Die Hippie, Die

Template:Infobox South Park episode "Die Hippie, Die" is episode 902 of Comedy Central's South Park. It originally aired on March 16, 2005.

Plot summary

Template:Spoiler Cartman runs a "pest control" service to try and rid the town of hippies, a foe he has feared and hated for most of the series, mainly because all they do is smoke pot and smell bad. Having studied hippies in his quest to eradicate them, Cartman deduces that the hippies are about to start a music festival in South Park. His attempts to warn the town council are futile, and he is arrested soon afterwards for imprisoning 63 captured hippies in his basement.

The town of South Park is soon invaded by the largest population of hippies in the history of man, and the music festival threatens to destroy the town. They manage to convert Stan, Kyle and Kenny to their cause with talks of corporate evils, and the trio get caught up in the massive hippie crowd, who spend their time listening to jam band music and doing drugs.

Cartman pleads with the mayor to stop the festival, but it turns out that the mayor was the one who permitted the music festival in the first place. After seeing the chaos that the hippies are creating, however, the mayor is ridden with guilt and shoots herself in the head (She survives and appears later when the festival gets terminated). The rest of the town then pleads with Cartman to rid the town of the hippies. Cartman eventually agrees to help, but only after Randy promises to offer a Tonka radio controlled bulldozer, as well as Kyle's mother assuring that Kyle would never have one and instead have to watch Cartman having fun with the bulldozer.

Stan, Kyle, and Kenny realize that the hippies are doing nothing to oppose the corporations that they have demonized and that their idea of a perfect society is the same as the currently existing one. They try to leave but the crowd is 7 miles in radius and Stan's efforts to talk sense into the hippies only make matters worse. In the end, Cartman, with the help of a scientist (Randy Marsh), an engineer (Linda Stotch), and "a black man to sacrifice himself in case anything goes wrong" (Chef), builds a giant drill -- the "Hippie Digger" -- to bore through the hippie crowd (effectively killing the hippies getting in its way). His plan is to upload a Slayer CD, because "hippies can't stand death metal". The plan works and the hippie crowd starts to disassemble, after which Cartman spots Kyle, and Kyle is forced to watch Cartman having fun with his Tonka bulldozer in the school parking lot.

Hippie JamFest '05

The festival devolves into what is essentially an excuse to take recreational drugs and party. Similar criticisms of the prevalence of drugs and partying rather than the intended environment of music and activism have been levied at other jam band festivals, such as Bonnaroo, Reggae on the River, and Burning Man. Negative caricatures of bands such as Phish and the Polyphonic Spree are the main stage headliners of this festival.

Trivia

• The term "little Eichmanns," which the neo-hippies often use in the episode, is a reference to the controversy over a Ward Churchill article titled Some People Push Back. In the piece, Churchill referred to the people who worked at the World Trade Center in New York City as "little Eichmanns." Even though the piece was over three years old, it was just being discovered and discussed by the mainstream media shortly before this episode aired. Churchill is a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, which is near South Park and is where the show's co-creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone first met.
• The title is a parody of Die Mommie, Die
• The song that Cartman plays is Slayer's "Raining Blood", off their Reign in Blood album.
• There is also a huge reference the movie The Core, highlighted when Chef, the "black" character, must sacrifice himself for the rest of the team.
• The viewer is able to see all the boy's toes (excluding Cartman) after they became hippies. They rarely take their shoes off and even if they do, in most cases their feet are simple ovals.

Goofs

• When Cartman is assembling his team to drill into the center of the JamFest, Randy states he's the only scientist in town. In fact, there are several others, including Dr. Mephisto (even though he's a genetic engineer) and Clyde's father (who is also a geologist as mentioned in Terrance and Phillip: Behind the Blow).
• Officer Barbrady returns in this episode to arrest Cartman. Some fans stated that Barbrady had a different speaking voice, and believed that Trey Parker had forgotten how to create Barbrady's voice.

Cultural References

• At the beginning of the episode, when Cartman is checking the old lady's house, it is a reference to Ghost Busters, where they check peoples houses for ghosts, and classify what kind of ghost is present. Also, the way Cartman is dressed in that scene and his hair is similar to Dan Aykroyd's character in the movie. The idea of capturing hippies is similar to the catching ghosts of that movie, as is the notion of the would be hero(s) falling out with the town / city officials and then being called in to sort out the situation.
• The drill crew's red suits and the scene where they board the drill is a spoof of astronauts boarding the Space Shuttle in the movie Armageddon.
• The red car driven by the "college know-it-all" hippies closely resembles the facelifted 6th generation Honda Accord.
  • The car has a Darwin fish on it.
• There is a statue from the Burning Man Festival in the background of one of the scenes.
• One of the song's playing during the festival is a portion of "St. Augustine" by jam-band, moe.
• The bands shown at the festival are parodies of Phish and the Polyphonic Spree, among others.
• The scenes involving the plan constructed by Cartman to use a drill to reach the center of the music festival is a parody on the film style of the Bruckheimer/Bay producer/director team, most recently The Core
  • having to drill to save the town (world)
  • the mayor (government) wanting to nuke as soon as the drilling was put to a halt
• The scene where Mayor McDaniels shoots herself in the head is very similar to a scene in the film The Sixth Sense, in which Donnie Wahlberg's character does the same.
  • Chef (Lev) climbing outside the Drill (Virgil) to restore power as well as the music and the astronaut suits.
• The vehicle that Cartman designed resembles the Gotengo from Atragon and Godzilla: Final Wars and also The Mole from the Thunderbirds puppet series and live action film.
• Much of the music in the episode is a parody of that featured in movies like Armageddon, The Rock and Crimson Tide, all movies with bombastic "Horns and Male Choir" soundtracks by composers like Hans Zimmer.
• The music that Stan is trying to play on the guitar is "Signs" from the band Five Man Electrical Band.
• Kyle wears a Che Guevara t-shirt.
• Cartman's method to get rid of the hippies has similarities to Mars Attacks! and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.
• The Slayer song used to drive the hippies away is "Raining Blood" from their album Reign in Blood and is thrash metal, not death metal as the episode suggests.
• When Cartman plays the Slayer song, we can see he has other music on his computer like "Muhhhrtallicaz - Ride The Thunder" and "Motorface - Death From Behind" which are obviously spoofs of Metallica's Ride The Lightning And Motörhead, other famous metal bands. Also, the gross misspelling of Metallica's name refers back to the days when Napster was still up and running yet Metallica songs specifically were banned; to avoid getting caught for sharing Metallica songs, users would often intentionally misspell "Metallica" in the file name (although never that drastically, of course).
• The scene where Cartman warns the City Council of the incoming danger of the hippies is a spoof of The Day After Tomorrow, which South Park parodied more heavily in the episode "Two Days Before the Day After Tomorrow".
• The failed suicide of the mayor is reminiscent of a similar situation on the recent Battlestar Galactica series involving the character of Boomer.