Good Times with Weapons

• 1. Introduction

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  "Good Times with Weapons" premiered on the 17th of March 2004, opening South Park's eighth season as the 112th episode of the series. In 2015, co-creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone named it their second favorite episode they had ever made. Four boys buy martial arts weapons at a local fair, then a rejected friend turns into a supervillain seeking revenge. What follows involves a shuriken, a veterinarian, and an animation style unlike anything else in the show. It also ends with a town more upset about nudity than about a child getting hurt.

• 2. A Market Full Of Trouble

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  At the Park County Fair, a vendor sells East Asian weapons to anyone willing to buy one. Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny each buy a weapon, then show them off to Craig, Clyde, and Token before wandering town pretending to be ninjas. Butters watches them play and asks to join, but the four boys turn him away. He goes home instead and becomes his supervillain alter ego, Professor Chaos, determined to get revenge on the ninjas who rejected him. Kyle and Stan are the first two he tracks down when he sets his plan in motion.

• 3. A Shuriken In The Dark

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  Professor Chaos neutralizes Kyle and Stan within moments of confronting them. Kenny rushes to defend his friends and hurls one of his shuriken across the fight. It strikes Butters in the eye and lodges there instead of stopping Professor Chaos. Taking Butters to the local hospital would reveal the weapons purchases to their parents, so the boys rule it out. An attempt to pull the shuriken free fails, so they dress Butters up like a dog and set off for a veterinarian instead. On the road, they run into another group of newly armed ninjas.

• 4. Two Ninja Gangs Collide

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  Craig, Jimmy, Clyde, and Token turn out to have bought weapons from the very same vendor. The two ninja groups fight, and in the chaos, Butters slips away unnoticed. Weak and delirious, he makes his way to the hospital, but staff mistake him for a dog and send him to the animal hospital instead. There, a veterinarian decides the only option left is to put him to sleep, so Butters bolts before that can happen. Craig later spots him wandering toward the fairground auction where all of their parents are gathered.

• 5. Chaos On The Auction Stage

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  Back at the fair, Craig tells the boys that Butters was last seen heading toward the auction stage. Cartman decides to use his presumed ninja power of invisibility to slip across the stage undetected, so he takes off his clothes. Instead of vanishing, Cartman ends up streaking slowly across the stage in front of everyone. Butters staggers onto the same stage moments later and collapses in front of the crowd. That reaction will center on Cartman, not on Butters at all.

• 6. Nudity Over Injury

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  At a community center meeting, townsfolk protest Cartman's public nudity instead of what happened to Butters. Cartman explains it away as a "wardrobe malfunction," a direct nod to the recent Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show controversy. Stan, Kyle, and Kenny notice that their parents are far more offended by sex than by violence. So the three boys go back outside and start playing with their weapons all over again. Those same fight scenes were rendered in an animation style unlike anything else on the show.

• 7. An Anime Detour

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  During the ninja and Professor Chaos fight scenes, the episode's animation routinely swaps South Park's usual cutout-and-solid-color look for a highly stylized anime theme. The ninja versions of the characters appear to be modeled on video game sprites from Capcom's Street Fighter Alpha 3. "Let's Fighting Love" plays as the episode's theme song, mixing Japanese and English lyrics. Its style parodies anime theme songs, including that of Dragon Ball Z. Parker performs the song himself. He also wrote the episode.

• 8. New Voices And New Formats

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  April Stewart voices the bulk of the female characters for the first time in this episode, taking over after Eliza Schneider's departure from the cast. In the United States, the episode carries a TV-MA L rating. On the 29th of August 2006, "Good Times with Weapons" reached DVD in the United States. It came packaged with the other thirteen episodes of season eight as a three-disc set. The set included brief audio commentaries from Parker and Stone for every episode. Later that year, it also joined South Park - The Hits: Volume 1, a DVD compilation gathering ten episodes Parker and Stone considered their favorites. On the 6th of March 2007, the day before season eleven began, the episode was re-rendered in high definition at 16:9 widescreen. That HD version came free with Xbox 360 console or HD DVD Drive purchases at Best Buy. The offer ran from the 20th of March to the 3rd of April. The episode was also free on the Xbox 360 marketplace for two weeks, from the 6th to the 20th of March. Anyone buying an Xbox 360 or HD DVD Drive that March received Butters's shuriken ordeal at no extra cost.