South Park - Episode 0209 - Original Air Date: 19th August 1998
South Park's first film festival attracts crowds of pretentious, tofu-eating movie lovers to the quiet mountain town. The resulting strain on the sewer system causes problems for everybody's favorite piece of talking poo, Mr. Hankey.
Kyle must appeal to the movie industry to save his little friend's life.
Menawhile Chef has a business on wheels.The film festival parodied here is the Sundance Film Festival, held every year in Park City, Utah and the movie "Mr. Hankie and Me," is an obvious parody of the Oscar-winning 1993 film "Philadelphia."
South Park Spoiler Alert!
(The complete plot for this South Park Episode)
Park City, Utah is in the midst of the Sundance Film Festival. Sundance's founder, Robert Redford, has decided that Park City has become too run down by the annual migration of the Hollywood jet-set and commercialism, so he decides to move the festival next year to another small mountain town: South Park, Colorado.The Sundance Festival relocates to South Park, which is immediately deluged by Hollywood tourists. In school, Mr. Garrison gives the students an assignment to see one independent film during the festival and write a report on it.
Chef sets up a sales stand at the festival for his fudge cookie recipes, and finally settles on selling his Chocolate Salty Balls, which do brisk business. Cartman objects to the films shown at this festival, insisting that they all feature "gay cowboys eating pudding".
That night, Kyle is using the toilet, when he thinks he hears Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo calling to him from the toilet. He becomes convinced that Mr. Hankey needs his help. Kyle persuades Stan, Cartman, and Kenny to help him find Mr. Hankey, and they enter the sewer system looking for him. They first find Mr. Garrison snorkeling amongst the sewage with Mr. Twig. They then find Hankey, who tells Kyle that he lives in the sewer during the year, but the influx of all the Hollywood tourists, with their health-food diets (Robert Redford and his wife are seen asking Chef for various yuppie foods earlier in the episode, such as couscous, steamed celery and tofu), have disrupted the "delicate ecosystem" of the sewer, which has made him deathly ill.
Kyle and the others appear before a film's showing, and Kyle pleads with the Hollywood visitors that their presence is causing the death of his good friend Mr. Hankey, but they all think Kyle is trying to pitch a script, and they offer movie deals and script changes. One agent approaches Cartman and attempts to convince him to sell the rights to Kyle's story, and of course Cartman readily agrees (despite deriding independent films as being about "gay cowboys eating pudding" which some South Park fans have called a prescient allusion to Brokeback Mountain, despite being created a full year after the short story was published in the New Yorker.).
The South Park locals are beginning to tire of the festival, seeing that it is causing the town to become overrun with commercialism and Hollywood kitsch. Even Chef realizes the large sales of his Chocolate Salty Balls is undercut by the fact that South Park is getting run down. Robert Redford's assistant points out that South Park is being slowly corrupted just as Park City was. Robert Redford reveals that this was his intent: to make all the small towns overrun with Hollywood culture, since he cannot escape it, so he wants to inflict it on everyone else.
A new film appears overnight, based on Cartman's "treatment" of Kyle's story, starring Tom Hanks as Kyle and a monkey as Mr. Hankey. Cartman starts selling "Mr. Hankey" movie T-shirts for quick cash. After the film is shown, the emerging crowd tramples Kenny to death. But instead of the usual "Oh my God! They killed Kenny!" "You bastards!" catchphrase, a man says, "Oh my God! I found a penny!" followed by another man saying, "You bastard!"
Kyle tries to show Mr. Hankey to the moviegoers, but Mr. Hankey is pale and near death. Kyle and Chef stand vigil over the dying Mr. Hankey, but Chef feeds Hankey one of his Chocolate Salty Balls, causing Mr. Hankey to return to life. Stan, Kyle, Chef and Mr. Hankey approach Robert Redford as he is on a podium to announce the return of the film festival the next year. After he callously ignores their pleas to relocate the festival, Mr. Hankey rises above the crowd, donning a magician's hat. Mr. Hankey causes the sewers to erupt over South Park, causing Robert Redford and his wife's car to fill up with feces, killing them, and all the tourists to flee the town. The South Park townspeople are relieved to see them all leave, and are grateful to have South Park "back to the way it was" - albeit now completely covered in raw sewage. This is followed by Mayor McDaniels saying, "Oh yeah, now all we have is a town covered in shit. This is much better!"