7 South Park characters who deserve their own movie

With 14 South Park films on the horizon, we dreamed up feature-length adventures for characters who have broken out or are on the verge

On August 5, MTV Entertainment Studios announced that, despite the COVID-related delays that affected the most recent season, South Park isn’t going anywhere. In fact, this latest agreement ensures that co-creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone get at least five more seasons on Comedy Central, in addition to 14(!) movies set to premiere on Paramount+.

As staggering as that number sounds, it’s not like cable’s longest-running scripted series (and the longest-running animated series outside of The Simpsons) hasn’t been gradually expanding its universe ever since “Cartman Gets An Anal Probe” debuted 24 years ago. While Parker and Stone initially focused on the elementary school-age foursome of Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, Eric Cartman, and Kenny McCormick, they’ve since lived up to the show’s title by exploring every nook and cranny of the town itself, including its supporting characters. As early as season five, Butters was getting his very own episode, and Stan’s father Randy—once a vaguely incompetent side character—has now become a fan favorite thanks to his series of increasingly bizarre (and morally reprehensible) life decisions. At this point, he plays as big a part in the show as the boys do. There have been storylines centered on clergymen, educators, sentient grapes—the list goes on.

So when it comes to narrowing down which characters (or, in some cases, sets of characters) might be at the center of one of the 14 upcoming films, there’s no shortage of colorful personalities to choose from. And because pretty much anyone from the show could work, we gave ourselves some additional criteria. As much as we’d love to see (and will in all likelihood get) a movie revolving around a character like Randy, he’s been the focal point of numerous episodes, as well as one of two specials that Parker and Stone created during the pandemic in lieu of a traditional season. Simply put, when you add up all of their screen time and storylines, many characters from South Park have more or less already gotten their own movie. We also tried to stick with people (and creatures) who could easily fit into already-existing cinematic templates.

Who would you put at the center of a South Park movie? Let us know in the comments. (Or we could just all settle for a Rob Schneider vehicle.)

2 / 7

Harrison Yates and Officer Barbrady

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In South Park’s early years, the dimwitted Officer Barbrady was the only real law enforcement in town. But starting with 2003’s “Christian Rock Hard,” his role became subsumed by Harrison Yates, a grittier, mustachioed cop who proved to be an effective vehicle for satirizing police brutality, institutionalized racism, and other questionable behaviors within the criminal legal system. Barbrady rose to prominence again when he accidentally shot a kid in “Naughty Ninjas” and was promptly fired, only to try and redeem himself with a streak as a kind of underground hero.

Barbrady has since been reinstated to his old position and is occasionally seen as a background character. But his newfound sense of duty makes him the perfect foil for Yates’ racism, which was introduced all the way back in 2004 with “The Jeffersons” and further explored in last year’s “Pandemic Special” with the shooting of Token Black. Having Barbrady work to take down the inherently corrupt Yates could be an effective way to provide further commentary and serve as a riff on one-good-officer-against-the-force movies such as Serpico and Cop Land. South Park is often at its funniest when skewering hardboiled dialogue, and let’s face it, Parker and Stone have always had a keen eye for cop drama.

3 / 7

Travis Mayfield

For better or for worse, political commentary has become one of South Park’s calling cards, especially in its later years, and it will probably be that way until the show ends. But the other side of that coin is that Parker and Stone love writing wildly silly, irreverent, practically apolitical storylines just because they feel like it. Take “Lice Capades,” a 2007 episode that focused largely on a colony of parasites living in the hair of the boys’ classmate Clyde. While the human drama unfolds, the lice get their own stone-faced disaster movie, with a louse named Travis Mayfield at the forefront. After he sees the giant eye of a nurse looking through Clyde’s hair, he warns the rest of his civilization about impending doom. Catastrophe soon arrives in the form of a prescription shampoo that kills Travis’ friends, neighbors, and wife. When we last saw him, he had escaped Clyde’s head via housefly with his newly born child Hope, and was safely living in Angelina Jolie’s pubic lice colony.

