As the show chugs on into its twenty-second season, its cultural legacy remains a source of contention for critics. Some, such as Brandon Katz at the Observer, have argued that "you're an idiot" if you don't appreciate South Park's unflinching satire of contemporary culture—and that the movie's satire of moral panic and media scapegoating is more relevant today than ever. Others, observing the polarized political climate of Trump's America, have accused the show of raising a generation of trolls, and even of laying the foundatio n for the rise of the alt-right.

On its release, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut took home almost four times its budget, received overwhelmingly favorable reviews, and snagged an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song. Something about its refusal to bow to convention—with its intentionally shoddy animation style and irreverent sense of humor—made it a perfect fit for the MTV generation. Playing to a post-boomer audience defined by cynicism and a sort of directionless anti-authoritarian spirit, South Park rolled up with a demonic glint in its eye and a raised middle finger for everyone and everything. The crowd went wild.

In the summer of 1999, with only two and a half seasons of the show under their belt, Matt Stone and Trey Parker went to the big screen with South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. In doing so, their lewd, low-budget cartoon about a group of foul-mouthed elementary school boys took a step that their rivals The Simpsons would wait nineteen seasons before attempting. It was a ballsy move. Looking back, it was typical South Park. "We're in the business of making people go, 'What the fuck is this?'" Stone and Parker told Rolling Stone in 1998.

20 years after Bigger, Longer, Uncut hit theaters, South Park remains a battleground in America's culture wars, but not exactly for the same reason that it became one in the past: Back in 1999, South Park's insistence on making fun of everyone and everything felt like an exhilarating assertion of personal freedom in an entertainment landscape that was being censored along increasingly hardcore and conservative lines. But in a world where conservatives have increasingly positioned themselves as the harbingers of free speech, leveraging the right to speak one's mind as a justification for violating the personal freedoms of others, the true legacy of South Park's no-fucks-given attitude becomes a little more difficult to parse. In fact, it can start looking a little dangerous_._

To go back to the episode where it all began, "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe" announced the show's mission to have fun and raise hell. Season one continued on in pretty much that vein: Elephants made love to pigs, starving African kids got accidentally shipped to Colorado, and Satan's son got picked on at South Park Elementary. There seemed to be no particular agenda to any of these decisions; they were just wacky, kind-of-unacceptable things that were sure to get a laugh.

At first, those fart jokes and curse words felt like an act of political rebellion. The South Park creators grew up in the seventies, a decade when the Supreme Court deliberated on the serious moral ramifications of George Carlin's "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television." By the turn of the millennium, rappers were being arrested on obscenity charges, and the Parents Television Council was pressuring the government into censoring violence, profanity and sexual content far more strictly. From the start, the PTC berated South Park for everything from overuse of the word "shit" to encouraging sex education. In this environment, Parker and Stone were genuine underdogs, two young guys fresh out of film school making an offbeat cartoon for a fledgling comedy network. Without money or fame to protect them, every risk they took put their careers on the line.

For the most part, their risks paid off. "It's crazily more permissive than when we started," Parker told the Guardian in 2014. "The standards were much, much higher when we started out." Bigger, Longer & Uncut occasioned a protracted battle between its creators and both the Motion Picture Association of America and Paramount Studios. Stone and Parker were ready to fight tooth and nail for every curse word, sex act, and decapitation in their movie, producing this legendary memo in which they gleefully denoted the particular sex acts that they felt most passionate about including. Their refusal to take the MPAA's guidelines seriously ultimately served to confound the censors so much that the film actually became dirtier than it had begun: asked to remove the word "hell" from the film's title (South Park: All Hell Breaks Loose), Stone and Parker offered the far filthier one that it goes by today.