0:00:00 Unknown_10: Hello everybody. I figured that I would do something special for Christmas for the Gumroad people because you are my favorites. I settled on Black Christian Movies, A Johnson Family Christmas Dinner. I felt really motivated to watch this because it had really glowing reviews on Amazon. This review in particular by Angelica Barrett says, I should have heeded the warnings. I am the type of person who usually goes against reviews in an attempt to support black media. Black spelled with a capital B. Up until this point, I had never felt that it was a waste. This movie certainly changed that. well well well uh luckily this is now free on youtube if you happen to have a vpn that can access canada or the united states so if you are intent on watching this uh go for it it's really boring but there are a couple scenes that are pretty funny i will sum up the plot very simply There are some young people and some older people and they're trying to have a family get together. I think they're all related to each other in some way. It's really hard to tell who's who because the oldest member is this guy in the all black and he is supposed to be the grandfather. But he is like the same age as everybody else. There's weird interpersonal drama that's kind of typical to any family, and it's very, very boring. This part isn't, though. The guy who's, like, addicted to drinking wine bottles just decides to sit down at this game of Monopoly, and then the little black girl immediately asks him, Uncle Robert, is Santa black? And you know he has to keep it real. Yes. 0:01:12 Unknown_04: Yes, he is. Then why is he writing pictures? Unknown_07: Let me tell you a little story. 0:01:45 Unknown_04: Do you think that Americans want to think of Santa as a black guy who parks his reindeer on top of their rooftops and sneaks into their house at night? Unknown_04: No, ma'am. So they pretend that he's white. Unknown_04: It's more palatable for the masses. Unknown_10: Amen. That explanation would make more sense if Santa was, like, actually a real person, but he's not, so I don't understand why he has to be white because of racism. All I want to do is sit right here and enjoy my wine in peace. He didn't even drink anything. 0:02:29 Unknown_10: There's a couple traveling by car from Atlanta to LA, and they have car problems, so they explain the car problems very rationally to the viewer. Unknown_03: How the fuck does an Arab guy make oil? Is that like a racial perk they have or what? Unknown_01: Oh, you bought oil from an Arab that made his own oil, and it's my fault. So we got terrorists all in the car, and that's how I want to start. Genius. 0:03:07 Unknown_10: I'm aware that's a joke, but it's still funny. Speaking of jokes, the patriarch of the family has some really good family-friendly jokes to tell. His story goes that there's a special ed class that goes to different zoos, and the teachers have the retard kids point out the different animals and say what they are, but because they're retards, they just go der-de-der, so the teacher pats them on the head and says... Unknown_05: Good little retard. Good little retard. Unknown_10: And he continues this joke until the punchline comes up. So then it was time for them to get in the beds, but the bed, well, they had the beds that were straight. 0:03:40 Unknown_03: Oh, you mean the bunk beds? Good little retard. Good little retard. Yo, that wasn't funny, man. Unknown_10: So the wino gets offended and he leaves. And I actually don't like this scene. Like for most of the show, the older black guy is trying to bring his family together and their Jesus for Christmas. And then in this one scene, he decides to call this guy who already has issues. He complains that he doesn't have money or a career and he's addicted to wine like a white middle-class woman. And then his dad just calls him a retard in the middle of family dinner. And it's like, why is he doing this? I really don't think that he should be complicating the problems in the family. 0:04:16 Unknown_10: Fuck it, let's watch something good. Unknown_10: If you have so much as looked at my podcast for a quarter of a second, you've probably seen a South Park reference. I don't know what it is. It really influenced me as a young adult, as a young child, watching this. It was the show that you're not supposed to watch, and of course you're most interested in watching those shows as a kid. 0:04:57 Unknown_10: Something about the vulgarity, the cynicism, the sarcasm, it really impacted me. Matt Stone and Trey Parker are very funny, and you can't really get away with their kind of humor anymore. Unknown_08: So, are you guys as anti-Semitic as some might believe? Unknown_08: You know, a lot of people have accused South Park of anti-Semitism, but I'm Jewish and proud of my heritage, and so I can say with some certainty that I am not anti-Semitic. 