South Park: The Complete Twenty-First Season Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		3.5

South Park: The Complete Twenty-First Season Blu-ray Movie Review

South Park is old enough to drink!

Fake news. North Korea. Uptight citizens complaining about past and the present and social injustice and inequality. Politically correct culture. Race relations. President Trump. South Park's 21st season is another glorious beatdown of modern America that pulls no punches and takes no prisoners as everyone and everything is woven into the season's fabric with a timeless sense of absurd surrealism that elevates the show's lampoons well above trite garbage that just wants to get in a joke, not tell a story or slyly say something about the world in which it exists. This ten-episode outing, which aired on Comedy Central between September 13 and December 6, 2017, offers a hybrid of eye-poke jabs at modern culture and politics as well as a handful of episodes that focus more on the zaniness only South Park Creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker can conjure up in their comedy cauldron. Canada is once again the center of tension and attention. A drug ring operates out of a local nursing home. Grade school infatuations and workplace romances headline some episodes. It's a fun season, one that doesn't push many boundaries but that does introduce some good new characters and ideas while building on past story lines and recycling old gags that still work, drawing a smile more for their well timed importation than for the actual humorous content they provide. It's a solid step up from a mediocre season twenty and a fun collection that fans should find agreeably entertaining.

• White People Renovating Houses: South Park citizens see the new intelligent digital assistants as a threat to their jobs. Armed with tiki torches and Confederate flags, protestors take to the streets of South Park. Randy gets upset because he feels they are interfering with the success of his new home improvement show, White People Renovating Houses.
• Put It Down: As tensions rise between the United States and North Korea, Tweek's conciliatory gesture of sending cupcakes to Kim Jung Un brings a Presidential tweetstorm down on him. Meanwhile, when Heidi finally breaks up with Cartman, he threatens to kill himself and, at the same time, takes on the cause of raising awareness for suicide prevention.
• Holiday Special: South Park Elementary is thrown into chaos when Randy petitions the local school board to cancel Columbus Day. Forced with losing a day off from school, the kids fight back. Stan and Kyle find evidence connecting Randy to past Columbus Day celebrations and try blackmail to keep their precious holiday. In a last-ditch effort to save his reputation, Randy fakes a DNA test and stumbles into forbidden love.
• Franchise Prequel : Coon & Friends hopes for a Netflix series are destroyed when they become the victims of fake news on Facebook. The parents are worried about their children when they read the postings so, they invite Mark Zuckerberg to South Park to discuss their concerns. When Zuckerburg arrives, he teams up with Professor Chaos and refuses to leave.
• Hummels & Heroin: Following a slew of opioid-related celebrity deaths in South Park, a young man named Marcus Preston follows the drugs to an unlikely suspect…Stan Marsh. What only Stan knows, however, is that his grandfather is the one caught in the middle of a drug trafficking ring that's run out of the local retirement home.

• Sons A Witches: It's the week before Halloween, and that means it's time for Jack & Crack Witch Week. Every year, Randy and his friends dress up as witches and party their brains out for one solid week. This year, one of the members takes things too far. Randy and the guys don't think it's fair to have to stop a tradition because of one bad witch. Meanwhile, Cartman and Heidi's relationship hits a new low.
• Doubling Down: Kyle can't understand why Heidi wants to be with Cartman and he decides to have a talk with her. While Heidi may be having second thoughts about her relationship, Kyle's interference makes her angry, and she runs right back into Cartman's arms.
• Moss Piglets: Nathan and Mimsy set out to sabotage Jimmy and Timmy's Water Bear experiment so their project, a fabulous lava volcano simulation, can win the Special Ed Science Fair. While Cartman attempts to kill the Water Bears, the girls at school are worried that since Heidi and Cartman have gotten back together, Heidi seems to have changed for the worse.
• Super Hard PCness: A new Vice Principal has been hired to combat all the bullying and insensitivity at the school. PC Principal finds himself wrestling with inappropriate feelings for a co-worker.
• Splatty Tomato: Garrison is frantic about his approval ratings. He's on the run and has landed in the woods surrounding South park where he is terrorizing the citizens. When Ike goes missing, the kids head into the woods to look for him. The parents follow. While they are hoping to save their children from President Garrison, they stumble upon something even more disturbing.

South Park: The Complete Twenty-First Season Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Good old reliable South Park. The show has been very consistent in its Blu-ray releases, particularly the later seasons that were originally constructed with the HD format in mind. South Park: The Complete Twenty-First Season carries on the tradition of simplistic visual excellence, offering largely monochromatic but very bold and vivid colors. All of the usual suspects -- the boys' familiar outfits, locales around town and in the school, carpet and walls in homes -- are present and accounted for with a healthy, punchy, and predictably pleasing presentation. Textural efficiency is high as well, of course, revealing the construction paper texturing, particularly noticeable on larger surface areas like walls but also in more intimate, close-up character shots, too. Lines are clean and the Blu-ray seems perfectly capable of drawing out the finest-point details that the collaborating artists have put into the show. Viewers will spot the occasional issue with banding or aliasing, the former a little more frequent than the latter, but neither are particularly distracting or disturbing. This is classic South Park on Blu-ray.

South Park: The Complete Twenty-First Season Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Much like the video presentation is of series-standard quality, so too is the audio presentation. The series-staple Dolby TrueHD 5.1 lossless soundtrack may not be one of great intensity if only because the sound design isn't often all that large or engaging, but it handles what is given to it with admirable accuracy. Dialogue of course propels the show, and all of the classic, and new, voices and inflections spill into the stage with firm front-center positioning and consistently strong clarity of voice and prioritization over any competing elements. Nice bursts of reverberation, as necessary, compliment various scenes, such as a gathering against the President in the season's final episode. Music is healthy and generously vigorous, whether the opening theme song, various classic refrains that cover a number of scenes throughout the season, or bursts of popular music; a Hootie & the Blowfish song that plays a vital part in the season's penultimate episode offers confident vocal and instrumental clarity as well as prominent stage width. Atmospheric effects support the show very nicely, including school bells, alarms, or falling rain. This is a very pleasing little track from Paramount and Comedy Central.

South Park: The Complete Twenty-First Season Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

All that's included is a "#Socialcommentary" and mini commentary for each episode. On-screen tweets shed some insight into each episode while Matt and Trey share a few brief comments about each episode.

South Park: The Complete Twenty-First Season Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

South Park's 21st season won't rate as a classic, but it's a fun collection of ten episodes that have a little bit of everything, including all of the classic South Park crudity and and over-the-top, absurd humor fans have come to expect. Plenty of plays on the modern social and political landscape of course dominate the season, but there are also a handful of original ideas that stray from the well beaten, but still somehow very fresh, path. Paramount and Comedy Central continue to put out a good product with South Park. Season 21 offers rock-solid video and audio and both mini and social commentaries. Highly recommended.