Die Hippie, Die

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South Park episode
"Die Hippie, Die"
Cartman in jail.
Episode no.	127
Airdate	March 16, 2005
South Park - Season 9 March 9, 2005 – December 7, 2005
Mr. Garrison's Fancy New Vagina Die Hippie, Die Wing Best Friends Forever The Losing Edge The Death of Eric Cartman Erection Day Two Days Before the Day After Tomorrow Marjorine Follow that Egg! Ginger Kids Trapped in the Closet Free Willzyx Bloody Mary
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List of all South Park episodes

"Die Hippie, Die" is episode 902 of Comedy Central's South Park. It originally aired on March 16, 2005.

[edit] Plot summary

Cartman runs a "pest control" service to try and rid the town of hippies, a foe he has feared and hated for most of the series, mainly because he considers their ideals of peace and love antithetical to his own views. Having studied hippies in his quest to eradicate them, Cartman deduces that the hippies are about to start a music festival in South Park. His attempts to warn the town council are futile, and he is arrested soon afterwards for imprisoning 63 captured hippies in his basement. The town of South Park is soon invaded by the largest population of hippies in the history of man, and the music festival threatens to destroy the town. They manage to convert Stan, Kyle and Kenny to their cause with talks of corporate evils, and the trio get caught up in the massive hippie crowd, who spend their time listening to jam band music and doing drugs. Meanwhile, Cartman pleads with the mayor to stop the festival, but it turns out that the mayor was the one who permitted the music festival in the first place. After seeing the chaos that the hippies are creating, however, the mayor is ridden with guilt and shoots herself in the head (She survives). The rest of the town pleads with Cartman to rid the town of the hippies. Meanwhile, Stan, Kyle, and Kenny realize that the hippies are doing nothing to oppose the corporations that they have demonized and that their idea of a perfect society is the same as the currently existing one. They try to leave but the crowd is 7 miles in radius and Stan's efforts to talk sense into the hippies only make matters worse. In the end, Cartman, with the help of a scientist (Randy Marsh), an engineer (Linda Stotch), and "a black man to sacrifice himself in case anything goes wrong" (Chef), builds a giant drill to bore through the hippie crowd, the "Hippie Digger". His plan is to upload a Slayer CD, because "hippies can't stand death metal". Cartman receives a Tonka radio controlled bulldozer for his efforts and a promise from Kyle's mother that Kyle will never have one and that he has to watch Cartman having fun with his in the school parking lot.

[edit] Hippie JamFest '05

The festival devolves into what is essentially an excuse to take recreational drugs and party. Similar criticisms of the prevalence of drugs and partying rather than the intended environment of music and activism have been levied at other jam band festivals, such as Bonnaroo, Reggae on the River, and Burning Man. Negative caricatures of bands such as Phish and the Polyphonic Spree are the main stage headliners of this festival.

[edit] Trivia

• Officer Barbrady returns this episode, after not appearing for a long while. Fans have noticed that Barbrady had a completely different speaking voice leading some to believe that Trey Parker had forgotten how to create Barbrady's voice. He seems to have been replaced by Sergeant Yates.
• The term "little Eichmanns," which the neo-hippies often use in the episode, is a reference to the controversy over a Ward Churchill article titled Some People Push Back. In the piece, Churchill referred to the people who worked at the World Trade Center in New York City as "little Eichmanns." Even though the piece was over three years old, it was just being discovered and discussed by the mainstream media shortly before this episode aired. Churchill is a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, which is near South Park and is where the show's co-creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone first met.
• This is the final episode where Isaac Hayes voices Chef because he retired on March 13, 2006. Although Chef appears for the last time on The Return of Chef, which first aired on March 22 2006, all of Chef's dialog comes from samples from previous episodes of South Park.
• The Mayor shoots herself in the head, a reference to her previous voice actor, the late Mary Kay Bergman.
• The title is a parody of Die Mommie Die
• This is the first episode in which Butter's father's name changes from Chris to Steven.
• The song that Cartman plays is Slayer's "Raining Blood", off their Reign in Blood album.

[edit] Goofs

• When Cartman is assembling his team to drill into the center of the JamFest, Randy states he's the only scientist in town. However, there are several others, including Dr. Mephisto (even though he's a genetic engineer) and Clyde's father, who is also a geologist (as mentioned in Terrance and Phillip: Behind the Blow).

[edit] Cultural References

• At the beginning of the episode, when Cartman is checking the old lady's house, it is a reference to Ghost Busters, where they check peoples houses for ghosts, and classify what kind of ghost is present. Also, the way Cartman is dressed in that scene and his hair is similar to Dan Aykroyd's character in the movie.
• The drill crew's red suits and the scene where they board the drill is a spoof of astronauts boarding the Space Shuttle in the movie Armageddon.
• The red car driven by the "college know-it-all" hippies closely resembles the facelifted 6th generation Honda Accord.
  • The car has a Darwin fish on it.
• There is a statue from the Burning Man Festival in the background of one of the scenes.
• One of the song's playing during the festival is a portion of "St. Augustine" by jam-band, moe.
• The scenes involving the plan constructed by Cartman to use a drill to reach the center of the music festival is a parody on the film style of the Bruckheimer/Bay producer/director team, most recently The Core
  • having to drill to save the town (world)
  • the mayor (government) wanting to nuke as soon as the drilling was put to a halt
  • Chef (Lev) climbing outside the Drill (Virgil) to restore power as well as the music and the astronaut suits.
• The vehicle that Cartman designed resembles the Gotengo from Atragon and Godzilla: Final Wars and also The Mole from the Thunderbirds puppet series and live action film.
• Much of the music in the episode is a parody of that featured in movies like Armageddon, The Rock and Crimson Tide, all movies with bombastic "Horns and Male Choir" soundtracks by composers like Hans Zimmer.
• The music that Stan is trying to play on the guitar is "Signs" from the band Five Man Electrical Band.
• Kyle wears a Che Guevara t-shirt.
• Cartman's method to get rid of the hippies has similarities to Mars Attacks! and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.
• The Slayer song used to drive the hippies away is "Raining Blood" from their album Reign in Blood. Also notable is that Slayer is a thrash metal band, not death metal.
• When Cartman plays the Slayer song, we can see he has other music on his computer like "Muhhhrtallicaz - Ride The Thunder" and "Motorface - Death From Behind" which are obviously spoofs of Metallica's Ride The Lightning And Motörhead, other famous metal bands. Also, the gross misspelling of Metallica's name refers back to the days when Napster was still up and running yet Metallica songs specifically were banned; to avoid getting caught for sharing Metallica songs, users would often intentionally misspell "Metallica" in the file name (although never that drastically, of course).
• The scene where Cartman warns the City Council of the incoming danger of the hippies is a spoof of The Day After Tomorrow, which South Park parodied more heavily in the episode "Two Days Before the Day After Tomorrow".