I know they are capable of that, but I'm sure that they had an episode in mind for the premiere prior to learning that Isaac Hayes had quit the show. They probably threw that episode aside, and completely came up with this one from absolutely nothing.

I completely agree with that. Hell, from the looks of it, they may have redone an entire arc.

I hope not. I would be soooo happy if we never see Darth Chef again, but odds are that we will be seeing way too much of him.

IMDB.com reports:

Oh, My God! They've Killed ... Chef!

 

Chef, the character voiced by singer Isaac Hayes on South Park, appeared to die a grisly death on the show Wednesday night (actually a grizzly death, as he was attacked by a grizzly bear while impaled on a post). The episode aired just days after Hayes said in a statement that he was leaving the show because of its thinly veiled attack on Scientology, the semi-religious group of which he's a member. At Chef's funeral, one of the South Park gang says in a eulogy: "A lot of us don't agree with the choices Chef has made in the last few days. Some of us feel hurt and confused that he seemed to turn his back on us. But we can't let the events of the past few weeks take away the memories of how Chef made us smile." Finally, the South Park tyke remarks, "We shouldn't be mad at Chef for leaving us. We should be mad at that fruity little club for scrambling his brains." Although Hayes's voice was used in the episode, the dialogue apparently was pieced together from previous episodes. The Associated Press, noting that Chef received "a true South Park send off," indicated that the ending, in which Chef's "fruity little club" tries to revive him, leaves open the possibility of his return.

I really didn't enjoy the episode much.  It had it's moments, but it definitely wasn't on par with what the last couple of South Park seasons have been.  You could almost tell that this whole thing was thrown together in 7 days, just for the sake of getting their shots in on Isaac Hayes.  I would have prefered a better episode that had been somewhat thought out, and then get around to Isaac in a week or two.

I remember reading an article in a magazine for audio engineers on how the guys actually DO throw their episodes together in a week. If I remember correctly, they write and record the voices early in the week, animate the show midweek, polish it and finally upload it about 20 minutes before the show airs.

Sounds about right, since they've shown in the past the ability to center an episode around topics that aren't even two weeks old.

It was funny, but I didn't like the episode until the speech at the funeral saved it for me.

 

Up to that point, it just seemed like a childish and petty attack on Isaac. Something like that jackass Vince McMahon would do.

It seemed that a lot of people missed the point that Chef was brainwashed by the Super Adventure Club. Most of the people who didn't like the episode seemed stuck on the "I can't believe they made Chef a pedo" thing when they really didn't if you followed the story.

 

The overriding theme of the show, which was actually spoken by Stan at the funeral, was that Chef/Isaac was a great guy who did some confusing things but we shouldn't blame him because he was being told what to do by some fruity little club.

 

I said over on DVDVR that it was the first time I've ever seen a character get what could be considered a burial and a proper sendoff in the same episode.

 

Besides, I think that the funeral with the Chef's spatula lovingly placed in the casket with a ribbon is as touching a sendoff you could ask for from a show like South Park.

All things considered, it seemed like a classy move to me. Their shots were all directed towards the group and not Chef. Even when he came under fire, they made a point to note how he'd be brainwashed. The speech at the end summed up things nicely and while they killed him off, the situation was handled in a professional manner.

It seemed that a lot of people missed the point that Chef was brainwashed by the Super Adventure Club. Most of the people who didn't like the episode seemed stuck on the "I can't believe they made Chef a pedo" thing when they really didn't if you followed the story.

It's not a matter of missing the point of the brainwashing or being mad about the pedophile thing. I just didn't find the episode to be funny, thought the "death" scene was nothing we hadn't seen before on this show, and the Darth Chef thing just seems stupid, more speficially annoying if they insist on making him recurring. I just watchted the episode again tonight, stoned this time, and still didn't find it all that funny. Best moments was Cartman crying when Chef left, the FBI dude fucking the dummy, and the fat black girl in the strip club. Kenny's eulogy was the only part of the episode I enjoyed regarding Chef, Isaac Hayes, or Scientology.

