Skirv and South Park

I know you'll never believe me, no matter what I say, but I am in some part responsible for the existance South Park. Really.

It was the Sunday after Thanksgiving break, 1996; I was one of the few people to get back to the dorm. My friend Jesse came to visit me in my room with the Geeks before they came back, to show me this video tape he'd gotten from his friend Amy Ryan, who had gotten it from Jay Kreibach, who had gotten it from... (you get the idea). It was a five minute short, entitled The Spirit of Christmas, depicting a fight between Jesus and Santa Claus. I thought it was funny, but not spectacularly so. Jesse copied it (I was the only one he knew with two VCRs) and went on his way.

I grabbed him later that day, after my roommates had come back, and asked him to show the video to them. He brought it back up and popped it in again. This time I laughed uproariously. So I asked to make my own copy of the tape, and did so...

Over the next 2-3 weeks, I probably showed that video 150 times to 300 different people, and made another 30 copies off of mine.

Finally, late in the year, we realized that our distribution techniques were flawed. So DB, Tammer, and I digitized it. It was large (53MB), but it was worth it. I put up on the web and on some local filesharing systems, and away we went.

I was unprepared for the onslaught.

My site eventually became the Official Distribution of the Spirit of Christmas - well, in that unofficial kind of way. I didn't actually put the movie up on my pages; I didn't have the bandwidth to deal with the thousands of downloads that were requested daily. So I spread out the file, had it mirrored across dozens of sites (mostly Universities). It worked, but it took a lot of work to keep up, and sites just kept on getting kicked off the 'net, like Dannyman's, the first to go after doing 8GB in 48 hours (this was worse back in 1997). I eventually handed it off to my Daemons to take care of, and started work on a new page...

...because, you see, a few months later South Park was announced. And was I ever excited! My work at spreading the word had paid off! I had several phone interviews with various news companies, small stories written about me in various places...

The first episode of South Park aired on Aug 13, 1997. I watched it, and laughed heartily for essentially the whole time. Years later, I still watch the show gleefully. _Fat Camp_ was a real trip, given that they showed college students distributing videos over the internet and causing the Krazy Kenny Show...it was a nice parallel. I choose to believe that it was an intentional homage to me and my friends... but I'm like that.

I can see you still don't believe me. That's fine. I know that I was getting thousands of hits a day, and that it was all fun... I know that South Park is still on the air, and is still a good show to watch. And I know that I was a part of it.