Revisiting Korn’s ‘South Park’ appearance for Halloween 1999
In 1999, Korn were arguably one of the biggest bands in the world. Nu-metal was storming the globe, and Korn had even been booked as one of the headliners for the notorious and recently documented Woodstock ’99 Festival.
At the same point in time, in television, a particular adult animated show had also garnered its fair share of publicity (and controversy) towards the end of the 21st Century. It was, of course, Trey Parker and Matt Stones’ South Park.
Just a matter of months before the third millennium would rear its ugly head, we were treated to a brilliant collaboration between nu-metal’s finest export and the best adult cartoon ever made when Korn appeared in the Halloween special of South Park season 3. The episode was titled ‘Korn’s Groovy Pirate Ghost Mystery’.
The episode in question is a brilliant parody of Scooby Doo. A local South Park radio station is hosting a Korn gig in town for Halloween, which leads the town’s priest to condemn both Halloween and Korn as the works of Satan.
Korn are then followed on their way to the concert in a van which closely resembles the iconic Mystery Machine from Scooby-Doo. The band are acting in a truly goofy, almost twee manner, a stark contrast from the hard-as-hell sonic textures of their music. Korn crashes the van and then run into a group of pirate ghosts.
A hilarious and ridiculous mystery caper ensues between Stan, Cartman, Kyle and Kenny, the members of Korn and the pirate ghosts, with many chases and revealing of identities, in typical Scooby-Doo fashion. Eventually, it’s revealed that the town priest had been behind the ghosts all along.
Jonathan Davis once opened up on the feature. He said: “The time that Korn did South Park, we had an amazing time doing it. We were on the road before Issues dropped. They had us go into a studio, and we saw the script for the first time and started recording it. It was really fun to do; it was this weird Scooby-Doo thing. The funny thing for me was that every time we’d do our lines, Trey [Parker] would always say, ‘stop acting like a gay surfer; this is Scooby-Doo, not gay surfers.”
However, there was a big mistake made during that recording process. Davis added: “So we did the stuff, did the whole thing, all excited, and I think it was four or five days after we recorded the audio, someone hit us back up and said, ‘we forgot to hit record’. So we did the whole thing for nothing and had to go back in after we did a show.”
Revisit the clip below.
