Simpsons Already Did It

Template:Infobox South Park episode "Simpsons Already Did It" is episode 607 of the Comedy Central series South Park. It originally aired on June 26, 2002.

In this episode, Cartman, Kyle, Stan and Tweek buy a collection of "Sea People", which Cartman imagines to be a race of fishy people who will "take me away from this Goddamn planetful of hippies." Much to his dismay, they turn out to be brine shrimp; nevertheless, the boys decide to put them in their teacher, Ms. Choksondik's, coffee. She then dies, as had been announced in the previous episode two months before.

Upon hearing on TV that "semen" had been discovered in the teacher's stomach, the boys go to the morgue to steal the semen evidence, fearful that "they'll find the sea-women next!" Eventually, Chef explains to them that there is a difference between "semen" and "Sea People", and that the brine shrimp couldn't have killed their teacher (it is never adequately explained how she dies; see Chuck Cunningham syndrome, although her name may provide a clue). By this time, the semen had been added to the Sea People remaining in Cartman's aquarium, and in the morning, he awoke to find they had combined to make a smaller version of his original image, that of sentient creatures who begin to make their own civilization ("Sea-Ciety").

Meanwhile, Butters, in his role as Professor Chaos, has been trying to figure out a way to bring disarray to the town; however, his assistant, General Disarray, keeps pointing out that each of Butters' plans (aside from being ridiculous) has also already been done by the animated series The Simpsons. Butters finally goes insane, seeing the entire town as if it were the Simpsons' town of Springfield.

When Butters sees the Sea People, and discovers that they believe Cartman to be a god, he screams that it is a copy of the Treehouse of Horror VII short "The Genesis Tub", where Lisa Simpson brings to life a civilization in her tooth which think that she is a god. It is then pointed out that The Simpsons have done everything, so worrying about that is irrelevant, and that they had in turn stolen their ideas from elsewhere. Butters recovers from his paranoia. At the end of the episode, the Sea People all kill themselves, when suicide bombing between different sects (one worshipping Cartman, the other Tweek) escalates into the use of nuclear weapons that destroys the entire tank. The inexplicable ending's moral is that people should try to live in peace.

Trivia

• Notable buildings from The Simpsons can be seen during Butter's breakdown. From left to right they are the nuclear power plant, the comic book store, the Kwik-E-Mart (called "Wink-E-Mart" here), and the First Church of Springfield.
• While Butters is ranting about his plan to block out the sun, one of his pet hamsters (or "Minions of Chaos" as he calls them in the previous episode) can be seen popping out of the pile of logs on the left.
• Many of the writers and producers of The Simpsons are fans of South Park and got a kick out of this episode, feeling it was more of an homage than criticism.
• At the very beginning of the episode, when Stan and Kyle are trying to convince Tweek to finish off their snowman, Tweek remarks "But what if when I'm putting on the nose, the snowman comes to life and tries to kill me?!" To this, Stan replies "Tweek, when has that ever happened except for that one time?" This is a nod to the very early rendition of South Park, "Jesus vs. Frosty" (a.k.a. "The Spirit of Christmas"), wherein the boys build a snowman that comes to life and attempts to slaughter them, however, it was the hat that caused the snowman to come to life in the short, not its nose.
• According to the commentary for this episode, creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker made this episode to express their real life frustration of often pitching new South Park episode ideas, only to discover that the idea had already been done on The Simpsons. One such example that was highlighted in this episode was Season 4's "The Wacky Molestation Adventure", where an early idea was to have Cartman block out the sun over South Park. Stone and Parker dropped the idea after discovering that Mr. Burns had the same plan in The Simpsons episode "Who Shot Mr. Burns?"
• In addition, Parker and Stone mentioned that originally Cartman's "Sea-ceity" was seperate from Butters' Simpsons plot. In the ultimate irony, it wasn't until the staff had mistaken Cartman's "Sea-ceity" as a parody of a Simpsons' "Treehouse of Horror" episode that they had decided to intersect the two plots with each other.
• Ironically, in a 2005 Simpsons episode ("Milhouse of Sand and Fog"), Marge wants all the kids of Springfield to catch the chickenpox from Maggie greatly resembles the plot of the South Park episode "Chickenpox", which aired in 1998. Also in another 2005 Simpsons episode ("The Father, The Son, and The Holy Guest Star"), the band Quiet Riot converted to Christian Rock by simply changing their lyrics from "baby" to "Jesus"; similar to Cartman's method in "Christian Rock Hard."
• Another irony of the episode is the ending where the two microscopic civilizations destroy each other over difference of beliefs in a nuclear war is done in the Futurama episode "Godfellas", where the robot Bender drifts aimlessly in space and accidentally grows microscopic people on his chest and rear end and watch their eventual self destruction as a god-like figure to them. This episode aired not more than two months prior to this South Park episode. Perhaps it's easy to see Parker and Stone's frustration as Futurama is another creation of Simpsons creator Matt Groening.
• About halfway through the episode, when the boys tell Chef the entire story, Chef laughs like Dr. Hibbert.

Quotes

• General Disarray - "Simpsons did it! Simpsons did it!"

• Kyle - "I guess we learned that war is the natural order of man"
  Cartman - "Why can't societies live in peace?"
  (credits roll)

• Cartman - (explaining where he obtained the "semen" for the aquarium) "Yeah, I bought all I could from this {sperm} bank...I got the rest from this guy named Ralph in an alley...stupid asshole didn't even charge me, he just told me to close my eyes and suck it out of a hose!"