0:05:32 Unknown_08: I am, however. Unknown_10: So, since I'm turning 30 on December 19th, I figured it would be time to look at what I consider my favorite episode of South Park. It's not favorite because it's funny. It's favorite because it's very meaningful and strange, and I like it a lot. Unknown_05: Matt and I are both firm believers in euthanasia. We think that once you get to be a certain age, things just get to be too boring and painful, and you should be able to, well, you know, buy people you love. That's why I've asked my family to put a bullet in my head when I turn 30. 0:06:04 Unknown_10: Sigh. Unknown_10: So the episode is called You're Getting Old. It is from season 15, which is well past what I consider the peak time of South Park. However, they still had some good episodes all the way up until the year that Donald Trump got elected. In You're Getting Old, Stan is turning 10, and as a result, everything starts looking and sounding like shit to him. This episode aired when I was 18 years old, and when I was a teenager, I was a very, very unhappy teenager, and this episode resonated deeply with me. The gist is that Stan's parents don't want him listening to what they call Teen Wave, which is music that literally sounds like shit. The joke is that it's music and it's just the sound of shit. It's very stupid as a joke. But what's interesting is that the parents hear it as what it is, and the kids don't hear it as that. They hear it as something interesting. Stan, however, hears it like shit, like his parents do. The change in perception causes alarm, and that's what drives the episode for the most part. Almost every episode of South Park has an A and B plot, and sometimes you'll remember two episodes very fondly and they'll turn out to be the same episode, because the A and B plots, especially in earlier South Park, were both very strong and very memorable. In this episode Stan's dad is pretending that he enjoys the music so that he comes across hip and young, even though it does sound like shit to him. This isn't a very interesting B plot except for how it sets up the ending, which is very interesting. 0:07:17 Unknown_10: Unusual to all other episodes of South Park, this one actually caused a lot of controversy with fans of the show because there were suggestions that the show was going to end with this episode. According to the commentary track, this was actually unintentional, but there were a couple things that suggested this would be the end of the series. First, this is one of the only episodes ever where Kenny has his hood off for no reason. Second, brands like CNN are not parodied, which seems unusual and kind of grounds the episode in reality more. Third, Stan's parents break up and they do not get back together before the end of the episode, which is also very unusual because the show is not serialized. 0:07:56 Unknown_06: I'm unhappy, okay? I've been unhappy for a long time. Unknown_10: And finally, the show ends with a montage set to Fleetwood Mac's Landslide, which is also very serious, very unfamiliar because it's not parodied, and also kind of hints at a theme of them being bored of producing the show. While it did not foreshadow the end of South Park, it did foreshadow the next episode, which is one of the few serialized episodes before the Donald Trump season. And herein lies why this is one of my favorite episodes. The themes are not only relevant to me at the time, uh, Landslide is one of my aunt's favorite songs and it reminds me very strongly of family. So Stan, concerned that he hears and sees everything as shit, goes to the doctor and the doctor performs a diagnostic, testing his hearing and his sight to see if maybe his interests have just matured as he's gotten older. Unfortunately, even good ol' Bob Dylan sounds like shit to him. Which makes the Doctor believe that actually, he's not just getting older. There's something else wrong with him. Something which I heavily relate to. 0:08:36 Unknown_06: You see Stan, as you get older, things that you used to like start looking and sounding like shit. And things that seemed shitty as a child don't seem as shitty. 0:09:14 Unknown_06: So that sets up the entire episode. Basically, Stan tries to associate with his friends that he has nothing in common with anymore, Stan's dad tries to relive his music career, the marriage falls apart, and Stan is alone without any friends. Unknown_10: so since south park doesn't end with this episode when you first watch it you think hey maybe the next episode will provide some sort of insight some sort of commentary to help someone like stan recover from being in this disposition towards everything around him since this episode seems so purposefully set up and so masterfully executed then surely the next one must be very poignant and very well thought out what's funny is that whole argument that happens between stan's parents at the end 0:10:08 Unknown_07: was like written on Tuesday morning, like it was one of the last things put in. So the whole show, you know, this big thing that everyone thought was this big reason for the show actually