Netflix Minute is a weekly feature highlighting a title from Netflix's catalog of instant view films. If you want to spend a night snuggled up with a bag of popcorn and don't want to drive to the video store, this is for you.
Despite all of the vulgarity of South Park, the showrunners Trey Parker and Matt Stone often manage to cram heaps of social commentary into their show. What they don't do very often is create multi-episode story arcs, mostly aiming for one major pop culture object to parody and one social trend to mock per show. In the case of The Imaginationland Trilogy, Parker and Stone cranked out a unique three-episode arc that combined the best elements of the series into one Emmy award winning masterpiece.
The trilogy starts off with all of the boys of South Park wandering around the forest looking for a leprechaun that Cartman claims to have seen at an earlier date. Kyle characteristically doesn't believe him and insists that the hunt is just another way for Cartman to seek attention. As a result, he bets Eric $10 that the leprechaun isn't real, while Cartman rebuts with a bet that Kyle give him oral sex if he's wrong. Against all odds and at the breaking point of Kyle's patience, Butters sees something moving in the brush and a leprechaun appears to everyone's total amazement.
This first scene does a lot to establish the world of South Park to those who might not be familiar with the series or just remind fans how funny all of the characters can be. Cartman comes off as the huge d-bag who gives blatantly mocking codenames to his friends, like naming Token (practically the show's only black person) 'Blackie' or Butters (the infinitely innocent kid) 'Faggot'. Furthermore, it highlights the huge rivalry between Eric Cartman and Kyle Broflovski, which plays an important role in these episodes.
After the leprechaun is caught in a cage, the creature scolds the children for wasting its time because it has to warn someone about a "terrorist attack". With a colorful wave of its arm, the leprechaun teleports away and the children are left wondering what they just got themselves into. Cartman, on the other hand, can only think about his victory over Kyle and how he won the ridiculous bet they made together. Walking away from the forest, the regular gang of four (Cartman, Kyle, Stan, Kenny) encounter a man looking for a leprechaun who rants about a place called Imaginationland. He subsequently takes them there, where all of the characters ever imagined by humans appear.
This venue allows South Park to truly flex its muscles of parody. Hundreds of characters appear in Imaginationland, from the instantly recognizable to the totally obscure. The sheer number of them makes the trilogy fun in the simple act of spotting each of them and trying to figure out what piece of pop culture they come from. It also helps set the tone of the trilogy, making it clear from the very beginning that anything is possible in South Park given the right circumstance.
Once the boys make it to Imaginationland, it becomes clear that this place is the target of the leprechaun's mentioned terrorist attack, as Iraqi's bomb the landscape and try to break down a barrier between the other half of the kingdom with all of the terrible things humankind has imagined. This central conflict is self-contained in the trilogy and brilliantly allows Parker and Stone to fully exploit their main cast of characters and tell a great allegory to our society's enslavement by our fear. Ultimately, The Imaginationland Trilogy showcases the best parts of South Park to both longtime fans of the series and the few people who've managed to avoid it over the years.
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