Every episode of South Park is animated digitally in only a few days. Well, all except for the first one, which took three and a half months, cost $300,000, and used cut out pieces of paper and stop motion.

Today, making a South Park episode just involves throwing things together on a computer program, but when Parker and Stone first got started with their pilot, the process involved cutting out literally hundreds of pieces of construction paper and capturing thousands of images shot from above. They labored for months on end in a small office in Denver, Colorado throughout the summer, and thankfully it paid off for them. For shots of the night sky, they took black poster board, cut holes into it, and lit it from behind. For a shot of Kenny bleeding, they drew on him with a red marker and added more and more for every frame.

Watching the first episode now, it definitely looks amateurish compared to the polished, HD look of the recent episodes, but it still has a charm to it, and it blows the mind to think of all the work that went into this dumb cartoon of kids swearing.