In response to South Park co-creator Trey Parker, The Lyons Group as soon as supplied him a buttload of cash to direct a long-forgotten Barney film if he might solely match his humorousness beneath a G ranking. That’s like if an NBA workforce tried to pay Michael Jordan hundreds of thousands of {dollars} to play basketball with out leaping.
Even earlier than South Park premiered on Comedy Central again in late 1997, the leisure trade understood that Parker and his artistic half Matt Stone have been destined to be massively profitable, and all of Hollywood was clamoring to capitalize on their expertise. The 2 stop-motion brief movies that originated the characters and elegance of South Park, each titled The Spirit of Christmas, have been cult hits in leisure circles, as was Parker and Stone’s black comedy live-action movie Cannibal! The Musical.
Nevertheless, none of Parker and Stone’s early work indicated that the pair have been particularly all in favour of family-friendly tasks, except some rash movie government solely noticed the primary 30 seconds of The Spirit of Christmas earlier than calling the pair’s brokers.
Do not Miss
Presumably, that’s precisely what occurred when The Lyons Group reached out to Parker a couple of profitable alternative to utterly change gears and direct the 1998 children’ film Barney’s Nice Journey, an childish musical comedy that flopped exhausting upon launch. In an interview with Parker and Stone that Rolling Stone printed only a couple months earlier than the premiere of Barney’s Nice Journey, Parker revealed that he might have made $1.5 million if he accepted the directing job, however he would have needed to promote his sacrilegious soul to the purple dinosaur.
Earlier than Parker and Stone made the second The Spirit of Christmas brief, the pair actually might have used the Barney-sized payday that Parker would later flip down. “We have been significantly ravenous. All the way down to a meal a day,” mentioned Stone of their dire scenario, which Fox government Brian Graden and future South Park government producer saved with a $1,200 fee for the brief that will quickly change Parker and Stone’s lives.
“Proper after The Spirit of Christmas, it obtained to the purpose the place we have been doing three conferences a day and getting supplied multi-picture offers from each studio,” Parker mentioned of the proto-South Park undertaking that put him and Stone on each leisure government’s radar.
However, as Parker defined, not each bigwig knew precisely what they have been attempting to purchase. “I obtained a name from my brokers saying, ‘Trey, you’ve been supplied to direct an image for 1,000,000 and a half {dollars},’” Parker recalled of what would have been his first (and doubtless final) massive break. “And I mentioned, ‘Wow, what’s the film?’ They usually mentioned, ‘It’s Barney: The Film.’ I mentioned, ‘Who the hell desires me to direct Barney: The Film?’”
Parker defined of the very flawed reasoning behind his would-be profession in children’ leisure, “They mentioned, ‘They need it to be a G-rated factor, and so they noticed which you could make actually humorous stuff with children since you probably did The Spirit of Christmas.’”
Clearly, the Barney executives by no means truly completed The Spirit of Christmas — or, alternatively, they needed to boost the Barney movie with a fast fistfight between Santa and Jesus.
