Pip (South Park)

The story is set in a 19th-century-like England, in a small town called Draftingshire-Upon-Topsmart. An orphaned Pip is visiting his parents' grave. While there, an escaped convict appears and threatens Pip. Pip aids the convict by giving him food. He then goes home, where his sister's husband, Joe, reads an advertisement about a Miss Havisham seeking a boy to play with her daughter. Pip goes and meets the daughter, Estella, who constantly insults him. Miss Havisham hires Pip, and throughout their playtimes, he eventually falls in love with Estella. Pip fears Estella could never marry a commoner like him. However, an offer comes for Pip from an anonymous benefactor to move to London and learn how to become a gentleman. Pip assumes the benefactor is Miss Havisham and accepts. After his time in London, where had a roommate named Mr. Pocket, he shows up at Miss Havisham's house, where she tells Pip that he can find Estella at a party at the palace. At the ball, Pip and Estella dance together. Estella says that she has no heart and cannot love. Just before Pip asks Estella to be his girlfriend, her boyfriend, a modern American 17-year-old named Steve, enters the ball. Pip, saddened, runs to tell Miss Havisham, only to find that she approves of Steve. Miss Havisham is glad that Estella has broken Pip's heart, and explains that she has Estella break men's hearts to use their tears to power her "Genesis Device". She desires youth and wants to use the device to switch bodies with Estella. She then uses robot monkeys to attack Pip. Pip escapes and falls unconscious, awakening back home with Joe and Pocket. The anonymous person who sent Pip to London is revealed to be the escaped convict Pip met earlier as a way of repaying Pip's kindness. Because of Pip's kindness, the convict led a life of goodness and became a millionaire. The four of them, Pip, Joe, Pocket, and the convict, decide to stop Miss Havisham. The group returns to the mansion, discovering many brokenhearted men and boys and Miss Havisham powering up her device. Pip manages to convince Estella to leave the machine, destroying it and setting Miss Havisham on fire. Fleeing the burning mansion, Pip's group and the hostage males escape as Estella finally declares her love for Pip. ==Production and broadcast==

played the narrator of the episode, simply calling himself "a British person" Creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker had the idea to recreate Charles Dickens's Great Expectations in the style of South Park from the very beginning of the series. The character of Pip has been a minor character on South Park from the show's onset, having appeared in the pilot episode, "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe". Pip had a somewhat bigger role in the original, unaired version of the pilot, but most of his scenes have been cut from the reworked and shorter broadcast version. One of these cut scenes, a short sequence in the school cafeteria that introduces Pip, was reinserted into the show's fifth episode "An Elephant Makes Love to a Pig" (as the scene came from the pilot, it was created with traditional paper cutout stop motion animation). In the scene, Stan asks Pip about his peculiar name, but Cartman interrupts Pip during his answer. Pip's reply - "my father's family-name being Pirrip and my Christian name Phillip, my infant tongue-" - is identical to the opening line of the novel Great Expectations, which is narrated by its protagonist, Pip. Production for the episode started after the first run of the series's fourth season, which consisted of four episodes. At the beginning of the second run, of six episodes (which started broadcasting in June 2000), the episode was assigned a production code number of 405 (meaning the 5th episode of the 4th season), and it was planned to air in June or July that year. However, given the complicated nature of the episode's look, where many elements had to be designed from scratch, the studio did not have enough time to finish the episode that summer, As it was already in production before the run, "Pip" was a "banked" episode of South Park, one of the first in the series's history. This way they can take off a few days during the two-month-long, demanding run, and then go back and finish work on the banked show. The episode, directed by South Park animation director Eric Stough, has a unique look compared to most other episodes of the series. The creators wanted a different design for Pip's England featured in the episode. For example, the directions for the exterior scenes were to make them look like they were "right out of a Dickens novel". To achieve the style, assets had to be built from scratch, including many new characters with "new mouths with rotten-out teeth" that were used for most of them. At one point, the plan was to have Pip tell his own story to the South Park Elementary class. An early storyboard scene shows "Pip walk[ing] up to the class holding a HUGE manuscript of paper. It could be a novel". Beginning his story in the classroom, he starts by introducing the origins of his name, only to be interrupted by Cartman - much like the scene in "An Elephant Makes Love to a Pig". Having an episode's worth of story told in front of the class was later used in the season eighth episode "Woodland Critter Christmas", which has Cartman telling a Christmas-themed story (in a plot twist). The ending of the story's narration in that episode resembles the ending in "Pip". In "Pip", the narrator ends the story with the line "And they all lived happily ever after, except for Pocket, who died of Hepatitis B". In "Woodland Critter Christmas", Cartman finishes the story by saying "And they all lived happily ever after. Except for Kyle, who died of AIDS two weeks later". Another idea was to have Chef narrate the episode, in the style of Masterpiece Theater. In the end, the creators decided to do the Masterpiece parody in live-action, with the narrator played by Malcolm McDowell. The reason behind the introduction was to make it clear to the viewers that it was going to be an "extremely different experience" from the other episodes, and that they are not going to see the regular characters of the show. Parker and Stone said that shooting with McDowell was a positive experience, and that he told old stories about the 1971 film A Clockwork Orange - which McDowell starred in - and its director Stanley Kubrick. as well as Eliza Schneider (credited both by her real name and her pseudonym "Blue Girl") providing the voice for Estella. Joe was voiced by South Park staff writer Kyle McCulloch, because, according to Stone, McCulloch "can do really good British voices, because he grew up in Canada watching a bunch of British TV". ==Cultural references and themes==

"Pip" serves as an explanation of the origins of its central character, as well as a retelling of the 1861 Charles Dickens novel Great Expectations. The episode is not a straight adaptation of the novel, but a comedic retelling thereof. As such, the episode's main aim is not to represent Great Expectations, but to use it for the purpose of comedy. Some of Pip's speech, such as "breaky-wakey out of prison" and "that's a lot of money-woney" is a reference to Malcolm McDowell's character Alex's speech in the 1971 film A Clockwork Orange. Many of the central characters of the novel appear in the episode. These include Pip, as well as Joe (Pip's brother-in-law), Mrs Joe (Pip's sister), Miss Havisham, Estella Havisham, Herbert Pocket, and the escaped convict. For most of the episode, the plot stays relatively faithful to the novel's basic story. At one point however, the episode begins major digressions from the novel, mainly Miss Havisham's technology, such as her Genesis Device and robot monkeys. (Incidentally, Masterpiece Theater featured an adaptation of Great Expectations in 1999.) The setup has been viewed as "a joke about America's (or more specifically, the typical PBS viewer's) haughty search for cultural enrichment in the English classics", based on the context of "he cultural authority of the British, so long courted by the American culture industries." ==Reception and home media==

"Pip" is a relatively unpopular episode of the series. According to creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, it is "probably one of the least-popular episodes of South Park" they have ever produced, and "most people pretty much hated it". In 2004, Stone said that he considers the episode "really cool" and "really good". ==References==