Mr. Garrison's Fancy New Vagina (South Park)

Mr. Garrison's Fancy New Vagina (South Park)
This is what happens when Trey and Matt start a South Park season with, "basically no ideas".
Series: South Park Part of Season: 9 Episode Number: 1 (126th overall) Air Date: March 9, 2005 Writer: Trey Parker Director: Trey Parker Previous episode: Woodland Critter Christmas Next episode: Die Hippie, Die

"Mr. Garrison's Fancy New Vagina" is the season 9 premiere of South Park. The episode first aired on March 9, 2005.

Plot

Garrison gets a sex change and his balls are removed, while Kyle becomes black in order to play basketball.

Why It Isn't Fancy

1. Most of the jokes either fall flat, or are just plain stupid, such as Garrison talking out loud about his/her new vagina after the operation, Kyle's, "negroplasty", his father Gerald getting cosmetic surgery to become a dolphin because he, "feels", like one, and Garrison gleefully deciding to have an abortion when s/he mistakenly thinks s/he is pregnant.
2. The gym teacher is completely unlikable, as he does not let Kyle play basketball, and discriminates against him for being Jewish, which leads Kyle to want to have cosmetic surgery, to become tall and black.
3. There are some downright disgusting scenes, like the doctor cutting off Garrison's penis and footage of a real-life surgery being shown, Garrison using the women's restroom at the grocery store, and Kyle's knees bursting open while playing basketball.
4. The infamous live-action sex change is absolutely disturbing, even for an adult audience.
5. Kyle's design looking like a black basketball player looks hideous and downright offensive; the same goes for Gerald as a dolphin.
6. Garrison himself/herself is completely unlikable in this episode.
7. It is revealed that Garrison only wanted to have a sex change because s/he wanted to be able to have a period, get pregnant, and have an abortion. When Garrison finds out none of this is possible since s/he was not born as a woman, s/he wants to become a man again, meaning that Garrison was unrealistically uninformed about the kind of surgery s/he had.
8. Animation error: During the scene where Kyle discusses his surgery with his parents, the beginning shows a few seconds of a clip of him failing to play basketball with the other kids, even though that scene already ended.
9. The doctor using Garrison's testicles for Kyle's knees does not make much sense.
10. It fails at making fun of transgender, non-binary, and transracial people, to the point where one can call it transphobic while portraying trans people as shallow and superficial when there are almost all legitimate cases of people who don't like the appearances, or identities they were born with.
11. The episodes try way too hard at inducing shock value, and being controversial. That is shown through the inclusion of footage from a real sex change operation and making fun of transracial and otherkin people, even though the final latter isn't mainstream enough to be debated yet.
12. Overall, this was a bad way to start season nine of South Park.

Redeeming Qualities

1. It does depict a politically incorrect and painful truth about the limitations of sex reassignment surgery.
2. Ike blurting out, "penis", and, "vagina", at the Broflovskis' dinner table is somewhat funny.
3. Kyle is still a likable character in this episode.

Reception

The episode is considered by many to be one of, if not the worst episode of the series, because of how off-putting it is.

Trivia

• According to co-creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the original version of the episode contained more than five minutes of the real-life sex reassignment surgery footage shown at the beginning as filler, due to writer's block, but in a rare positive example of executive meddling, Comedy Central had forced them to drastically reduce it to just a few quick shots.
• Trey Parker claims to have come close to giving up on South Park entirely due to how stressful making this episode was for him.
• Trey Parker and Matt Stone themselves later admitted being unhappy at how transphobic the episode came across as.
• The events of this episode were never mentioned again, aside from Garrison staying a female, until eventually becoming male again in season 12's "Eek, a Penis!"

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