South Park and Scientology
Written by Bill G on November 21st, 2005 in Movies, Religion, TV, Trainwrecks, culture.
Download South Park’s “Trapped in the Closet” here:
Mark Ebner from Drastic Media says all you need to know about Scientology.
“Dead Agent Packs”—dossiers of all the dirt they dig up on people critical of their “religion.” Often they disseminate damaging information like this to the friends, family, landlords, and employers of anyone who dares speak of—or worse, publish—anything derogatory about the “church.”
According to Scientology (and stemming directly from Hubbard’s “vision”), 75 million years ago, an evil ruler named Xenu implanted “thetans,” or spirits, in volcanoes on the planet Teegeeack (known more recently as Earth). All humans are made up of these thetans, which are basically good but terribly misguided little buggers. The problem, you see, is that things called engrams, which come from early traumas, cause us spiritual pain and unhappiness. We all got ‘em; we all gotta get rid of ‘em.
So what do we do? Simple counseling sessions with something called an E-meter—a crude lie-detector-type device that Scientologists claim measures mental energy, locating and ridding you of troublesome engrams. Called auditing, this process isn’t cheap. At rates that rise rapidly to $1,000 an hour, you can become what’s known as an Operating Thetan, or OT.
This isn’t the first time Trey Parker and Matt Stone caught the attention of the CoS.
Last year, Church of Scientology operatives received an alarming tip: During the upcoming 2000 MTV Movie Awards scheduled for June 8, a short South Park film parodying Battlefield Earth would feature the character Cartman wiping his ass with a copy of L. Ron Hubbard’s sacred text, Dianetics.photo of Tory Bezazian picketing Scientology
The tip was erroneous. Cartman would actually be wiping his ass with a Scientology personality test.
From Radar Online:
South Park is the highest-rated show on Comedy Central thanks to its willingness to slaughter sacred cows, but sources say even show creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone are a bit nervous about the blowback from tonight’s episode. Entitled “Trapped in the Closet,†the duo set their crudely animated sights on Scientology and Tom Cruise—topics previously deemed “off limits†due to the actor’s close ties to Comedy Central’s sister company, Paramount Pictures, we’re told.
The unwanted cartoon cameo comes at an awkward time for Cruise. The actor recently canned his career-wrecking publisister Lee Anne DeVette, and has been trying to restore his image with help from Rogers & Cowan spin-masters Paul Bloch and Arnold Robinson. Comedy Central’s parent company, Viacom—which also owns Paramount—might not be too keen either about seeing its studio’s big-money Mission Impossible 3 star ridiculed yet again just when America had seemingly moved on from its obsession with his sexuality and Scientology ties.
From Yahoo news:
After bristling at what might have initially seemed like a conflict between a valued cable property and the studio’s biggest movie star, Viacom financial executives took another look at the War of the Worlds numbers, and realized that there was a direct relationship between Cruise’s eccentric public behavior and box office receipts. They concluded the South Park episode was instead a valuable opportunity for branding synergy, and commissioned six more episodes on the topic of Cruise and his outrageous,
Rip Taylor-esque follies for the coming season.
It is rumored (but probably true) that L. Ron Hubbard said You don’t get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion..
