formal answer — usually a very long-winded one,” Gilligan said of his AMC shows. But he said he realized that the people who create a TV show “are seldom the best people to ask to explain what that thing is.” So when he reads interpretations from selected artists, “I learn things about my own TV show that I didn’t know,” Gilligan said.