In the sixth episode of The 22nd season of South Park, which was updated last week, there is a plot to apologize to the "terriers" from past episodes, which is made to former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, who appeared in the anime 12 years ago. Apologies are rare in this cartoon of sharp and spicy satire.
The apology is directed at the sixth episode of season 10 in 2006, which satirizes that "warming" is just a farce directed by Gore himself. A creature called "ManBear Pig" is fictionalized, and it symbolizes "global climate change" – wandering the world and attacking humans everywhere. Former President Gore runs to South Park to warn the protagonists stan, Kenny, Cartman, and Kyle of the dangers of the creatures, saying that it lives in a cave in Colorado called the Wind Tunnel, and inviting them to go with them to destroy it. After arriving at the cave, Gore shoots everywhere, causing the cave to collapse and diverting the river water to try to drown the "monster", while the four protagonists almost die because of this toss. Eventually, the "ManBear Pig" was not found, but Gore became famous and announced that he would direct a movie of his own. Stan says to Gore in the play, "You're just going to catch the eye with the ManBearPig because you're a loser yourself!" ”
Al Gore, who served as vice president of the United States from 1993 to 2001 under Bill Clinton, is also a prominent environmental activist who often speaks in public on the subject of warming. He won universal suffrage in the 2000 presidential election, but ultimately lost to George W. Bush, who won more electoral votes. After taking office, Bush refused to implement the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which controls greenhouse gas emissions, and also removed the destructive content of global warming from environmental reports.
In 2006, the episode of South Park satirizing him, Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which Gore co-produced and performed, was broadcast. The documentary won the Best Documentary Award at the 79th Academy Awards, and its second film also made its world premiere at this year's Cannes Film Festival. He was also awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 with the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for "raising awareness of the dangers posed by climate change."
Beginning in 2015, global temperatures broke through the 1°C rise barrier, and the Paris Agreement that year made "1.5°C" the goal of controlling global temperature rise by the end of the century.
In April, Gore also warned audiences in a speech that climate change would trigger more dramatic catastrophes, especially for the poor and blacks in the United States. At the time, he pointed the finger at scott Pruitt, then the director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, who later resigned from the scandal, a climate change denier who pushed the biggest regulatory rollback in the EPA's history and persuaded President Trump to keep his campaign promises and withdraw from the Paris climate accords.
As for Trump, he has long questioned man-made global warming, and although he recently acknowledged its existence as "not a prank," he still denied its long-term effects, arguing that "the climate will change back again."
For the satire of South Park 12 years ago, Gore himself did not ask for an apology. Only some of the researchers involved have questioned it. Written by Drey M. In his book Enviro-Toons: Green Themes in Animated Cinema and Television, Deidre M Pike says that "environmentalists may feel threatened by the episode because it is influenced by the Bush administration's environmental decisions."
Last week, South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker took action, admitting mistakes in the latest episode. At the beginning of the show, the original monster ManBearPig is revealed to be real, it is harmful everywhere, and only Gore can help stop it. So the four protagonists ran to Gore for help.
However, despite the apology, the creators still put a lot of irony on Gore's stems. For example, in the face of the protagonist's request for help, he has been asking them to repeatedly and more politely apologize to him. In the end, the plot develops that only by doing so can the monster be resisted, thus making fun of Gore as a narcissist. This is also the way South Park admits its mistakes, after all, irony is habitual, and the so-called "honest apology" is not easy.
According to the Guardian's summary, there are many cases of controversy over the "terrier" in popular TV shows. Friends, Seinfeld, and Ally McBeal have all been criticized for disrespecting women and lacking minority roles.
The problems faced by shows that have been serialized since the 1990s are even more complex, because there are many problems and perspectives that have evolved and changed rapidly, and this time, "South Park", which has been running for 21 years, is an example.
The title image is from a screenshot of the video.