For this blog post I watched an episode from season 16 of South Park called Sarcastaball. The episode starts out with a NFL game where there is a big hit on one of the players and he gets up after suffering a concussion. He then proceeds to get fake keys out of his pockets and then begins to act like he is driving a car until someone comes and helps him off of the field. Then it goes to the announcer who is standing with the NFL Commisioner Roger Goodell who then goes on to say that there is no proven correlation between concussions and football. At that point Hall of Fame players walk onto the field whom are supposed to be suffering from CTE as one has his pants around his ankles and another is acting like he is baking something in an imaginary oven. The episode then switches to the town of South Park where Randy is upset that the school decided to take kick offs out of football games for safety. In protest Randy goes down to the school and precedes to ask why kickoffs are going to be taken out of the game and begins to get very sarcastic. He begins to sarcastically say that for safety that the boys should wear bras, play with a balloon, along with hugging, tickling, and complimenting one another. The school board loves his idea and when they ask Randy what they should call this new game he replies, "Sarcastaball." Sarcastaball begins to take America by storm and begins to get adopted all around the US instead of football including the NFL making a switch to the National Sarcastaball League. Randy even gets named the coach of the Denver Broncos. Being left without a coach the boys decide to make Butters there team captain since he is the best on the team at Sarcastaball. Randy's sarcasm goes so far that at a certain point he can't say anything that isn't sarcastic. He gets an MRI and a doctor tells him that there is a correlation between Sarcastaball and sarcasm. Randy then goes and tells everyone that they should stop playing Sarcastaball for fear of becoming sarcastic all of the time and not being able to stop. The town then stops playing Sarcastic and decides to figure out the issue with kickoffs.
With South Park being a cartoon the production aspect is a lot different then most shows. The visuals and sounds are very important and there is still camerawork to be done to make it flow like most other shows. Most scenes open with an establishing shot to let the viewer identify and figure out where the episode is taking place. For example in the opening scene started with an overhead view of the entire Denver Broncos stadium before it began showing the players playing the game. There are close ups of characters throughout the episode but with it being a cartoon you see over-the-shoulder or two person shots and you tend to see more of the long shots than anything. I believe a main reason that the long shot is the one used to most is because the show South Park is a cartoon and the creators can let the scene play out in a long shot where a lot can happen without having to change the back drop.
