South Park is now on
HBO Max in its entirety... almost. The lineup on the new streaming service does not include five of the most controversial South Park episodes - as noted by THR,
all five episodes include the depiction of religious figures, including the Prophet Muhammad. The revelation shouldn't be news to fans of the long-running animated comedy; all the South Park episodes featuring depictions of Muhammad have been unavailable to stream on services like Netflix, iTunes, Hulu, South Park Studios, Comedy Central, and Amazon Prime Video in the years following their broadcasts.
5 South Park episodes you can't stream on HBO Max:
[ignvideo width=610 height=374 url=https://www.ign.com/videos/2018/06/04/south-park-trey-parker-reveals-his-favorite-episode-of-the-past-5-years] "Super Best Friends" portrayed a superhero team made up of religious figures such as Jesus, Buddha, Moses, Krishna, and Muhammad, the latter being strictly prohibited from being figuratively depicted in Islam. Even so, the episode aired without much controversy in 2005 and was only censored in later years. In IGN's
"Super Best Friends" review, we said, "While this isn't one of
South Park's best episodes of all time, it stands out because of the sheer audacity of incorporating just about all of the world's major religions in one silly joke." South Park then explored, in its own very meta way, the furor over depicting the prophet in the two-parter "Cartoon Wars," which chronicled the uproar over a cartoon's (in this case, Family Guy) attempt to broadcast an uncensored version of the Prophet Muhammad. The episodes explored the themes of censorship, free speech, and fear, but were also censored by Comedy Central to remove any on-screen depictions or mentions of Muhammad. These episodes were produced following the protests and violence sparked by Danish newspaper cartoon depictions of Muhammad, as well as the assassination of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Muslim man who objected to van Gogh's short film Submission: Part 1. Series creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone revisited the subject of censorship in episodes "200" and "201," the latter being deemed particularly incendiary and which saw
Comedy Central beefing up security around their offices.
Parker and Stone reportedly received death threats in response to the episodes. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=south-park-topical-episodes&captions=true"] Comedy Central also censored "201," which at the time prompted
Parker and Stone to slam the network: "In the 14 years we've been doing South Park we have never done a show that we couldn't stand behind. We delivered our version of the show to Comedy Central and they made a determination to alter the episode. It wasn't some meta-joke on our part. Comedy Central added the bleeps. In fact,
Kyle's customary final speech was about intimidation and fear. It didn't mention Muhammad at all but it got bleeped too."
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