‘Cannibal! The Musical’: The first movie Trey Parker and Matt Stone ever made
It’s been 20 years since Trey Stone and Matt Parker made a feature film, but they’ve been kept plenty busy by the ongoing success of South Park, which hasn’t left them with much time to turn their attention to anything else.
The crude animated classic recently finished up its 26th season, and with the co-creators having signed an eye-watering $900million deal with Paramount to continue on until at least 2027 and release 14 hourlong streaming specials along the way, they’re going to have their hands full with Stan, Kyle, Kenny, and Cartman for the foreseeable future.
Of course, the comedic duo’s careers were always going to be defined by their status as the originators of such an enduring cultural behemoth, but it can’t be overlooked that they also found massive success on Broadway with The Book of Mormon, while all of their feature-length endeavours have become cult classics in their own way.
Before superhero sex comedy Orgazmo, subversive sports caper BASEketball, and Jodie Foster’s favourite comedy of all time, though, there was Cannibal! The Musical. What originated as a three-minute trailer created for a film class Parker and Stone were taking soon snowballed into not only their first full-length movie but also a stage production recreated by countless other troupes.
Cobbling together a decent-sized budget of $125,000 for their ambitious undertaking, the pair sought to recreate the magic of Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals with their own special flair. In this case, it involved regaling the story of Alferd Packer, the first person to have been convicted of cannibalism by the state of Colorado.
In real life, Packer led a group of miners across the state after hearing of new prospecting opportunities in neighbouring Ohio, only for the team to get lost in the mountains and resort to eating each other in order to stay alive. For most filmmakers, a powerful and harrowing drama along the lines of Society of the Snow may have been the first port of call, but Parker and Stone’s minds naturally wandered to a song-and-dance extravaganza.
Using their friends, families, and classmates as cast and crew, Cannibal! The Musical wasn’t without incidents of its own. Parker broke his hip after being launched from a horse, strong waters nearly swept them away during a perilous river crossing, and tensions regularly caused fights to break out during shooting. It was lewd, rude, and tonally unquantifiable, which obviously made it a must-have acquisition for shlock titans Troma, who acquired the distribution rights and renamed it from Alferd Packer: The Musical to the moniker it was eventually released under.
It’s a one-of-a-kind musical, as should be expected from the minds behind South Park, but it ended up taking on a life of its own after being repurposed by dozens of amateur and professional theatre groups in the years to come when they decided they wanted to mount productions of their own.
