I’m not a regular South Park watcher but I’ve seen episodes I thought were pretty funny. Over the past week people have been talking about this upcoming special called “South Park: Joining the Panderverse” which premieres later this week. From what I can gather, no one knows the exact plot of this thing. The official synopsis says it has something to do with AI.
In SOUTH PARK: JOINING THE PANDERVERSE, Cartman’s deeply disturbing dreams portend the end of the life he knows and loves. The adults in South Park are also wrestling with their own life decisions as the advent of AI is turning their world upside down.
But what’s clear from the trailer is that the show is mocking the tendency of entertainment corporations to recast various parts with actors of color. So in the special, at least four of the kids who make up the regular cast have been recast as minority women.
Somehow, South Park has never recast its heroes as girls before. However, that is set to change with Joining the Panderverse, whose trailer sees South Park’s lead characters Butters, Cartman, Kenny, and Stan transformed into women of color. Only Kyle remains unchanged and seems to notice the difference. It is not yet clear whetherSouth Park’s next two-part special will revive one of the show’s best traditions by focusing on Halloween and Christmas, but it is likely that the change in the main characters will be caused by something going badly wrong in the show’s universe.
The subject of South Park’s new special is tough to ascertain from a brief one-minute promo, but the title and the clip seem to suggest that Joining the Panderverse will be a critique of reboots that recast famous characters with more diverse actors.
Again, it’s all pretty vague at this point but lots of YouTubers are convinced the show is taking a shot at Disney in general and maybe even Rachel Zegler in particular.
The South Park trailer seems to show a universe in which the four primary leads of the show, Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, Eric Cartman, and Kenny McCormick, have been replaced by four women of color. South Park fans are seeing this as a direct attack on the casting of Rachel Zegler, a Latina actress, in the role of Snow White, a fictional character who has traditionally been portrayed as White.
It could be a dig at Disney, though Disney is not the only offender (remember Ghostbusters 2016?). But it is true that Disney has been doing this a lot lately.
Personally, I don’t think Zegler’s ethnic background was the chief objection to her casting. Beege wrote a good piece about this back in August. The problem with Zegler was that she seemed to not understand why people loved the original Snow White. She dumped on the original film, suggesting the prince was a stalker, and revealing that she never liked it as a kid. That’s honest, I guess, but maybe if you’re cast in a big remake of a classic people love you should make some effort to find something good to say about it? Just a thought.
Here’s the trailer for the new special.
Read the full article here