South Park – The Complete Seventh Season
Picture: C+
Sound: C+ Extras: C Episodes: B-
Skipping over a couple of seasons of South Park, we
go from four to The Complete Seventh Season that was first broadcast in
mid-2003. In this time, the show was
being made totally in the post-9/11 world and a few things had changed. Trivial female characters were dropped, Chef
was still considered cool, Butters had replaced Kenny somewhat and Kenny did
not die at the end of each show. Also,
with a new world of ugliness across the screen, the show became more crude and
though it was always that way to begin with, it lost its way and focus a bit.
Besides revisiting too many previous shows and tired
characters, it did not have enough home run shows like the scathing attack on
Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck in the infamous Fat Butt & Pancake Head
episode. Not that the show needs to
attack stars to be funny, but what made the show work best was its attacks on
banality and overblown media hype. It
pulls no punches, but the 15 shows are still pretty bold and have their
moments. Sometimes, it just seems like
it is on autopilot, but this is seven seasons in, so that is to be expected.
Once again, the 1.33 X 1 full frame image is not bad with decent color,
but while the limited animation looks good, it seems more overprocessed than
the earlier seasons. There are no
scratches, noise, or flaws in any of it.
The Dolby Digital 2.0 is available in the brief Stone/Parker
commentaries, Spanish Mono, French Stereo, and English Stereo with no
surrounds. The “4th Grade”
credits with a sweetened techno music version of the score gets tired quickly
and is the loudest thing on any of the four boxed sets to date. The mini commentaries are the only extras
again and Paramount uses a folding DigiPak to store the three DVDs. This is a quality way of doing this without
taking up a ton of room, plus the artwork is again top notch with an amusing
cutout design.
- Nicholas Sheffo
