14/04/2026
From the Cracked Archives:
South Park fans should have known that something was up when the Season Two premiere was scheduled for April 1, 1998.
Back when South Park was first starting out and hadn’t yet evolved into a billion-dollar multimedia franchise, series creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone had no way of gauging exactly how passionate their fledgling fanbase would be. Hell, even 28 years after South Park premiered, Parker and Stone are still waiting for the other shoe to drop and for interest in the show to instantly evaporate along with their lucrative contracts. But somehow, in its first season, South Park earned a renewal from Comedy Central, which inspired Parker and Stone to plant a fake cliffhanger in the Season One finale to set up some inter-season shenanigans that would lead to one of the biggest controversies of the early series.
In the Season One finale “Cartman’s Mom Is a Dirty Slut,” South Park teased the results of a paternity test that would determine who Cartman’s father was, only for Season Two to open with the infamous episode “Terrance and Phillip in Not Without My Anus,” which both refused to reveal Cartman’s father and featured zero appearances from Cartman — or from the rest of the main cast — in a single scene. Shortly after the “Terrance and Phillip in Not Without My Anus” bait-and-switch incensed the early South Park fandom, Parker and Stone appeared on Dennis Miller Live where they confessed that they didn’t expect their viewers to care about the identity of Cartman’s dad.
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