Grid Effect

You know how to tell when a parody of a movie is done effectively? When you haven’t even seen the movie but still instantaneously recognize it in the parody. I was wondering what the hell they were doing with Randy and the camera other than accentuating what a putz he has a proclivity for being, then when the CNN field reporter was swept off his feet it all came clear: They’re going to parody Cloverfield.

Now, I had a feeling that the “monster” in this case would be something absurd, especially after one of the random pan flute players referred to what they were preventing as “the furry death”, but when that over-sized guinea pig ran into Randy’s camera shot I’m not sure if I’ve ever laughed so hard at something so outlandish that I should have seen coming. It was either going to be a guinea pig or a care bear, and they’ve already had a terrorist murder a care bear on screen…so guinea pig it is.

Inflated killer Giraffe's would have been our preference.

Up until that point however, we weren’t getting much out of the episode. Really the only points we found amusing other than the parody were Craig constantly haranguing the four guys about why no one else in school hangs out with them and lamenting his lost birthday money (somehow his parents didn’t flip off Kyle’s), and the rogue Government agent calmly telling all of the pan flute band members that they were going to spend the rest of their lives at Gitmo. Save for those two instances, most of it wasn’t very substantiative.

But all the hysterics over an over-sized guinea pig made the episode. We’ve mentioned before that Randy is without question our favorite peripheral character on the show, and with quotes like “Get in your room, Sheelyy” and “Oh my God! What is that thing!”, for whatever reason, only solidified his stature. We’ve been hoping for years that they would do a Very Special Randy Episode, similar to the one they did for Butters, and this only typified why: He is too similar to the bumbling fucking idiots lacking any and all self-awareness that we seem to encounter too often for us to not find him comical. Your average Joe six-pack or whatever, if you will.

After three episodes this season we put this one in the middle of our rankings, as it had some actual callbacks to earlier episodes. Most notably that Cartman, Kyle, Stan and Kenny convinced Craig to fight Tweek after they claimed he was making fun of his guinea pig. That was a nice touch as I don’t think Craig has ever been so prominently featured in an episode since “Tweek Vs. Craig” in season three.

We don’t have much to say about it, since, again, it was lacking in substance. But there were a number of good laughs in this and that is all we ever ask out of a South Park episode.