Cartman's throwaway joke about Jewish women's boobs and the guy being immortal... until he was hit by a train were my favourite parts of the episode.

Im pretty much in agreement with those who actually understood the ep. I enjoyed, it wasnt "funny" as much as it was clever. It was kinda poetic, really. They way they basically shared their feeling through the characters were subperb.

The Sunday Times - Review

 

The Sunday Times March 26, 2006

 

Hey Chef, these guys are killing free speech

Andrew Sullivan

 

We have a new cartoon-blasphemy scandal. No, it?s not Islamists burning down Kentucky Fried Chicken stores in Pakistan because a few Danish cartoonists had the gall to draw the prophet Muhammad. Now it?s Scientology versus the popular and hilarious cartoon television programme South Park. And the Scientologists, like the Islamists before them, are winning.

South Park is a potty-mouthed series created by two young iconoclasts, Matt Stone and Trey Parker. It features a group of nine-year-old cardboard cut-out pals whose adventures include run-ins with a talking piece of Christmas poo, Jesus, Saddam Hussein and Mel Gibson. The show is both highbrow, it has dissected left-wing political correctness along with Vatican hypocrisy, and lowbrow.

 

Yes, Paris Hilton once entered a ?whore-off? contest with a gay character called Mr Slave. The show is as offensive as it is inspired: the first truly post-PC television adventure. It is also brave. It doesn?t only skewer political ideology, it also aims square at religions. It has mocked Catholicism, Mormonism, evangelicalism and even featured a cartoon Muhammad as a super-hero.

 

The Catholic League managed to stop a rerun of an episode called Bloody Mary. But now things have become really ugly. Though South Park is broadcast in Britain one episode has never been aired in the UK, and has just been pulled in the US. The show mocked Scientology. In the episode one of the kids, Stan, takes a Scientology ?stress test? and does so well he is hailed as the reincarnation of L Ron Hubbard, the science-fiction writer who started Scientology.

 

Suddenly the child is mobbed. John Travolta shows up. Stan is sent to his room, where he finds Tom Cruise. When Stan tells Cruise what he thinks of his acting skills, Cruise is so crushed to have been dissed by the new prophet of Scientology that he runs into a closet and won?t come out. A chorus of people then implore Cruise to ?come out of the closet?. Not exactly subtle. But it?s a cartoon; the episode begins with a disclaimer that none of this is supposed to be mistaken for reality.

 

In the US all hell broke loose when the episode was broadcast. One of the show?s cartoon stars, an oversexed, overweight African-American chef in the school cafeteria, is voiced by Isaac Hayes, the soul singer best known for singing the theme song for Shaft. Hayes, it turns out, is a Scientologist.

 

At first he seemed to have no problem with the episode. He told the American satirical magazine The Onion that he often had to defend the show?s edginess: ?I told them not to take this stuff seriously. If you do, you?ll get in trouble. Just enjoy it.?

 

That was January 4. By January 18 Hayes had been admitted to hospital for ?exhaustion?, and a friend subsequently said he?d had a stroke. Eight days ago Hayes quit the show, accusing it of religious ?bigotry?. (Chef has since been outed as a paedophile, fallen off a bridge, been mauled by a mountain lion and died.) Then the Scientology episode rerun was abruptly yanked from the schedule.

 

News reports say that Viacom, the company that owns Comedy Central, made the decision. Viacom also owns Paramount movie studios, which has spent a small fortune on Mission: Impossible III starring Cruise, a Scientologist. He denies any connection. Viacom refuses to say why it hasn?t put the episode back on the air. South Park fans have started a petition.

 

And so we are back where we were with the Muhammad cartoons. Someone somewhere won?t let you see the Scientology episode of South Park. You can go to the Comedy Central website and view it on the internet ? the last refuge for free speech. But you won?t see it on television. In a battle between satire and religion, although some deny that Scientology deserves that moniker, religion wins again.

 

This is, of course, a trivial story in many ways. South Park is preternaturally puerile (though it remains one of the most inspired pieces of sane lunacy out there). There are wars going on. Who cares if one silly episode of a silly series gets pulled?

