South Park - Dances with Smurfs Review

Cartman Does the Morning Announcements at School

Nov 13, 2009

When the kid who reads the morning announcements is brutally murdered, Cartman steps in to replace him. However, like anything Cartman does, he takes it a bit too far.

Cartman is selected to do the morning announcements at South Park Elementary. Of course, it’s obvious that Cartman is going to abuse this power to its full potential. It’s just a matter of how he is going to abuse it.

Cartman Pretends to be Rush Limbaugh

When Cartman first starts doing the morning announcements, it seems harmless. He points out things wrong with the school, but it doesn’t appear that there will be any more mention of it. However, that’s the complete opposite of what actually happens.

Cartman starts to blame Wendy, the student body president, for all the things that are wrong with the school. It’s right around this point that it is obvious that Cartman is acting very similarly to radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh. He even goes as far as to get the morning announcements done on the TV so he can have his own talk show just like Rush.

Eventually, in true Cartman logic, he comes to the conclusion that Wendy wants to kill all of the smurfs. This is very similar to the “Mystery of the Urinal Deuce” episode where Cartman came to the conclusion that Kyle was behind the 9/11 attacks.

While any anti-Rush person will no doubt truly enjoy this episode, “Dances with Smurfs” was one of the weaker episodes of the new run. It made a good point that people sometimes blindly follow talk show hosts like Rush because they have a voice. However, the show wasn’t as funny as the other episodes in this season.

It’s disappointing because when the former morning announcements reader is brutally murdered, you get a sense that this is going to be one of those “what were they thinking?” episodes. However, the rest of the episode did not live up to the opening scene.

Cartman Lives with the Smurfs

Cartman decides to leave the school and live with the smurfs. He makes a movie of his time with the smurfs and shows it during the morning announcements. In the video, he dresses up as Wendy and proceeds to destroy the smurf village because Wendy needs smurf berries to power the school.

Instead of dismissing this claim, Wendy admits they are true, and tells the whole school that it was Cartman’s idea to protect the smurfs against his own people. Wendy decides to resign and let Cartman be student body president. Just like Wendy, Cartman does an awful job of being student body president, and the new morning announcements reader informs the entire school of that.

The argument the episode makes is a good one, but they spent so much effort in making the argument that they didn’t make the episode funny as well. There were moments that were worthy of a chuckle, but overall it fell way short of past episodes.

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