South Park doesn’t steal

Peter and Bobby Farrelly are angry that their movie ‘the Ringer’ is being called a rip-off due to its similarity to a South Park episode. The ringer stars Johnny Knoxville as a normal guy who fakes a mental disability to compete in the Special Olympics. The South Park episode ‘Up the Down Steroid’, which aired in 2004, featured Eric Cartman faking a mental disability to compete in the Special Olympics. Peter Farrelly says:

“There is no way those guys didn’t know we were making this very movie as they took it upon themselves to do that episode. They know what they did and they know it was wrong. Period. These are guys I have always respected, but what they did was very creepy.”

South Park co-creator Matt Stone adamantly denies he or his partner was aware of the film or took the idea from it.

“I can totally see why (screenwriter Ricky Blitt) would be bummed about people accusing him of stealing an idea he came up with himself. But this is a matter of people having the same idea, and I assure you we weren’t aware of the movie when we did that episode. And I don’t agree with Peter’s point that you should back off if you have an idea and find someone else has it too. It should be a race to the market. I don’t think that is all their movie has going for it.”

It is true that ‘the Ringer’ has been around for years. I read a copy like 5 years ago. I also read a Siamese twins comedy about 5 years ago, about brothers who entered and dominated the lucrative ‘three-legged race’ pro circuit. That doesn’t mean the Farrelys stole the concept for ‘Stuck On You’. Hell, even I wrote a bit about entering the Special Olympics, and how I won a silver in boxing cause it’s all political these days. “My friends all agreed, I kicked that girls ass”, was the punch line. This all got kind of cathartic somehow, but there’s no chance in hell I’m gonna bad mouth Matt and Trey. In fact, I heard one time, they touched a kid in a wheel chair and cured him of his cancer. And that kid, my friends, was LeBron James.