 

Well: count me as one who does care. In the mansion of free speech cartoons have an honourable room. You can say things in cartoon form that you could never put into words or enact with real live human beings. You can turn politicians into unearthly creatures; you can portray the powerful as fools and liars; you can mock pretension of all sorts with an abandon and visual wit the written word cannot match. You can create fantasy worlds that make arguments that would be libellous or untrue in other contexts.

 

In the cartoon in question no one alleged that Cruise was gay. They constructed a scene where he was in a closet and others were urging him to come out of it. And it?s this artful ability to say in cartoon form what you cannot say in any other without a libel writ that makes cartoons irreplaceable.

 

In the Parker-Stone puppet film, Team America, you get to see Michael Moore explode as a suicide bomber. In the sublime South Park movie Saddam Hussein has a gay love affair with Satan. Cartoons and puppetry, as the classic series Spitting Image proved, can convey truths and explore fantasies no other form can.

 

We need those truths and benefit from those fantasies. A free society survives partly because the powerful are mocked, and their pretensions undermined. Religions, which guard their own illusions carefully, are particularly ripe for satire. And they should be.

 

Whenever one human being is claiming to tell the truth about the meaning of life he is making a very powerful claim ? and in a free society he also runs the risk of getting a raspberry. Laughter matters because piety begets power.

 

Orwell once remarked that one reason fascism never took off in Britain was because the sight of a goose-stepping soldier would prompt your average Englishman to giggle. Someone is now silencing the giggles. And our world is a lot creepier because of it.

'South Park' Responds: Chef's Goose Is Cooked

 

By Lisa de Moraes

Thursday, March 23, 2006; Page C07

 

"South Park" fans have struck back, threatening to boycott Viacom's upcoming Tom Cruise flick "Mission: Impossible III" until Viacom's Comedy Central puts back on its schedule the show's Scientology spoof episode the network yanked last week.

 

Meanwhile, Comedy Central and the show's creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, hoped to placate the angry mob (as if) with a hastily thrown together season-opening episode in which Chef is brainwashed by "a fruity little club" whose members travel the globe having sex with children.

 

Celebrity Scientologist Isaac Hayes, who had provided the voice of Chef, South Park's beloved school cook, since the show started, announced early last week that he wanted out because he had discovered "South Park" pokes fun at "religious communities." Two days later, Comedy Central yanked the scheduled rerun of the "Trapped in the Closet" episode that skewered Scientology and its most famous member, Tom Cruise.

 

The response to Hayes's exit was last night's slapped-together 10th-season opener, "The Return of Chef!" The producers sliced and diced lines Hayes had recorded in previous seasons to produce Chef's new lines for the episode, a Comedy Central rep told The Post's John Maynard.

 

In the episode, pals Stan, Kyle, Kenny and Cartman are thrilled when Chef, who'd left South Park to join the Super Adventure Club, returns. But in school the next day, he says to them, "How about I meet you guys after work and we make love . . . come on children, you're my sexual fantasy, let's all make sweet love." Those are the printable things, anyway.

 

The guys take Chef to a shrink, who pronounces him the worst case of brainwashing he's ever seen.

 

They take him to a strip club to try to deprogram him. Chef is cured, but then is shot with darts by members of the Super Adventure Club -- "South Park's" new, thinly veiled metaphor, in case you haven't figured it out yet, for Scientology.

 

Chef is taken back to HQ, where the Super Adventure Club continues the brainwashing.

 

The boys follow and learn the secret of the Super Adventure Club, founded by a guy who was an explorer, only every time he got someplace he discovered someone had beat him there. So he decided to become the first explorer to have sex with the native children in the various remote locations, which he felt would make him immortal.

 

Long story short: The boys rescue Chef and they run across the rope bridge over the deep ravine that takes them to safety. But once they're on the other side, the Super Adventure Club's big chief shouts to Chef, "Don't you remember why you left South Park in the first place? You sought adventure . . . because your life had become dull and empty."

