South Park: The Fractured But Whole senior producer Jason Schroeder has said on Sony’s PlayStation Blog that, as a massive fan of the TV series, having to read the script – and thus spoiling all of the jokes and gags – was tough, as he wanted the final product to be a surprise.
Despite knowing the ins and outs of the script though, Schroeder says the comedic impact of the writing hasn’t diminished over time, admitting that both he and other members of the team found themselves laughing uncontrollably on several occasions as a result of Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s writing.
18 months ago, I got my first hand-delivered paper script while I was down at their [Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s] office and I was thinking to myself ‘I don’t want to read this, it’s going to be full of spoilers. It was this very genuine fan moment and I had to say to myself ‘well, I guess it’s my job – I’m going to have to read this thing 100 times over’.
When you do an E3 demo you play the game over and over and when we left at the end of the week, the team was still laughing at the jokes – it’s just been a tonne of fun.
In our theatre [at E3] we had one of those really just contagious moments of laughter: someone was laughing and then that made the person sitting next to them start laughing, then our demonstrator cracked up. Tears were running down their faces because the jokes just kept coming and coming.
In regards to show’s more risque comedy moments, Schroeder says he hopes fans will be surprised by some of the content that makes it in to the final product without being censored, saying:
There’s hopefully going to be some stuff in there that people will say ‘how did that make it through classification?’
South Park: The Stick of Truth infamously became a victim of the European ratings board, which resulted in several particular scenes being removed (audio was left in) and being replaced with a mocking title card lamenting the fact. Whether South Park: The Fractured But Whole manages to evade the same treatment when it releases in December remains to be seen, but let’s hope it does.
