TV GUIDE: Since you started working on South Park Two years ago you’ve made a couple of albums, finished the movie "Orgasmo," starred in "BASEketball" and made the "South Park" feature film. But now you’re back working on the TV show full time. 

Trey Parker: Well, we promised ourselves that we were going to come back and just do the show for a year. Because in July, I started getting grey hairs. And I know it’s from the movie. 

Matt Stone: The "Chef Aid" album [a faux benefit album spoofing the Live Aid concert] was a lot of work, but the movie was the king monster of them all. 

Trey Parker: We felt like, this better be good, or we’re in trouble. 

TV GUIDE: Why so much pressure? 

Matt Stone: We just felt that people were thinking. South Park isn’t new anymore, the honeymoon is over, it’s passé. All the summer movie previews were saying stuff like Austin Powers: It’s shagadelic!, Starwars : Here comes the force, South Park: It may be passé. So we knew the movie had to be good. But also we felt that the movie was a swan song. We just felt like, we’re gonna go out in a big blaze of flame. And somehow that backfired, and it was a critical success and an economic success. 

Trey Parker: And people treat us differently now. After BASEketball and Orgasmo they were starting to go "Oh, those guys are over" But now things are different. I got a letter from Stephen Sondheim saying that he thought South Park was the best musical of the last five years. 

Matt Stone: So all of a sudden we got a little bit of credibility back. But we exchanged it for years off our life. 

TV Guide: You went whole hog with the movie. You offended the ratings board, really annoyed the MPAA president Jack Valenti, fought with Paramount. 

Trey Parker: Oh, yeah. What I’m most proud of us for, we always said "If we’re gonna get kicked out of this town, we’re gonna get kicked out flipping everyone off" And what’s cool is that we haven’t gotten kicked out yet. 

TV Guide: Not that some executives probably haven’t tried. 

Trey Parker: It’s funny, because everyone was saying "You guys are ticking off Paramount. You really better be careful. Don’t you worry about your careers?" And we were like "No". All that matters is that the movie does well. If the movie does well, we’re fine. If it doesn’t, we’re out. And if we’re out, we wanna go out with our heads up high. 

TV Guide: Do you think the quality of the show suffered when you were off doing movies? 

Trey Parker: No, quite the contrary. I know how we work. I won’t be creative unless I’ve got a deadline. So it’s not like, wow, if I don’t do this, I could write a book. It would never happen. I’d sit there and play video games. I can be the biggest loser in the world, unless I have a very solid deadline: You’ve got to hand this in or your going to get sued for $6 million. Then I can be creative. 

Matt Stone: If we didn’t do the movie we could have done more shows. But I don’t think they would have been any better. It’s stupid the way we work. 

Trey Parker: We suck. We have no work ethic. No self-discipline. We’re just total losers at heart, that’s the problem. 

TV Guide: So why not delegate some of the responsibility. 

Trey Parker: The easiest thing to do would be to get a writing staff. Hire five people and have them do it. Matt and I could be executive producers and do the voices and watch the shows and make notes. 

Matt Stone: And we’d get paid the same. 

Trey Parker: We’d get paid the same and we’d add years to our lives. But once the show took off we promised we’d never do that. We’ve done really bizarre stuff this year in these new shows because as we said from the beginning we would rather have the show completely inaccessible than just sort of peter out. We did a show about Jew Scouts, and it was insane. It made no sense. But we loved it. 

TV Guide: So even after offending much of Hollywood, you have no plans to calm down? 

Trey Parker: We’re gonna get older just like anyone else, and our values are probably going to change, but when that happens, I want us to not be doing this anymore. I just hate watching people in music or whatever, going through that phase, becoming tame, sitting there on a stool playing "Tears in Heaven" I feel like, just shut up. You did your thing now go away."