Oh my god, they killed Cartman's father and sister!
You bastards!
Over the years, South Park has had a lot of ideas that never came to be:You bastards!
Also this Bigger Longer and Uncut page.
- "The Coon" was intended to be more of a parody of Watchmen, with all the kids as superheroes. It also had a main plot of The Coon trying to fix the economy. However, Matt and Trey realized that Cartman was stealing the show, so they scaled it back and used the economy plot line in "Margaritaville". The original concept seems to have returned with "Coon and Friends" trying to fix another BP oil spill.
- Mysterion was also originally intended to be an alter-ego of a new, unnamed character, but it was decided to make him Kenny's alter-ego.
- In "The Wacky Molestation Adventure", Cartman was originally going to block out the sun. However, after learning that It's Been Done by The Simpsons, they scrapped the idea. Their frustration made its way into creating the episode "The Simpsons Already Did It."
- "A Million Little Fibers" was originally going to be about Towelie on Intervention. However, they couldn't fit it in right, so they ended up revamping it. The original idea was later used in "Crippled Summer".
- "Pinewood Derby" was going to be an hour long special where Randy finds out that dinosaurs had killed themselves off after inventing guns, and convinces everyone to do away with them. After this, an alien would have arrived and taken over the world with a handgun, with no one able to stop him. The entire plot was torpedoed by, once again, The Simpsons having done it earlier in two different Treehouse of Horror vignettes.
- Kenny's semi-permanent death in season 5 was originally considered for Kyle, who Butters would then replace, allegedly because they felt that Stan and Kyle were too similar. This itself was built from an earlier idea of Kyle moving away in season 4. In the end, they decided they didn't want to kill Kyle (as they felt things would get too depressing without him), but Kenny, being an overused Running Gag, was expendable. (Stan and Kyle, meanwhile, eventually underwent enough Divergent Character Evolution to fix any problems.) The creators had also intended for Kenny's death to be permanent. When that idea fell through note , they simply considered dragging out Kenny's death even longer, with more characters besides Butters and Tweek replacing him.
- The PlayStation 2 was going to be featured in "Towelie" (judging from this storyboard
◊), but they couldn't get Sony's permission. As a result, they came up with the Okama Gamesphere, which was a parody of the current video game consoles of the time (the PlayStation 2, Nintendo GameCube, and Xbox). - Nancy Cartwright was the original choice for the female characters on the show, but she refused because of the vulgarity.
- Barry White was considered for Chef, but declined because the show went against his Christian values.
- "Quintuplets 2000" had its plot heavily reworked: Originally titled "Rosie O'Donnell Eats Children", it would have involved the quintuplets moving to South Park and becoming a media frenzy due to Rosie O'Donnell promoting them. Kenny's mother would then wind up jealous of their fame and attempt to get pregnant with multiples, while Cartman would have a crush on one of the Quints. The Quints were also originally to be American, and the original broadcast promo for the episode featured them with different voices. After the Elian Gonzalez case happened, the entire episode was quickly reworked from the ground up to parody the story. Kenny and the Quints were also to be exchanged and return to their homes safely, but Parker and Stone decided it'd be funnier if it ended with Kenny dead and the Quints deciding to become celebrities. Other scrapped plot points from earlier drafts included Timmy making an appearance, and the Quints displaying the ability to multiply themselves.
- "The Lemmiwinks Easter Special"/"The Return of Lemmiwinks" was an episode scripted for season 8, but the crew quickly ran into trouble with animating it, as well as finding ways to make it seem funnier. "AWESOM-O" was aired in its place (with a joke referencing the original plot before the episode), and the story was put on hold, with the crew suggesting that it'd air later on in the run. Eventually, Trey Parker and Matt Stone decided to scrap the idea completely.
- In early planning of the show, Trey Parker and Matt Stone had the idea for the boys to be involved in more plots focusing around aliens and the supernatural. This was quickly scrapped, as they then decided it'd come off as too much of a ripoff of The X-Files. The random aliens placed in the background as Easter eggs were a remnant of this concept.
- Cartman was to have a father and younger sister, and both of these characters cameo in the longer (unaired) version of the pilot episode. They were both dropped, as it was decided that it'd be better if Cartman were only raised by his promiscuous mother. Kenny was to also have a younger toddler sister, who would resemble Ike note , but she never made it into the first season (she was originally to appear in "Starvin' Marvin") and only briefly appeared in one episode. However, the sister idea was eventually reused with Karen McCormick for later seasons, although Matt Stone initially regarded her first appearance as an oversight.
