Dances with Smurfs

"Dances with Smurfs" is the thirteenth episode of the thirteenth season of the animated television series South Park. It originally aired on Comedy Central in the United States on November 11, 2009.

The young student who normally reads the morning announcements over the intercom at South Park Elementary is murdered while performing his duties (due to the killer confusing him with someone else with the same name who had an affair with his wife), and Eric Cartman is chosen as his replacement. Cartman begins using the opportunity to express his opinions regarding the quality of the school and to criticize the performance of student body president Wendy Testaburger. Soon, Cartman's morning announcements are broadcast as a political commentary-themed talk show to televisions in every classroom. Cartman accuses Wendy of being a communist and socialist, and she refuses to accept his daily challenges to appear on the show. Through a designed fallacy, Cartman then accuses Wendy of wanting to kill Smurfs, and writes a book consisting of sexually-explicit rumors about Wendy. The school staff's efforts to stop Cartman's behavior are impeded by the ACLU, and he begins to develop a small following led by Butters Stotch. During another of his morning shows, Cartman fabricates a story about how he was living peacefully among the Smurfs, and promotes a documentary DVD of the event entitled Dances with Smurfs. He ends the story by telling the students Wendy killed every Smurf so she could steal their "Smurf berries", which can "power the school" for a year.

Wendy finally agrees to appear on Cartman's show after Butters leads an angry mob to her home, where he proceeds to urinate on her front door. Cartman begins the interview by asking loaded questions, and Wendy responds by spinning a story in which she doesn't deny Cartman's accusations of raiding the Smurf village. She informs the audience that Cartman was a willing co-conspirator in their clandestine effort to obtain the Smurf berries. She then reveals that she has written a book, Going Rogue On The Smurfs, containing further details about the plan, and the movie rights have been sold to James Cameron, who has adapted the story into his film Avatar. Wendy then hands over the class presidency to Cartman, who, by rule, is no longer eligible to continue performing the morning announcements, and is disappointed by the lack of actual power the position has. He is replaced by Casey Miller, a third-grader over which Cartman had earlier won the morning announcements job by deceiving Mr. Mackey, the school's guidance counselor. Casey immediately begins criticizing Cartman's performance as the new class president, causing Cartman to run out of class crying.

The episode's title and the scene where Wendy mentions she sold the rights to the story to Director James Cameron (and Cartman's later trip to the theater) is a reference to the film Avatar.^[1] Cameron has stated that he views the story of Avatar to be very similar to the film Dances with Wolves^[2].

Cartman's televised morning announcements are visually and musically patterned after Glenn Beck's television show on Fox News Channel.^[3] Wendy resigning from her post as student body president and writing a book entitled Going Rogue On The Smurfs bears resemblance to the actions of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who resigned from office four months prior to the airing of the episode.^[4][5] Palin then announced her intentions to publish her memoir, entitled Going Rogue: An American Life.^[4]

The character of morning announcements candidate Casey Miller speaks in a manner similar to that of radio personality Casey Kasem.

Several critics praised the episode's satirical treatment of Beck. Ramsey Isler of IGN stated that it did a "clever" job in spoofing Beck, and the "real accomplishment of this episode is how it totally roasted a semi-political figure, without being political at all." However, Isler also believed it began to lose its appeal once the plot began involving Smurfs, feeling too much of the episode's focus was wasted on setting up the Avatar reference near the end.^[6] In a review where he declared his contempt for Beck, Sean O'Neal of The A.V. Club awarded the episode with an A- grade, suggesting that mocking Beck is an easy task, but the episode "handled it with just enough of the show’s usual surrealist bent that it was never wholly predictable".^[4] Carlos Delgado of iF magazine gave the episode a B- grade, calling it "smart, sharp, and poignant" and a "well-done parody" that had relatively less "laugh out loud" humor than other traditional South Park episodes that mock current events.^[7]

On his radio program the day after the episode originally aired, Beck himself considered the parody to be a "compliment", and admitted to finding humor in a scene that portrayed Cartman as having hair similar to his.^[3]

• "Dances With Smurfs" at South Park Studios

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