Matt Stone and Trey Parker admitted it was 'an honest mistake' to copy some lines from a CollegeHumor web video which also spoofs the Christopher Nolan movie.
- Oct 23, 2010
AceShowbiz - "South Park" creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker admitted to similarity between their recent "Inception" spoof and an episode done by web comedy video CollegeHumor. "It's just because we do the show in six days, and we're stupid and we just threw it together," Stone said in the confession. "But in the end, there are some lines that we had to call and apologize for."
On October 20, "South Park" aired an episode called "Insheeption" where many dialogues are noticably too similar to the web video called "Inception Characters Don't Understand Inception" which was written by Dan Gurewitch and David Young, and posted on CollegeHumor on August 2. While CollegeHumor said, "Shared unconstructed dream space" to explain what Limbo is, the Comedy Central cartoon said "Empty scary dream space."
Another example is when an 'expert' in "South Park" said, "We need to move them all to the next dream level before the projections kill them." In the web video, the line is "We need to move to the next dream level before these projections kill us." An exact match is found on the line "Sometimes my thoughts of my dead wife manifest themselves as trains."
Stone and Parker explained that under the limited amount of time, they could not find theaters playing "Inception" or any other sources where the movie is watchable. In the meantime, they wanted to satirize the verbal complexity of the movie because it's all about "explanations of explanations". When they found the CollegeHumor video, they thought "their joke was that a lot of those lines were actually in the movie." Stone admitted, "That was a mistake, and it was an honest mistake."
Meanwhile, Gurewitch said on his blog that he has no hard feelings toward Parker and Stone copying his work but he's "conflicted". He said, "To give them the benefit of the doubt, I'd say maybe it's an homage - I'd be honored - but while our sketch was popular, it wasn't nearly the national phenomenon it'd have to be for them to parody it. Maybe it was some staff writer, and Matt and Trey aren't aware of the source material? Or something?"
The apology from the writing duo had been accepted and Gurewitch said he and Young would meet Stone and Parker the next time they're in New York.
