South Park: Mr Hankey's Christmas Classics (1999)

There are many South Park Christmas specials, and they're all pretty good. Two of my favourites are animations that Trey Parker and Matt Stone created in the early 90's called The Spirit of Christmas. One is known as Jesus V Frosty, which has the boys build a snowman that comes to life and starts killing people.

The other is Jesus V Santa which has the two fighting over who Christmas is about and features the Mortal Kombat music.

These two technically aren't a part of the South Park series so I have chosen Mr. Hankey's Christmas Classics from season 3. This South Park episode is unlike any other. There is no plot and has many of the main characters singing Christmas songs. We have The Dreidel Song by Kyle, Cartman, Stan and Kyle's parents where Kyle tries to teach Ike about Dreidels, but Cartman comes along and insults their religion.

Mr. Mackey sings 'Carol of the Bells' while dressed as a bell, Mr. Garrison sings 'Merry Fucking Christmas' where he goes to countries that don't celebrate Christmas and wishes all their denominations a merry fucking Christmas.

Cartman sings 'O, Holy Night' with all the wrong lyrics, Hitler and Satan sing 'Christmas Time in Hell', and Santa and Jesus perform a medley of Christmas songs, but Santa gets jealous as there are loads of songs about Jesus but hardly any about Santa, so he resorts to singing 'Rio' by Duran Duran.

The episode ends with the main characters and many of the female characters singing 'Have Yourself a Merry Christmas' in a tribute to voice actor Mary Kay Bergman, who voiced many of the female characters. She committed suicide earlier on in the year.

Throughout this episode, just before each ad break, is a news reporter repeating the phrase, "Fighting the Frizzies at 11". This is a reference to the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special. This was awful, and the less everyone knows about this special, the better. Chewbacca and his family, jeez.



There is an album of the same name that was released prior to this episode which contains more songs. South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker are gifted song writers and have won numerous awards for their original music. They even wrote Broadway musical The Book of Mormon.




Now I love South Park, I always have. I remember when it first aired in 1997 and obviously as a child I loved the profanity, but it wasn't until a few years later that I began to watch more of it. A lot of people say, "South Park? That show is stupid and immature, it's shit". These people are correct about the immature aspect of the earlier seasons, but South Park became what many shows have never done, and that is that it became a social commentary. It's tackled subjects such as sexism, P.C culture, social media, politics, religion, body images, racism and many more. So watch a later episode and clue yourself up. And definitely watch this Christmas episode, it's hilarious.