- Trey Parker and Matt Stone considered letting the end to "You're Getting Old" stick, and having Stan spend the second half of the season growing to accept it. However, every plan they came up with involved more drama than comedy, so they decided to hit the Reset Button.
- Jerry Seinfeld had shown interest in guest-starring on the show, but he changed his mind as Parker and Stone refused to give him a larger role than one of the turkeys in "Starvin' Marvin" (similar to George Clooney's role as Stan's dog in "Big Gay Al's Big Gay Boat Ride"). They admit in the Season One commentaries that they weren't fans of Seinfeld anyway, so his absence from the episode wasn't seen as a huge loss to them.
- Also, the ending for "Starvin' Marvin" was going to have the Ethiopians kill Sally Struthers and dine on the fat from her belly for Thanksgiving. Comedy Central deemed this too distasteful, so they instead ended the cartoon with the Ethiopians tying her up and then feasting on Dr. Mephesto's mutant turkeys; Struthers went on to appear in "Starvin Marvin in Space", the episode's sequel.
- In "Cartman Sucks", Butters being sent to a gay camp was originally meant to be a joke of a bunch of Camp Gay kids who were stoked to be alone at camp. Chris would have walked in on several trying to gang bang Butters, leading to him trying several other ways to make him not gay. However, when they came up with the idea of a camper who was troubled by his homosexuality, they decided it was a much better story. Cartman's plot was originally going to just be him trying to not be gay. This was changed to Cartman simply wanting the photo back.
- Season 20's post-Election Day 2016 episode was originally "The Very First Gentleman", in which Bill Clinton visits South Park Elementary after his wife Hillary is elected President of the United States, and ran promos during that night's live Daily Show and At Midnight installments....which revealed that Donald Trump was going to be elected instead. Parker and Stone hadn't prepared an alternate episode for a Trump victory even though the season's Member Berries Story Arc hinged on Mr. Garrison as a Trumplica, so it was rewritten/reanimated within one day as "Oh Jeez".
- Mr. Garrison would also have gone back to teaching by the end of the season, and the Gender War would likely have been covered in more detail in the last four episodes rather than pushed to the sideline in favor of the Trolling-arc.
- Relatedly, "About Last Night" was written and animated under the assumption that Barack Obama would win the 2008 presidential election. Parker and Stone subsequently said that had John McCain upset the odds and defeated Obama, they would probably have crudely chopped up and re-edited the episode's dialogue (and maybe recorded one or two new lines) to make references to McCain's victory.
- 2012's election episode, "Obama Wins!" was designed to have the ending easily alterable in case Mitt Romney won — Parker and Stone didn't rate Romney's chances, but many of the studio staffers reportedly did — by having the final scene instead have Stan and Kyle hand control of the Star Wars franchise over to Disney (and thereby making Romney the winner of the election) on the grounds that they couldn't possibly screw it up worse than the prequels and Special Editions had. The alternate ending was storyboarded, but never animated. Ironically, Parker and Stone would go on to have far more negative opinions on the Disney-produced films than they did even on the prequel trilogy.
- Mysterion from the "Coon and Friends" episodes was originally intended to be a brand new character, before it was decided that he would be Kenny's alter-ego.
- The very first South Park game was under development by Crawfish Interactive in 1998 and was set to be released on the Game Boy Color. The upcoming game even had previews in Nintendo Power and other gaming magazines. When the game was ready to be released for manufacturing, it suddenly fell off the radar and was never heard of again. Trey and Matt requested that the game be cancelled since they felt it would be inappropriate to have a game based on a mature-rated cartoon on a handheld gaming system whose main demographic was mostly children.note The codebase was later recycled for Maya the Bee and further recycled into The New Adventures of Mary Kate & Ashley. A ROM of the original GBC game would later surface when a user named "DaKoolDood" on the Lost Media Wiki Discord server managed to contact the head developer of the game.
- Meanwhile, the 1998 first person shooter was going to receive a port to the Dreamcast, but it never materialized.
- Speaking of that game, the original plan was for the PS1 version to be a completely different platformer-puzzler, a la Lost Vikings (and similar tot he Game Boy Color title), instead of the Porting Disaster we ended up with.
- The opening theme song was going to be much slower paced, but Comedy Central wanted the song to be much faster and energetic. The instrumental was instead used as the theme for the closing credits.
