South Park and Scientology are two great tastes that taste great together. It's a bit like the classic battles between Larry Flynt and Jerry Falwell, but better on both ends. Parker and Stone are FAR sharper tools than the old pornographer— and the Scientologists far more venal and despicable than a simple country preacher like Falwell.
I wrote a review of the "Trapped in the Closet" episode when it first ran in November 2005. Of course interest has been ratcheted way up in the last few days way past when the episode first aired without any pre-release hype. Isaac Hayes' departure due to his employers' religious "intolerance and bigotry" have made it a hot item. The cancellation of the rerun of the show last week under supposed pressure from Tom Cruise and their mocking response hailing Xenu ratchets it up another notch. Now Parker and Stone have returned fire, addressing the situation in tonight's season premiere with "The Return of Chef," with his lines extracted from previous shows as the Super Adventure Club turns him into a child molesting Chef Vader.
So then, I've been obsessing over this beautiful and perfectly silly November satire of the Scientologists. Naturally, I've whooped up a big honkin' 150 image photo gallery of "Trapped in the Closet" images. Doing video captures and editing for these galleries always brings out new things.
Probably the funniest new thing that jumped out from looking at it as still images was the quick ending of the closet storyline. Tom Cruise and John Travolta emerge from Stan's doorway with R. Kelly sandwiched in between them. Travolta and Cruise are smiling and waving, but check out the images of R. Kelly in these few seconds, with his arm protectively crossed, shifting his eyes anxiously from side to side, and looking down in shame. I wonder exactly how they imagined that playing out? I bet that'll learn R Kelly to stay out of closets.
But really, I don't much care which celebrity is rubbing wee-wees with who. It's fun to torment Tom Cruise though, on general principles. In the first place, he's got some ridicule coming just for being duped to be involved with this nonsense. As the show is presenting it he's actually in the closet because the supposed reincarnation of L. Ron Hubbard isn't impressed enough with his acting.
But watching it closely, Stan does NOT "hate" Tom Cruise's acting, as it's sometimes been said in stories about the episode. It's the best attack on his ridiculous celebrity insecurities that the lukewarm response "You're not, like, as good as Leonardo D'Caprio, but you're okay" was all it took to crush his little ego so completely. It would be someone with that much ridiculous insecurity that would be drawn into foolishness like Scientology.
Rolling backwards and forwards through this episode, it dawned on me to actually hunt down the R. Kelly song "Trapped in the Closet." I haven't yet figured out just how many parts of this damned thing there are, but holy jumpin' Jebus, this thing is cheesy. I got the 20+ minute video of the first part of the story.
Article comments
1 - JD
Did you notice that no one used thier real name in the credits?
2 - Nick
R Kelly is badass dont fuck with him
3 - eexlebots
haha this is fantastic!
4 - Hartley
The Wikipedia version of the Xenu story is the correct one, though South Park was very close. Critics of the cult have for a long while been handing out copies of the 'Xenu leaflet' at pickets:
The 'THIS IS WHAT SCIENTOLOGISTS ACTUALLY BELIEVE' message is actually untrue. Most cult members don't know, or nowadays believe they have to pretend they don't know, the Xenu story. It's a *secret* that if they were told without thousands of dollars of preparation would ruin their chance of immortality, forever.
The cult has spent millions of dollars trying to keep the story secret. Here's their http://www.daisy.freeserve.co.uk/stolgy_14.htmstandard lawyer's letter:
5 - Arnie Lerma
You wrote:"
Now, I've noticed one little discrepancy. The South Park version of the story has Xenu dropping frozen souls INTO the hot Hawaiian volcano, whereas another version of the story on Wikipedia would have it that he dropped the souls AROUND the volcanoes, and then used nuclear weapons on them."
In 1995 I was the guy that posted the xenu story to the net and then Scientology spent $1,740,000 suing me. See the FAQ page at my homepage.
Though I am under an injuction to not make copies of what Scientology describes as their "ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY" allow me to fix this one small error in South Park's rendition.
A proper rendtion of the section about the implant stations goes something like this:
After stacking up the frozen corpses of the captured spirits around volcanoes, Hydrogen bombs were dropped on the volcanoes, and in the resulting maelstrom, an electronic ribbon came up from the implant station, capturing all the spirits and drawing them down into the implant station, where they were then forced to watch lousy movies.. ( pictures of how earth society looks today - Hubbard makes his rubes think this is why architecture etc is the way it is ) and packaged up into clusters and these clusters are stuck all over you, and for $360,000 Scientology can get rid of them fo you.
Any Questions?
Sincerely
Arnie Lerma
Lermanet.comExposing the CON
"The dispute in this case surrounds Lerma's acquisition and publication on the Internet of texts that the Church of Scientology considers sacred and protects heavily from unauthorized disclosure. Founded by L. Ron Hubbard, the Scientology religion attempts to explain the origin of negative spiritual forces in the world and advances techniques for improving one's own spiritual well-being. Scientologists believe that most human problems can be traced to lingering spirits of an extraterrestrial people massacred by their ruler, Xenu, over 75 million years ago. These spirits attach themselves by "clusters" to individuals in the contemporary world, causing spiritual harm and negatively influencing the lives of their hosts "
A recent radio show from March 29th about this and South Park is HERE mp3 29 meg
6 - Al Barger
Arnie- "$360,000 Scientology can get rid of them fo you." Can L Ron's boys do anything about Manbearpig?