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August 02 Highly educated misfit Bottom row, from left, Yeardley Smith, Matt Groening, James L. Brooks, Nancy Cartwright and Pamela Hayden. It's a pleasant surprise to see how TIME use South Park to open an introduction to the Simpsons: In episode 607 of South Park, Butters, in his guise as Professor Chaos, dreams up a host of insidious schemes—blocking out the sun, decapitating a South Park statue, selling the town a monorail—only to be told that these had already been spun out on a certain animated TV series. "How come every time I think of something clever," Butters asks, "The Simpsons already did it?" The episode was a tribute from one cadre of cartoon geniuses—South Park's Trey Parker and Matt Stone—to another, earlier one: Matt Groening, James L. Brooks and their team of highly educated misfits, who developed Groening's crudely drawn one-minute Tracey Ullman Show vignettes of a chinless yellow family into a half-hour sitcom, nay, a veritable comedy cosmos that this fall begins its record-breaking 19th season on Fox. But what really caught my eyes, is the term "highly educated misfits". Of course, the word "misfit" is used as a commendation here, kind of appreciation of their original creativity and unbound imagination. But just like any success story, this term has a lot of unhappy endings behind its glorious ring of light. And I am not going to name any here. Two other eminent examples of highly educated misfits are, of course, Trey Parker and Matt Stone. I happened to find today that they are much younger than I thought. In short, they have been running South Park for several seasons at my current age. Here is an example of how they misfit, or fit, into Oscar:  |
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