Customer Reviews

The South Park Episode Guide Seasons 1-5: The Official Companion to the Outrageous Plots, Shocking Language, Skewed Celebrities, and Awesome Animation

5 star:		(4)
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3 star:		(1)
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This book is really big guide to the universe of South Park. Although the 2do book has more info than this,but is logic.

Even though you can find episode guide for this show online, its still good to have something to just lay down and read as it goes every episode and gives facts about each episode as what characters debuted or other interesting things. If you are a South Park fan pick these books up.

Pulitzer Prize winning quality book!!! i've been waiting for a book like this for years, and now i can't wait for future volumes to be released!

This is the most extensive South Park book I have seen. A perfect gift for any South Park fan. Can't wait for future volumes.

It seems that popular animated shows tend to use the excellent Simpsons episode guides as a model for their own. As with Family Guy, South Park uses The Simpsons format in giving a brief summary of the stories and including boxes with various tidbits about each episode, i.e. "Original Songs," "Celebrities Impugned," "Character Debuts," What a certain character "Learned," even a "Body Count" to list the characters that died. My favorite sections are "Behind the Scenes" (not many of these, unfortunately), "Where Did the Idea Come From?," "Pointless Observations," and "Pop Culture References."

The "Pointless Observations" mention details that may be missed such as what the alphabet in the classroom in "Ike's Wee Wee" says or the splitscreen effect used for Cartman and Evil Cartman in "Spookyfish." Cultural References include such things as the "Okama" in "Okama Gamesphere" is Japanese for "gay." Sam Stall gets some inside information from Trey Parker and Matt Stone like, for example, Stan's sister Shelley was based on Parker's own abusive sister and that "Rainforest Shmainforest" was inspired by Parker's vacation to Costa Rica, but these glimpses into the making of South Park are very brief with no elaboration.

Two reasons make this guide not up to par with The Simpsons' guides. First, save for the character debuts and story summaries, the same images are used for the different sections for each episode. For example, the "Original Songs" section has Randy singing as a member of a boy band for every episode, not just for the episode to which it applies ("Something You Can Do With Your Finger"). The main reason I am dropping two stars off the grade, though, is that there is no expanded index in the back. That was what I was hoping for when I purchased this guide. Sometimes there's a certain SP episode I have to see but, if I don't remember the season or the title. I have to do an Internet search for a joke, quote, character or something I remember about that episode to find it. The Simpsons' guides have indexes where you can look up some little detail and, more times than not, find the episode. The one saving grace is that this guide lists the episode titles by season at the beginning so, if you know the title, you can find the season fast. The DVDs do not list the titles on the back of the box, so you have to take out the case and open it to see which episodes are in a certain season which is a pain. Still, this is a nice guide for the price for curling up with or looking up something you see in an episode that you just don't get. This book made me bust out those early SP season DVDs. SP certainly has evolved from those early years (especially Cartman).