South Park: The Complete Twenty Fourth Season - Blu-ray Review

[Michael Scott]

South Park: The Complete Twenty Fourth Season



Movie:
Video:
Audio:
Extras:
Final Score:



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Movie
2021 pretty much screwed up most people’s lives with the pandemic in some way shape or form, but that sort of chaos only fuels the demented minds that are Trey Parker and Matt Stone. South Park did have a truncated 24th season after a short hiatus in 2020 by making only 2 extended episodes (the equivalent of 4 regular episodes), but made up for it with a completely savage and hysterical satire on the whole covid debacle and everything that came with it.

I’ll split the review up into two parts, each one focusing in on each of the two specials that make up the 24th “season”. The first and foremost is the best of the bunch in the form of the “Pandemic Special”. I honestly can’t tell you how many times I was literally wheezing for breathe trying to suck in oxygen while trying to laugh during this one. It’s probably as close to old school Randy as you can get as he goes full on bonkers, and ends up accidentally creating the pandemic virus to begin with.

Ever since the virus took over the town of South Park has pretty much become run down and deserted. Randy is happy though, as his weed sales have skyrocketed 400% as everyone is smoking their depression away. To celebrate his newfound success, Randy decides to come up with a “pandemic special” bud to commemorate the great times (while his wife and everyone around him rolls their eyes at his sheer ignorance).

Simultaneously Randy finds out that the CDC has pinpointed the source of the disease to a bat in Wuhan, which immediately sends the man into a panic as he remembers that he and and Mickey Mouse may have had “intimate” relations with a bat over in China while he was pimping his “Tegridy weed”. The whole episode is a wicked satire on the whole panic in general, dealing with police brutality, Randy being a complete idiot like usual, plus the kids trying to get back to life in school after a year of remote learning.

The “South ParQ: Vaccination Special” takes a different angle on the pandemic, dealing with the whole lunacy of the Qanon generation, as well as taking some jabs at the elites and over aggressive lockdowns that stemmed from said pandemic. This special was less of a funny one, and more of a mirror held up to our faces to let us know just what we created. The first part of the special roasts the whole Qanon (Qties in the episode), but there is a LOOOOOT to make fun of on the opposite end of the political aisle as well. It’s not laugh out loud funny like the previous one, but I got more than my fair share of chuckles out of it. Especially when the police get their funding through executive orders, or all of the older folks in town literally going and partying like animals once they got the vaccine. Simply put, it's a good brace of episodes that lampoons basically everyne involved in teh whole pandemic dealings, and allows us to get some humor out of what was technically a very bleak set of years




Rating:

Rated TV-MA by the MPAA




Video:

Well, broken record time here. But as with most long running TV shows, Paramount has given us a very stable and very predictable level of quality with the Blu-ray set. The show is very simplistic with it’s (now) digitally animated universe, and the Blu-ray itself shows little to no issues. Colors and bright and sharp, and digital clarity is spot on. The basic animation style used isn’t known for stunning detail, but everything in the show is rendered nicely with good black levels and excellent detail levels. The show is a bit monochromatic with it’s basic primary construction paper colors being the main look, but it’s done nicely and without major artifacting. The single disc release holds a bitrate in the teesns, but being that this is a VERY low resource intensive style of animation, it's not shocking that it manages to look great nonetheless.








Audio:

The 5.1 Dolby TrueHD track is right on par with just about every other season of the show in recent history. The mix is largely front heavy with musical numbers and burts of activity in the form of gunfire, tanks rolling through the street, or general hubbub of voices to kick up the surrounds. The comedic nature of the TV show means that it's never going to be a super duper intensive mix, but dialog is clean and the track checks off every check mark it can under the constraints of the simplistic show design. Good, never super great, but always excellent for it's style.








Extras:

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Final Score: ​

The 24th “Season” is more of a mini set of extended specials that made up the time slot where the full 24th season would have run had it not been for the pandemic, but the hour and a half set of specials is pretty stinking funny and streamlined for what it is. The Blu-ray looks and sounds exactly what you would expect the series to look and sound like after this many years of Paramount releasing their Blu-rays. Although, I would have liked to have seen some commentaries or other special features on the disc as the 2 special episodes are all that is there. Solid Watch.


Technical Specifications:

Starring: Trey Parker, Matt Stone, April Stewart
Creator: Matt Stone, Matt Stone, Brian Graden
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1 AVC
Audio: English: Dolby TrueHD 5.1, English DD 2.0
Subtitles: English SDH
Studio: Paramount
Rated: TV-MA
Runtime: 94 minutes
Blu-ray Release Date: August 16th, 2022

Recommendation: Fun Watch​

 

[tripplej]

Thanks for the review. 24 seasons. Wow. That is long. Wonder when they will end the series??

 

[Michael Scott]

well, 25th is done and they're working on a 26th.... so who knows lol

 

[tripplej]

Just amazing..