Monday, October 11, 2021

1998 A Mother's Courage (Lost South Park Halloween Short)

A Mother's Courage is an online short released on the Comedy Central website in 1998 to coincide with South Park's Season Two Halloween episode titled Spookyfish. The short is about Stan, Kyle, and Kenny demonstrating how to make a Jack-o-lantern that looks like Lou Diamond Phillips. They are also arguing with Cartman, who is in the background eating a whole bag of candy corn. While Cartman throws up after eating too much candy corn, Kenny accidentally impales himself with a knife he was using to carve a Jack-o-lantern, though the trademark phrases from Stan and Kyle did not follow suit.

The short was lost from the internet until 2015. Various South Park fan forums across the web found out about the short and proceeded to look for it. In October 2015, a YouTube channel going by the name of Mannis found the short, and uploaded to his channel. Mannis also created a second video explaining how it was lost and how he found it. Both videos are embedded below. The technical details on how it was lost is explained in the next paragraph.

Originally, it was available to download through a small 50 KB file called "SouthPark.mcs", and was made with an obscure tool called Media Conveyor, which, at the time was a rival to the form of Macromedia Flash. It was chosen because it was able to recreate the South Park art style with small downloads, which was important at the time because back then, the average consumer had low bandwidth. Plus, it worked with a cache system. This means that you could make a model once and save it to use for later. Macromedia Flash became the mainstay animation software, leading Comedy Central to pull the short and replace it with a comic following the exact same story, and the short was presumed to be lost forever.

1998 A Mother's Courage (Lost South Park Halloween Short):


South Park Halloween Video Lost Media From 1998 Explained by Mannis:


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