By John Corrado

This week, Paramount is releasing the streaming special South Park: Joining the Panderverse on Blu-ray. The 49 minute animated special from South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone skewers everything from “woke” culture, to useless college degrees, multiverse movies, and token diverse characters in Disney reboots.

The wide-ranging special, which premiered on Paramount+ last fall, is built around the kooky premise of Eric Cartman having a recurring nightmare that Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy has had him replaced with a diverse Black lady.

This leads to him being transported to an alternate universe where the South Park characters have all been replaced by a cast of racially diverse women. At the same time, Disney CEO Bob Iger (yes, he is depicted here) is trying to figure out why their films keep flopping, while a Cartman-lookalike Kathleen Kennedy simply responds to every pitch at the board meeting with “put a chick in it and make it gay!”

The special takes aim at forced diversity, and the laziness of replacing pre-existing characters to fill out racial or gender quotas (the boys like “Black Spider-Man” Miles Morales, they tell their PC Principal who accuses them of being against all diversity, because he’s his own fully fleshed out character). But Joining the Panderverse also pokes fun at online fans who spend all their time complaining about diverse characters in “their” franchises, in a classic case of Parker and Stone attacking both sides and not wanting to let anyone off the hook.

Meanwhile, Stan’s dad Randy Marsh is trying to fix the oven door, but can’t get a handyman because they are all booked up and charging exorbitant fees, due to nobody knowing how to do anything themselves anymore. The joke is that the handymen have all gotten rich because everyone else spent their time getting useless college degrees to work office jobs instead of learning manual labor, in an inversion of the class system that puts tradespeople at the top.

It’s as crude both in content and style as is to be expected from what is essentially an extended South Park episode, but Joining the Panderverse hits most of its (sometimes easy) targets. It’s stupid and funny in equal measure, but also not unintelligent in what it has to say. There is a cleverness to how it uses the multiverse premise to satirize a number of modern cultural mores, while also functioning as an amusing parody of modern Disney.

Bonus Features (Blu-ray):

The completely bare-bones Blu-ray disc includes no bonus features, but the package ships with a standard slipcover.

South Park: Joining the Panderverse is a Paramount Home Entertainment release. It’s 49 minutes and rated 14A.

Street Date: June 11th, 2024