Oh man, this is great. Being a huge fan of “South Park” — I was hooked when I watched the premiere of “Cartman Gets an Anal Probe” and phoned friends everywhere — and having a sort of six-degrees-of-separation relationship with some of the people who work on it (and who did Orgazmo), I love news about South Park (henceforce referred to without quotations) pissing people off.
The latest is posted over at CNN.com, but I’ll summarize just for the hell of it.
South Park ran an episode lampooning Scientology (and Tom Cruise and John Travolta, etc., etc.) titled “Trapped in the Closet”. Isaac Hayes, who plays Chef, happens to be a Scientologist, quit the show, saying that South Park was “religiously intolerant”. Matt Stone and Trey Parker responded with an open letter saying they were sorry to see him go, and that it was interesting that he had spent about ten years, and cashed hundreds of thousands of dollars of checks, while gleefully lampooning Mormons, Muslims, Christians, Catholics — basically ever religion they could get their hands on.
The latest story revolves around Tom Cruise, who apparently demanded that the “Trapped in the Closet” episode not be re-run on a cable network where he was promoting Mission Impossible III (which, by the way, is the next Lord of the Rings, I’m sure) — or he’d pull the promotion of this Gone With The Wind epic tale. The cable network obligingly did not re-run the episode.
Matt and Trey responded with the following, which, to help the unitiated, I should explain is full of references to the “religion” of Scientology (oh God, it’s horrible, but I read L. Ron Hubbard’s science fiction — I said FICTION — novels when I was in the fifth grade or so). Anyway, here’s what they had to say, and if you know anything about Scientology, or don’t and can read between the lines, this is frigging hilarious:
“So, Scientology, you have won THIS battle, but the million-year war for Earth has just begun. Temporarily anozinizing our episode will NOT stop us from keeping Thetans forever trapped in your pitiful man-bodies. Curses and drat! You have obstructed us for now, but your feeble bid to save humanity will fail! Hail Xenu!!!”
That’s some damn funny shit right there.
Hail Xenu. 🙂