Production
According to this episode's mini-commentary, this episode was one of the most difficult to make. After making the feature film Team America: World Police and the 13 other episodes in South Park's 8th season in the same year (a year which Trey Parker and Matt Stone describe as "The Year from Hell"), Parker, Stone and the show's other writers were completely drained of ideas. The staff tried to come up with an idea, but nothing came up through Thursday and Friday which is considered a huge drawback with South Park's rushed production. On Saturday afternoon the staff decided to just do the idea of parodying John Denver and the Muppets: A Christmas Together holiday special, which had been in gestation for some time. The critters participate in Satanic behavior like the possessed crew of the 1997 movie Event Horizon, which also inspired Stone and Parker to create the characters. With some doubt, the show developed into an episode involving a rhyming narration and ending with it being a story by Cartman, the creators ended up quite satisfied with it. The episode was also in the style of Christmas stories such as How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
The episode has special bumpers, announcing it to be "A Woodland Critter Christmas," with Squirrelly then saying in a cheerful voice, "Hail Satan!"
Read more about this topic: Woodland Critter Christmas
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“In the production of the necessaries of life Nature is ready enough to assist man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)