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It’s a well-established fact that the respective creators of South Park and Family Guy hate each other, and that’s to be expected — theater geeks just love drama.
The animated comedy community is rife with rivalries, and some are much friendlier than others. Ever since the Golden Age of Warner Bros. and Disney, the cartoon business has always had a healthy spirit of competition between the power players that can occasionally spill over into ugly acrimony — like how Seth MacFarlane responded to a Simpsons gag about Peter Griffin being a clone of Homer by having Quagmire straight up sexually assault Marge and murder her family. However, MacFarlane’s most heated and most personal feud somehow isn’t with the predecessor series to which his Family Guy is so often compared, but with the outspoken creative duo of Trey Parker and Matt Stone who made their feelings about MacFarlane’s work perfectly clear in the classic two-part South Park episode “Cartoon Wars.”
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MacFarlane once said that his occasional and brief run-ins with the South Park duo have always been “like when Churchill and Hitler would be in the same room together.” But as one animated comedy fan recently pointed out on Twitter, MacFarlane, Parker and Stone’s shared love of musical theater makes the relationship between Family Guy and South Park look less like Churchill and Hitler and more like Gilbert and Sullivan.
MacFarlane, whose formal music training included a decade of tutelage from Frank Sinatra’s personal voice coaches, has long believed that modern music is lacking the upbeat energy of classic show tunes and big band standards, once remarking, “I love the lush orchestration and old-fashioned melody writing … it just gets you excited, that kind of music.” Speaking on the obvious inspirations behind the Family Guy opening number, MacFarlane added, “It’s very optimistic. And it’s fun. The one thing that’s missing for me, from popular music today, is fun. Guys like (Bing) Crosby, or Sinatra, or Dean Martin, or Mel Torme… these are guys who sounded like they were having a great time.”
Beyond the many show tunes MacFarlane wrote into many Family Guy episodes, MacFarlane’s love of classic Broadway music manifests in his accomplished vocal career. In 2011, MacFarlane released his debut album Music Is Better Than Words, which included numerous renditions of classic Rodgers and Hammerstein standards. Since then, he’s released seven more albums, most of which celebrate the early scores of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Cole Porter and Lerner and Lowe, among other Broadway legends.
Parker and Stone’s close relationship with musical theater also extends beyond the many original show tunes they wrote for various South Park episodes and movies. Their first feature-length film was the 1993 cult hit Cannibal! The Musical, which, as the name suggests, implemented the elements of musical theater into its comical carnage. Much later on in their careers, Parker and Stone’s debut musical The Book of Mormon became a worldwide sensation and netted the pair numerous Tony Awards at the 2011 ceremonies.
Given their mutual love of musical theater and clear aptitude for the medium, it’s a shame that MacFarlane, Parker and Stone will never put their talents together and create the single greatest musical comedy in the history of Broadway. Then again, it might be more fun if that rivalry escalated into a musical cold war wherein the two sides keep writing diss-show tunes back and forth like Drake and Kendrick Lamar.
Is it too much to ask for the next season of South Park to have a score that includes “Seth’s Mom”?