 

The boys plead with Chef:

 

"Chef -- we love you!"

 

But Chef heads back over the bridge, only it's struck by lightning and falls apart. Chef plunges down the ravine and is impaled on a large stick and attacked by a mountain lion, then a grizzly bear.

 

Back in South Park, the townsfolk hold a memorial service for Chef. Kyle tells the residents that although a lot of them don't agree with the choices Chef made in the last few days, they should focus on how much he made them smile and -- here's the money quote -- they should not be mad at Chef but instead at "the fruity little club for scrambling his brain."

 

We're guessing the episode may still not be enough raw meat for the piranha-esque "South Park" fans, who took to the Internet yesterday urging people to write, phone or e-mail Viacom, or sign their Chef Gate petition, letting the corporation know they and their loved ones will not see "Mission: Impossible III" (due in theaters on May 5) until Comedy Central runs the more direct Scientology-skewering episode "Trapped in the Closet."

 

(Normally these kinds of petitions are quixotic and kinda sweet, but there's no denying that "South Park's" core demographic -- 70 percent male, 20 percent male teens, 30 percent men age 18-34 -- is a bull's-eye for action flicks such as "Mission: Impossible.")

 

In the episode, Scientologists become convinced that Stan is the reincarnation of founder L. Ron Hubbard. Cruise shows up at Stan's house seeking praise for his acting work, but Stan pronounces it inferior to "that guy who played Napoleon Dynamite." Cruise, crushed, locks himself in Stan's closet. For the rest of the episode, Stan, his family, celeb Scientologist John Travolta and R&B artist R. Kelly try to get Cruise to "come out of the closet."

 

Immediately after Hayes made his announcement last week, Stone and Parker claimed in interviews that his exit from the show was entirely about his being a Scientologist. The publicity ginned up by the kerfuffle drove viewers to the show, only to be disappointed when the "Trapped" episode did not run last Wednesday night. That set off speculation it had been yanked because Cruise, or someone acting on his behalf, had said he would stop promoting "M:I3" if it aired.

 

"We, the loyal viewers of television's 'South Park' do hereby protest against the removal of the episode 'Trapped in the Closet,' " the fans' petition reads.

 

"We demand that Comedy Central put this episode back on the air and show it as soon as possible; we want everyone, including Tom Cruise, to know that censorship is wrong."

 

Far more fun are the comments attached to some of the more than 2,000 signatures that had been collected by the time the petition's Web server apparently crashed around 7 p.m. yesterday:

 

? Stop being girly-men.

 

? I would expect more moxie from Comedy Central.

 

? Bad Tommy! No biscuit!

 

? Get a sense of humor Tom, you couch jumping freak.

 

And, our personal fave:

 

? Free Katie!

 

* * *

 

The sky is falling! The sky is falling! Chicken Little has been sacked from "American Idol"!

 

After he finally delivered a passable performance of a frightened little mouse singing "When I Fall in Love," Kevin Covais got the fewest of the 35 million votes cast this week and was plucked from the competition last night.

 

Where are those http://votefortheworst.com/ voters when you need them? Oh wait . . .

 

Then, as if the sky falling weren't bad enough, Paula Abdul led the "Idol" audience in the Wave while Barry Manilow sang "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing," which you'd think would have caused a plague of locusts to visit Hollywood before the commercial break.

 

Instead, it only caused "Idol" Bootee Weirdsmobile Extraordinaire Bobby Bennett, who was standing in the audience, swaying gently from side to side while singing along with Manilow, to break through security and get up onstage to give Manilow a big weirdsmobile hug at the end of "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing."

 

Who the heck is doing security on this show -- the Department of Homeland Security?

I can't find the petition with the 20,000+ signatures online anywhere, but this whole thing is downright hilarious. I personally didn't see even see War of the Worlds because Tom was getting a nice cut of it. I really don't like the douchebag for reasons beyond his Scientology beliefs.

 

What did you guys think of last night's episode? Cartman was the highlight for me, throwing the going away party and risking his life entering San Francisco.

I thought it was pretty damn funny.