‘South Park’ Was Almost a Fox Show if It Wasn’t for This Iconic Character

It’s hard to imagine pop culture without South Park, the landmark animated series that has been on the air for nearly 30 years. But back in the ’90s, when it was still making the rounds on the underground animation festival circuit, it was considered too edgy and extreme for television.

At one point, however, Fox was willing to give it a shot, possibly planning to air it alongside its beloved first family of animation (and future rival), The Simpsons. One single character, though, stopped that from happening.

In 1995, Trey Parker and Matt Stone were students at the University of Colorado Boulder film school, where they often entertained themselves by creating raunchy kid characters to make each other laugh. At the end of the winter semester, when the department showcased student films, the duo decided to submit a skit of their own.

“I was like, ‘There should be something Christmassy,’ because these screenings were a few days before Christmas. I had done one even before that, called American History, with construction paper cutouts, and I got a student award for it. So Matt and I just did this little Jesus and Frosty thing,” said Parker in an EW interview.

The result was the short “Jesus vs. Frosty,” also known as the first “Spirit of Christmas” animated short that would later evolve to become South Park. It featured the four main kids in all their foul-mouthed glory, as well as Jesus battling Santa Claus for the rights of Christmas.

“[The audience reaction] was huge,” said Parker. “It was just the fact that there were little-kid voices and cute animation and that they were screaming, ‘F—!’ People hadn’t really seen anything like that before.”

After college, the duo showed the clip to Fox executive Brian Graden, who was so taken with the production that he shared it with friends on VHS and asked them to make another the following year. When the second Spirit of Christmas short became an underground sensation on the festival circuit and through pass-along tapes, the pair began taking meetings about turning the toons into a series.

“There was no calculation that millions of people would see this and then we’d get a TV series. I wanted to do something cool for the Christmas card, and those guys are geniuses,” said Graden. “We did a kids’ pilot, if you can believe it, for Fox’s sister network. We had started developing South Park based on those characters before [the second video] was made.”

However, South Park and Fox were never meant to be, all because of one character: Mr. Hankey.

Comedy Central

“Before South Park started, when we did ‘Spirit of Christmas,’ and people first talked about doing a series, we wanted to make a series called The Mr. Hankey Show, and basically the whole thing would be centered around this piece of s**t. And we would have Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny, but it would all be sort of centered around Mr. Hankey and his view things,” said Stone in the DVD commentary for the first season.

“We pitched it to Graden, and he said, ‘I’m not putting poo on my network,'” recalled Stone.

Related

Trump Reacts to 'South Park' Mocking His 'Tiny' Manhood

“We came up with another way to present it all, which was South Park, and it featured the town rather than the piece of poo, and maybe we bring the poo into it later. So when Comedy Central [was] interested, they took us out to dinner basically to say, ‘We’re who you should take this show to,'” continued Stone. “They were super excited about the show. So we were out to dinner with them, and we said basically, ‘We just need to know one thing: Are you open to talking poo?'”

“And the person that was there at the time said: ‘Absolutely.'”

After that, history was made as Mr. Hankey said “Howdy-ho!” to Comedy Central.

South Park, Season 27, Wednesdays, 10/9c, Comedy Central