Good Times with Weapons (South Park)

Warning! Mature Content! The following work contains material and themes that may include coarse language, sexual references, and/or graphic violent images that may be disturbing to some viewers. Mature articles are recommended for those who are 18 years of age or above. If you are 18 years old or above, or are comfortable with mature content, you are free to view this page; otherwise, you should close this page and view another one. Reader discretion is advised.

"Good Times with Weapons (South Park)"
A great idea to do an anime episode of South Park.
Series: South Park Part of Season: 8 Episode Number: 1 (117th overall) Air Date: March 17, 2004 Previous episode: "It's Christmas in Canada" Next episode: "Up the Down Steroid"

"Good Times with Weapons" is the first episode of Season 8, and the 112th overall episode of South Park.

Plot

The boys are transformed into Japanese Warriors after they trick a vendor and buy martial arts weapons at a local flea market.

Why It's a Japanese Warrior

1. Making an episode of South Park with an anime influenced art style was a pretty decent idea, and while it was risked doing this, at least it is executed much better than medias such as Rick and Morty: The Anime that looked worse than this and that show came out in 2024, 20 years after this episode aired.
   • Something that help this fact is that the art style looks pretty good, speaking of that...
2. The anime esque art style is nice to look at and translate well despite the show not being as detailed as anime, and the characters designs are really good and do some references to other medias, such as:
   • Cartman had sai like Raphaël from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise, and his design look a bit like a TMNT character too, and this make him having a pretty good design.
   • Stan look a bit like a character from Street Fighters, although this may be unintentional, and his anime design look great.
   • Kenny had a stylish design, and he look a bit like he come from the Naruto franchise, and look a little similar to Kakashi from said franchise.
   • Kyle also had a great design, like most other characters that had anime designs.
3. A lot of hilarous moments, such as Cartman walking naked, when the main characters did throw a shuriken and that they try to find a way to not be punished, and even when Cartman try to ask to get his power back and transform Kyle into an animal.
   • For that matter, the humor during the scenes that are done anime style has a feel similar to some of the imagination sequences featured in Calvin and Hobbes.
4. The song Let's Fighting Love is catchy and is even better when you know that Trey did wrote actual Japanese lyrics, also it combine both English and Japanese lines.
5. Great fight scenes, and while it isn't as great as most animes, it had a fun fight with Craig and sope other characters, the fight with Butters is also decent and a bit hilarous, despite that Kenny did throw a shuriken to Butters eye.
6. The animation is really great as usual, both in the usual and anime style, the anime style animation is also unique for an anime.
7. The episode starts to set things up for another classic episode from the show's 8th season, "The Passion of the Jew" (with Cartman starting to use The Passion of the Christ as part of his anti-Semitic arsenal).
8. All of the characters are likable, but... (See BQ#2).

Bad Qualities

1. Despite being a great episode, it might be considered a torture episode to Butters due to him suffering from the shuriken blocked in his eye, this doesn't help that the main characters didn't wanted to take him at the hospital, speaking of that...
2. While likable, the main characters can be unlikable at times such as when they didn't wanted to take Butters at the hospital because they fear that they going to be punished, which could lead to a terrible moral to not take someone at the hospital so you aren't punished.
   • Kyle can also be considered unlikable at the end where he say that it's Cartman that started it all, when it wasn't really him but rather Kenny, even if Cartman did a bad thing, walking naked in public when thinking that he is invisible.

Reception

The episode received positive reviews by critics and especially fans, and is considered to be one of the best episode of the whole show.

Trivia

• This is the first episode to have April Stewart as part of the voice cast.
• One of the knives on display looks like a "Klingon" knife (called "D'k tahg") from Star Trek. A "Bat'leth" (Klingon Sword) is also for sale.
• At the beginning of the episode, the two Star Trek Nerds from "Fourth Grade" are looking at the knives.
• This episode was the first episode to be remastered in High Definition, however, the High Definition version was only available on Xbox Live and on an HD DVD/DVD combo disc included with some Xbox 360 HD DVD Players sold at Best Buy.
• The style is based on the anime Ninja Scroll and similar styles of Japanese animation.
• This episode aired almost a month after Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" at the thirty-eighth Super Bowl. At the end of the episode, the townspeople are enraged that their children saw Eric Cartman naked, rather than the gory scene of Butters with a ninja star lodged in his eye; Trey Parker and Matt Stone's intention was to satirize the American public's ludicrous concern towards nudity and sexuality in entertainment rather than gratuitous violence and gore. Sheila Broflovski's comment "This is what happens when the moral fabric of society breaks down" could be self-reflective of the meeting itself.
  • Sheila's comment is also a reference to Trey and Matt's vision behind the show: "People are born bastards and society barely keeps them inline."
• The song "Let's Fighting Love" was later used in both The Stick of Truth and The Fractured But Whole video games.
• This is the second time Kenny's irises have been shown. The first being in "Starvin' Marvin".
• This is the first episode where there is no Comedy Central logo at the end, there is instead a copyright notice that appears before the Braniff plane logo appears.
• It is never revealed what Cartman's punishment was for walking across the stage naked.
• This was the first episode of Season Eight, which Trey Parker and Matt Stone have referred to the year in which it was made as "The Year From Hell". This was due to the fact that their film Team America: World Police was filmed, finished and premiered while they worked on this season, which caused a huge amount of writer's block among the staff.

Comments

Loading comments...