Butt Out
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| South Park episode | |
| "Butt Out" | |
 The boys trying to avoid turning into Butt Out. |
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| Episode no. | 109 |
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| Airdate | December 3, 2003 |
| South Park - Season 7 March 19, 2003 – December 17, 2003 |
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| ← Season 6 | Season 8 → |
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| List of all South Park episodes | |
"Butt Out" is episode 713 of the Comedy Central series South Park. It originally aired on December 3, 2003.
[edit] Plot
An upbeat anti-smoking group called Butt Out, which incorporates elements of dance and hip-hop into its routine, performs at South Park Elementary, which brings out a mixture of boredom, annoyance, confusion and fear in the boys.
Afraid that they will grow up to be as lame as the people in Butt Out, the boys decide to take up smoking, which Mr. Mackey finds out about. While giving the children a lecture about the dangers of smoking, the school burns down as a result of the children discarding their cigarettes. The parents all come into the burned down school and are initially very angry at their children, but Mrs. Broflovski first ends up blaming it (and the other parents follow suit) on the tobacco companies brainwashing them into smoking, which the boys agree with in order to avoid being grounded for three weeks.
The town then calls in Rob Reiner in order to combat the spread of smoking among children in South Park. Reiner considers himself important. Despite the fact that he is against smoking, he is seen eating large amounts of junk food (another unhealthy pursuit) on an almost constant basis. He is loved by Cartman because "He just goes around imposing his will on other people; he's my idol." The rest of the boys are suspicious of him as he attempts to use them in order to get Colorado to pass a ban on smoking in public.
Reiner, disguised as Rita Poon, gets a tobacco company to give them a tour around a factory near South Park. Reiner planned to sabotage the company by taking the boys there and then taking a picture of them in the factory and photoshopping it ("You've just been Reiner'd!"). However, the tobbaco company offices look really nice and everybody employed there looks really happy and friendly. By contrast, Reiner's anti-smoking group is a group of vampires who try to kill Cartman with a poisoned cupcake, after Reiner gets him to appear in an anti-smoking commercial in which he says is dying of second hand smoke. Cartman escapes, and seeks the help of Stan, Kyle, and Kenny, who after much convincing, agree to help him. Eventually, as Kyle predicted, they end up back at the cigarette factory where the townspeople, bearing torches, demand the factory hand them over. Reiner reveals his plan to the townspeople, at which point they turn against him. Cartman stabs Reiner with a fork causing mass amounts of goo to come out of him, killing him. The boys tell their moms that they had smoked on their own free will, and are then grounded.
[edit] Trivia
- The episode's title is a double entendre. "Butt out" can mean either "quit smoking" or "mind your own business".
- This episode defends smokers, although both Trey Parker and Matt Stone are non-smokers (Stone admits that he used to be, but quit). They explained that they did the episode mostly because they think Rob Reiner is a "big fat ass", and because they were tired of loved ones being assaulted by people criticising them for smoking.
- Rob Reiner was previously criticised for "using children to pull at the heart strings of the public" in the episode Gnomes, but this time a full episode is devoted to it.
[edit] References to other works
- The episode pokes fun at the formulaic storyline of some South Park episodes, which start with the boys getting themselves in trouble and incite a controversy between the townsfolk and a national interest group (or a major catastrophe) while trying to avoid punishments, subsequently learning a lesson from this conflict.
- The depiction of the workers in the cigarette factory is a reference to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
- The people working for Rob Reiner bear a resemblance to those the character Winston Smith describes working at the Ministry of Truth in the novel Nineteen-Eighty-Four.
- The man who first tells Cartman to eat the cupcake greatly resembles Gríma Wormtongue.
- At the end of the episode, Cartman punctures Rob Reiner's stomach with a fork. Reiner begins hemorrhaging green slime to exclamations of "My goo! My precious goo!" and melts away in a manner similar to the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz.
- When Rob Reiner takes a picture of the boys and later confesses to be against the tobacco companies, he exclaims "I'm Rob Reiner, and you've just been Reiner'd." This is an obvious parody of MTV's Punk'd.
| Preceded by: "All About Mormons" |
South Park episodes | Followed by: "Raisins" |
