Unintentional Period Place / South Park

• South Park having run for over twenty years, is famous for being very topical in its humor, as its extremely short lead time (with each episode being written, animated, and edited in the course of a week), allows for very precise and topical humor that often becomes dated in less than a year and, thus, it's easy for even a casual viewer to determine what year any given episode was first aired without viewing the end credits. As such, it has lampooned every hot topic in pop culture, politics, and American (and occasionally Canadian) society as a whole that has cropped up during its run, from Barbra Streisand, Pokémon and The X-Files in the 1990s to The War on Terror, World of Warcraft, and Tom Cruise's public meltdown in the 2000s to PewDiePie, safe spaces, The Twilight Saga, Minecraft, Fortnite and pop culture nostalgia in the 2010s to the COVID-19 Pandemic in the '20s. That said, being the textbook example of an Animated Shock Comedy, the cartoon's use of raunchy and offensive humor rife with controversial shock value that attracted the attention of Moral Guardians, endless celebrity-bashing, nihilistic attitude, overly libertarian politics and "both sides" approach to every real-life topic identify it as a cultural product of the late 90s and 2000s.
  • South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut references "Don't Ask Don't Tell", Free Willy, Late Night With Conan O'Brien, Saddam Hussein, and the V-Chip.
  • Saddam Hussein was a recurring character early in the series (his first episode being "Terrence and Phillip: Not Without My Anus" in April 1998). He abruptly stopped appearing after May 2003 — he had one episode after that point, "It's Christmas in Canada" (December 2003), which has him being dragged out of a hiding hole in a clear reference to his then-contemporary capture by American soldiers.
  • "The Tooth Fairy's Tats 2000" revolves around Cartman wanting to get a Sega Dreamcast, which would be overshadowed by the PlayStation 2 not long after its original air date, and discontinued close to a year after the episode aired.
  • One episode from 2001 tries to show how Tolkien's family is relatively wealthy by having them as the only people in town with a DVD player while everyone else uses VHS tapes. A later 2012 episode has Stan saying that renting DVDs "is more ancient than Madonna's boobs".
  • The episode "Osama bin Laden Has Farty Pants" (the first post-9/11 episode) has people worrying about terrorism and anthrax attacks. Plus, with Osama's death in 2011...
  • A 2004 episode has the town's girls (with the exception of Wendy) wanting to be "stupid spoiled whores" just like Paris Hilton (and Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and Tara Reid too), skimpy clothes and fake tans included.
  • Another episode pokes fun at "zero tolerance" bullying policies at schools (by painting the bullied ones as being worse than the bullies) at a time these were seen as rather controversial.
  • "Canada on Strike", aside from the Ripped from the Headlines nature of the titular strike attacking the '07-08 writer's strike, features the overall message that the internet isn't a proven revenue source and people shouldn't expect to make careers off it. It goes so far as to feature a whole bunch of Youtube viral stars, rooted in the "cute animals and weird people singing or getting in slapstick" era of the site, and treats their attempts to make money as idiotic ("theoretically, I'm a millionaire!"). Inside of a few years, streaming through Netflix or other services would become one of the most lucrative revenue sources around, and many Youtubers have managed to leverage the site into profitable ventures and careers—primarily through gaming and Let's Play streams, which aren't even mentioned. Even at the time, the creators had managed to score a pretty lucrative deal for putting South Park on streaming sites, so they should probably have recognized that it was about to get big.
  • "A Scause for Applause" ends with Jesus leading the townspeople in a "Free Pussy Riot" rally, which became this after the members of Pussy Riot were freed in 2013.
  • Matt and Trey seem to have become aware of this in recent years, and the 2015 season takes some jabs at the show's 2000ish nature as it mockingly "transitions" into the 2010s with an emphasis on "political correctness".

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