was kind of an afterthought in a little bit. And we were just we were hoping I think by Sunday we started cutting things together with that Stevie Nicks song Landslide at the end. And we were just praying and praying we would get that song. I remember we got it, like, Tuesday night. Like, we barely got that song. Yeah. And we had some backups, and none of it worked as well. Unknown_07: But, you know, it was a cool ending for us, but we were definitely, like, Unknown_09: We just also couldn't think of a great ending, too. Unknown_07: I mean, that's part of it is like we'd set up this kind of existential crisis for Stan and it didn't feel like you could just shit, you know, just like out of it because we were kind of talking about that very thing. 0:10:52 Unknown_09: So then to do it felt like a kind of a kind of a crap out. Unknown_09: We put in landslide and saw it. We're just like, this is cool. And I don't really know what they don't mean. We didn't really think too much about like what it was saying on a bigger level. It just felt really satisfying, like a real end, you know, real good emotional end to the show. Yeah. Unknown_10: Well shame on me for expecting a cartoon and some comedians to solve my problems, huh? Unknown_10: So they couldn't just leave Stan like that. They had to find some way to backtrack what they had just done to the series. And I was hoping that maybe there would be some explanations in this. But let's see what they actually do. So we had the summer off from South Park and then we came back basically in the room going, okay, now what the hell do we do? Basically, they explain that there were a couple things that they were considering doing for the next episode to conclude the first one. They could have just ignored the first one and returned to format as if nothing had happened, but as they explain, there was some emotional connections, i.e. what I felt, and they wanted to satisfy that. 0:11:26 Unknown_09: That kind of key, because I especially, I really hated the idea of just not doing, like really just crapping out on it. I felt like we had, people had some real emotional connection to that last show, and I want, you know, we want to do something kind of satisfying, but like Trey said, we didn't want to like really go. And just make it a sad show. Make it a sad show, and like all emotionally complex and shit for, you know, I don't think people would want that. I don't know if we'd be good at that. 0:12:03 Unknown_10: Granted, it was probably a good idea not to completely change the tone of the series just because of the Stan thing. But at the same time, I really, really don't like what they do with this. The first documented case of a child developing Asperger's syndrome from school vaccinations has put the government in a tight spot. There's some really, really weak commentary about celebrity anti-vax stuff and it has to do with Asperger's because they literally just wanted an episode revolving around making fun of the name Asperger's as like a disease name for socially autistic people. 0:12:52 Unknown_06: All right, Stan, listen up. We don't have a lot of time. You've been told Asperger's is real. It isn't. It's just a front that we use to stay hidden. Wait, it's not a real illness? Of course not. If there was a social development disease, you wouldn't call it Asperger's. That's just... that's just mean. Unknown_00: Please put your hands together for a reasonably fat simile of Mr. Hans Asperger. Unknown_00: Do you feel bad about having a name that sounds like a bad cut of cow meat? 0:13:23 Unknown_10: yeah it goes without saying that this was the best thing that chris ever produced the rest of the episode is split between cartman flavoring burgers with his ass and stan having to come to terms with the fact that reality is shitty and the happy world he used to know as a child being an illusion he can only return to by drinking and thus is the moral of the story that stan almost becomes an alcoholic because he cannot cope with his reality When I was 18 and looking for answers to my depression and cynicism, this was not the answer that I was looking for. But I did give it a strong consideration after this. Unknown_02: The show briefly teases the fact that South Park might become serialized and going in a wildly different direction. Unknown_10: But then after teasing it for a little bit, Stan's dad rolls up and then announces that everything is going back to exactly how it was before the previous episode. Stan! And thus concludes the second part of the South Park episode that could have changed who I was. 0:14:21 Unknown_02: Dude, we're gonna go see the new Zookeeper movie! Zookeeper 2! Zookeepier! Unknown_02: K, coming. 0:15:11 Unknown_09: The world's not going to go back to the way it was. That's the way kids think. It's like, I just want to wake up in the same bed every day and have the same great day. And you get to be a certain age and it's like bad shit starts happening and you don't get to go back.