Pip (South Park) - Cultural References and Themes

Cultural References and Themes

"Pip" serves as an explanation of the origins of its central character, as well as a retelling of the 1861 Charles Dickens novel Great Expectations. The episode is, of course, not a straight adaptation of the novel, but a comedic retelling thereof. As such, the episode's main aim is not to represent Great Expectations, but to use it for the purpose of comedy. Some of the central characters of the novel appear in the episode. These include Pip, as well as Joe (Pip's brother-in-law), Mrs Joe (Pip's sister), Miss Havisham, Estella Havisham, Herbert Pocket, and the escaped convict. For most of the episode, the plot stays relatively faithful to the novel's basic story. At one point however, the episode introduces major digressions from the novel, mainly Miss Havisham's fictional objects of modern, evil technology, such as her Genesis Device and robot monkeys. The ending of the episode has been viewed as "a joke about contemporary Hollywood's inability to produce entertainment that does not depend on idiotic spectacle."

The way the story is presented – South Park Classics – is a parody of Masterpiece Theatre (now continued as Masterpiece Classic), a long-running drama anthology television series airing on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the United States, best known for presenting adaptations of classic works of literature. (Incidentally, Masterpiece Theatre featured an adaptation of Great Expectations in 1999.) Malcolm McDowell's portrayal of the narrator parodies Alistair Cooke, "a British person" himself, who was the host of Masterpiece Theatre between 1971 and 1992. The setup has been viewed as "a joke about America's (or more specifically, the typical PBS subscriber's) haughty search for cultural enrichment in the English classics", based on the context of "he cultural authority of the British, so long courted by the American culture industries."