South Park Calls Avatar “Dances with Smurfs”

Warning: This entire article talks about an episode of South Park and gives away a few jokes. But by no means does it really ruin the episode. Spoilers, but not very big ones.

Last night’s episode of South Park really struck a chord with me as a movie geek. The plot of the episode involved taking on talk radio with Eric Cartman becoming a Rush Limbaugh/Bill O’Reilly type of character. Cartman trashed the school president Wendy saying she didn’t do enough and then the entire episode shifted to nerd culture when Cartman brought up how Wendy wants to kill Smurfs.

Cartman made a whole story/film called Dances with Smurfs where Cartman moves in with the Smurfs, falls in love with one of them and then only to have them all destroyed in front of him so that Wendy can collect Smurf-berries to power the school.

In a twist at the end Wendy flips it on Cartman by writing a book called “Going Rogue on the Smurfs” in which she claims Cartman was hired by the school to infiltrate their circle and bring back information to help her. Basically it broke down to the plot of James Cameron’s Avatar. Wendy claims to have sold the rights of the film to James Cameron and that the movie is already out and of course we get Cartman walking out of Avatar and flipping it the bird.

Which brings me to question why this formula of film works so well. The white man who becomes one with the natives who must then turn on his own greedy people. We’ve seen it with Dances with Wolves and The Last Samurai and many other films and all of them are usually very successful or critically accepted. Is it a white guilt type of thing? Whatever the case may be South Park called it out and openly claims that Avatar is basically Dancing with Smurfs.