When Radiohead cameoed in South Park’s darkest episode South Park, the satirical, boundary pushing animated show, returns for its 22nd season today. After more than two decades, Trey […]

South Park, the satirical, boundary pushing animated show, returns for its 22nd season today.

After more than two decades, Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s creation shows no signs of slowing down.

But perhaps its finest moment came in 2001 with infamous episode ‘Scott Tenorman Must Die’: a self-contained epic that starts silly, gets very dark, and features a cameo from one of the world’s biggest bands.

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A dastardly tale of revenge

At the start of the episode, an older boy named Scott Tenorman tricks Eric Cartman into believing that buying pubic hair from him will make him reach adolescence quicker. Typical South Park fodder, you might say.

But, upon realising that he’s been tricked, an angry Cartman embarks on a journey of murderous vengeance.

After being told the best way to humiliate Scott is to exploit his weaknesses, the plot kicks into gear when Cartman learns that Tenorman’s favourite band is Radiohead.

"Dear Radiohead, My name is Eric Cartman, I am a young, supple eight year old boy from South Park, Colorado…" pic.twitter.com/TTg0gClWOG — South Park (@SouthPark) October 17, 2013

He doctors a clip of them being interviewed, and dubs over it to make it seem like they’re saying they hate Tenorman.

When Tenorman retorts with an embarrassing video of his own, Cartman writes a letter inviting the band to South Park, claiming that Scott is suffering from cancer and dreams of meeting them.

The awful reveal

Everything comes down to a showdown at a local chili cook-off, where both boys have prepared a prank for the other.

Without going into details for those yet to watch it, both boys attempt to prank each other – but Cartman takes it much further, and darker, than anyone could have guessed.

It’s at this point of utter catastrophe for Tenorman that Radiohead make their appearance – providing their own voices – to berate him as a “crybaby”.

The episode ends with Cartman licking “tears of unfathomable sadness” from Scott’s face.

A watershed moment for Cartman

The show has always possessed the ability to shock. But ‘Scott Tenorman Must Die’ is perhaps the moment it made its envelope-pushing truly clear.

The episode became a real benchmark in terms of structure and character building too.

“Over the course of the show Cartman got a little bit meaner and darker,” Trey Parker explained to the New York Post, “and then came the Scott Tenorman episode.

“That was big, with us wondering, ‘should we do this? This is crazy to do with a kid.’ From that point on, he just got darker.”

In terms of writing, the episode also marked a shift in style for Parker and Stone. It is the first episode to only feature a single story-strand, with no other subplots making an appearance.

According to the episode’s DVD commentary, it came from an ideas block the pair had, during which they could only think of the back and forth scheming between Cartman and Tenorman.

They initially worried that the lack of a subplot would hurt the episode. But soon realised that its focus worked well.

Positive reaction to the episode altered the course of the show, with single stories becoming the focus from then on.

‘What a little crybaby!’

One of the more surprising elements of the episode is the inclusion of Radiohead themselves.

South Park has had plenty of bizarre celebrity cameos, but it’s rare for famous faces to appear as themselves.

Radiohead were on tour in Santa Barbara around the time of the episode’s production, and Matt Stone made the 100-mile drive from Los Angeles to record their lines.

Speaking to Pitchfork, Stone recalled some difficulty getting Thom Yorke’s performance right.

“Voice-acting in animation, you know, you can’t just talk normally… everything has to be kind of exaggerated,” he said.

“I’m just trying to get him to do this dumb line, and I have to say, ‘hey man, you’ve got to put some feeling into it!’

“It’s such a funny line to give some guy who’s such a brilliant singer, so brilliant at emoting perfectly, exactly, in such a complex and beautiful way.”

At the time, the band had no idea about the cannibalistic content of the final episode.

“I don’t think we’d come up with that yet,” admitted Stone. “We didn’t not tell them. We just weren’t done with the episode.”

Years later, it remains an unforgettable moment.