But what’s happened since then? Are Travis and Hope still okay? Are they in search of a new home after witnessing the tumult of Jolie’s divorce from Brad Pitt? Have they gotten unpleasantly rocked by her stunts in the upcoming Eternals? We already got an Apocalypto parody with “Lice Capades,” so maybe it’s time for the pair to strike out on their own again in an insectual version of Lone Wolf and Cub. Whatever the case, Parker and Stone devoting an entire film to a character we’ve only seen once (and who was never actually seen by any of the show’s human characters) would be so South Park.

4 / 7

Nathan and Mimsy

When it comes to characters with disabilities, South Park has stayed refreshingly subversive, giving them greater agency than anyone around them presumes. In the case of Nathan, he plays up the stereotype of being sweet, innocent, and unaware to the outside world, just so that he can be an honest-to-god villain when no one’s looking. Along with his henchman Mimsy (the duo are a nod to the Looney Tunes gangsters Rocky and Mugsy), he’s usually depicted as a rival to the more heroic Timmy Burch and Jimmy Valmer, especially in the Meatballs/Merrie Melodies/Intervention mashup from season 14's “Crippled Summer.”

So how about teaming them up for a change? 2017’s role-playing game South Park: The Fractured But Whole already featured a DLC where the campers thought the counselors were getting murdered (complete with Mimsy dressed up as Jason Voorhees), which would nicely set up a feature-length South Park riff on Friday The 13th. Only by working together could the quartet of Nathan, Mimsy, Timmy, and Jimmy survive the night and discover who’s slaughtering their mentors.

5 / 7

Kanye West

Kanye West is having a moment, and seeing as no one in the world of comedy has gotten under his skin quite like Trey Parker and Matt Stone (okay, maybe Jimmy Kimmel), it seems like the perfect time for South Park to revisit its Yeezy saga. And what better way to do it than a feature-length film? To recap, it all started when the show took shots at West’s ego and perceived lack of self-awareness in the 2009 episode “Fishsticks.” West initially took the joke in stride, going so far as to comment on how the episode inspired him to take a closer look at his flaws. He seemingly backtracked later by referencing “Fishsticks” in his music, which in turn led to subsequent lampooning in the episodes “200” and “The Hobbit.” While he’s since popped up here and there in the background, it’s been a good eight years since West has played a substantial role on South Park.

As for the West-centric movie, why not lean into the show’s more meta tendencies? The first 30 minutes or so could be an episode in itself where we see behind-the-scenes antics about why the artist’s Donda album is taking so long to come out. We then zoom out to see the real-life West watching the latest South Park episode about himself and becoming enraged. He hops on his Honda CRF-X motorbike and sets out to find Parker and Stone to make them answer for this latest transgression.

6 / 7

Sharon Marsh and Sheila Broflovski

Stan’s mother Sharon has evolved into a fully nuanced character in her own right, but despite being at the center of some of South Park’s funniest moments (her Shake Weight addiction comes to mind), she often gets overshadowed by the zanier and more frequent story arcs of her husband Randy. Since she’s historically grown exhausted by Randy’s schemes (especially his latest stint as a weed farmer) and has even separated from him—twice!—it only seems right that she gets to go off on her own Thelma & Louise adventure at some point. Yeah, yeah, Simpsons did it, we know.

But who could accompany Sharon on her road trip? Who could be the more outspoken Louise to her Thelma? Kyle’s mom, Sheila Broflovski, comes to mind. She and Sharon have been depicted as (sometimes uneasy) friends over the years, and she’s certainly had to deal with her own discontent at home. Where the show’s first movie, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, portrayed Sheila as a militant censorship warrior, a new film could explore her other side as a mother and wife who’s sometimes been mistreated and beleaguered.

7 / 7

7 South Park characters who deserve their own movie

With 14 South Park films on the horizon, we dreamed up feature-length adventures for characters who have broken out or are on the verge

Harrison Yates and Officer Barbrady

Harrison Yates and Officer Barbrady

Travis Mayfield

Travis Mayfield

Nathan and Mimsy

Nathan and Mimsy

Kanye West

Kanye West

Sharon Marsh and Sheila Broflovski

Sharon Marsh and Sheila Broflovski

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