In its latest 48-minute episode, South Park opted to slam all sides of Disney’s “woke” culture wars, which have ensnared everyone from Florida governor Ron DeSantis to legions of fans eager to complain about political correctness.
Titled “Joining the Panderverse,” the episode details Eric Cartman’s worst nightmare—that he’ll be replaced by a woman of color. When Eric wakes from the bad dream, he declares, “They were taking all my favorite people and replacing them with diverse women complaining about the patriarchy!” later adding, “And the Disney stock just keeps going down and down!”
Cartman’s dreams become reality in the form of a multiverse occupied only by women of color is led by South Park Elementary’s “PC Principal,” who accuses the characters of bigotry when they say recasting South Park’s white male characters “doesn’t make any sense.” Says the administrator, “If you boys don’t think Eric [Cartman] can be a Black woman, then maybe the problem is you. You probably don’t like that Indiana Jones got replaced by a female either, huh? You probably have a problem with Black Spider-Man too”—referencing controversies that have cropped up around recent Disney titles like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which notably didn’t replace Harrison Ford as Indy with Phoebe Waller–Bridge, and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. The kids do, at least, support the latter film: “No! Miles Morales is sweet! That’s a whole constructed thing with its own character and narrative. This is just taking Cartman, same old Cartman, and putting a Black woman in it!”
At one point, the episode features a fictionalized version of Disney CEO Bob Iger, who tells his fellow executives to “pander harder” to frustrated audiences via the “panderstone” that the studio uses to remake the same stories over and over. This is where Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy enters the episode to repeat the same note: “Put a chick in it and make her lame and gay!”
But before episode’s end, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone acknowledge the hatred that can spew from the anti-woke fans and commentators who place Kennedy directly in the crosshairs. Kennedy tells Cartman of the “hate mail” she’s received on the job, “ugly letters from racists who couldn’t stand that some of the panderstone’s rehashes had diverse women characters in the lead.” She admits that using the panderstone to “fight all bigotry in our society” was the wrong method. “All I ever wanted was to make great entertainment, believe me. But as soon as you start getting piles and piles of hate mail, endless messages calling you the C-word, you can’t think straight,” Kennedy says before apologizing to Cartman for being “so reckless with the things that you love. It was just lazy.” Cartman also admits, “I’m sorry I wrote all those letters…I guess just railing on woke stuff all the time is pretty lazy too.”