South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone made a surprise appearance at Comic-Con to celebrate the show’s upcoming 20th season, which debuts in September on Comedy Central. They also were on hand with a sneak peek of their next video game, Ubisoft’s South Park: The Fractured But Whole

Loading

I was able to talk to Parker and Stone right before they took the stage in Hall H, and here’s what they had to say about Season 20, South Park’s long history, and much more…

Loading

For the first many years, just every season, it was like, dude, we have to make six of these. It'll be hilarious. And who knows what we're going to do next. And then we're like, wow, I think we're going to do more than six. Maybe we'll do this another year… We might do this another two years. That's crazy. And we were always kind of looking for the other thing, but we also -- every time we came back to South Park -- we really liked it. We didn't like doing it, but we liked having done it. We always kind of felt like we were going to move to L.A., do our thing, and move back to Colorado. That was always the plan. I think we still somewhat mentally have this attitude of like, any minute now we're going to stop and move back to Colorado.They're going to figure us out!Any moment. People have started to realize we're not going to excuse ourselves from the table, so we're probably going to have to be excused.They'll just send us away.But we sensed that coming, too. It's like, you know what, you guys? Get the f#@k out of here. Are you guys still here?The most fun part is finding the joke, laughing in the room. There's fun stuff. But it's work. It is hard.And we set up this thing for ourselves where it's so stressful. It's gets really stressful. Because of the six-day [production time].I mean, you just do it. That's not special to us. Anybody in television lives under grinding deadlines, especially SNL people. But it also keeps you honest. I guess, now we're a little older and a bit more responsible, but we didn't have the discipline of doing this show in our early 30s. I don't know what I would have done if it had spun off... so it's been great.It's funny, because we're pretty set up for it. When we're talking about it, it's like, we already did a big show about Trump, we already did the I'm going to build a wall, we already did f#@k 'em all to death, we already did... we did all this. You know what I mean? It's like, what are we going to do?When we did that show — one of the things that we do — we have had shows where sometimes you're tackling a current event or something a little more timely. We like to do contemporary events, but make sure the show will be watchable in five years, and makes sense. If you look back, there's probably some things where you're like, "Oh wow, that was a weird thing." Sometimes you have to lay down a bet. Is this worthy of a show? It has to be something pretty big. When we did the Trump show, I guess we were like -- it felt like one of these shows that might be irrelevant in three or four weeks. Unfortunately it's not. So I don't know what we'll do. This is, like, our fourth presidential election. We'll do something, but I don't know what yet.Well, we also did Giant Douche versus Turd Sandwich, so we already did that too. So now here we are again.It's kind of the mode of TV. We felt like there were a couple things. When we started, it was a sitcom world where you did shows and they got jumbled up in syndication, and they had to be watchable. Then it seems like it got to the point in the last couple of years, like season 16 or 17, we were watching all these shows… It does get to be -- especially when you're cartooning -- you’re going, okay, the kids are in China now, or they're in space and we have to get them home and reset everything. It's like, you kind of get sick of doing that. It limits you. Sometimes we come up with something great, but a lot of times it just feels like work. Like, okay, let's reset it. Not like a really cool bowtie on a story, but like, let's get back -- we've had all our fun. So it was really fun to kind of do both -- we didn't do a full serialization, but if it were something cool that could blend over, then blend over. And especially having this idea of the new character PC Principal, who we thought we were going to kill off in the first show... I remember, I went and told Trey, that's a f#@king funny character. We shouldn't [kill him]. In other words, when we find a funny character, it's like let's tease that out. And then a couple of weeks later -- I guess it was the third show maybe -- [we did] the Whole Foods thing, and that was like a Whole Foods coming to a small town is like a town-wide thing, and that could affect everybody. And they kind of went together, and that became a background. It was cool.You know what's really funny though? And we haven't really talked about this -- maybe it's obvious -- but because a lot of people think, oh so for last season, you obviously say you just get together and start going, kind of like Saturday Night Live, and go that week and you're onto the next week and the next week... They said, it was obvious in the last season that you kind of thought it out a little more ahead of time, and it was actually totally the opposite. For the first time, we made a conscious decision to say, you know, we always fly by the seat of our pants, but we always do get together for a big writer's retreat first, and we start animating some scenes to get our feet wet and give us a day off somewhere down the road somewhere... let's not do that this season. Let's not do anything. Let's just get to where we're about 10 days away from airing for the first show, and just go with the first show. And it's funny that for some reason, it did the reverse thing -- it made us all go down one path. It was really interesting but we also lucked onto the PC Principal thing. We had the first meeting, and we were like, it could be this, and it could be that... and at first we were going, how do we stuff all that into one show? Then we started going, we couldn't fit that and we couldn't fit that in, and then the next week, we were like, that thing was pretty funny... what if we picked that up somehow? And it really just happened organically.We've just been around so long in TV and you couldn't do that before. And now it's like the way everyone watches television. They just roll right into the next episode.Yeah, if we shot in black and white, we didn't have to worry about the color of their shirts. It's like, oh s#!t, now we have to worry about that.Because of the 20th thing, it has been sort of reflective lately, and it will probably get more so. We just walked around the Comic-Con thing here where they had moments and stuff, and looking at that, it's like... we just remember those like that was off of that album, and I remember where I was in my life then. Oh, I remember that -- I wasn't married yet. Things like that. Oh, that was the year I got married. That was the year I had my girl, and stuff like that.Being here at Comic-Con, it's like geek culture kind of won the world. And like a lot my favorite episodes are the ones where we did the anime thing, or World of Warcraft thing, where we branched out behind the South Park style into other animation styles. We've had some of those episodes where we think we're doing some little geeky thing -- something obscure -- and that is the stuff people love the most. Those kind of tributes and stuff like that. And our crew -- we've got a lot of crew, too, our important crew has been with us almost the whole time. And, and for them, too -- you've got to keep it exciting.South Park’s 20th season will debut on Comedy Central in September.

Talk to Senior Editor Scott Collura on Twitter at