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Creative Bloq
Creative Bloq
Technology
Joe Foley

South Park's tiny Trump penis was a win for handcrafted animation

Naked Donald Trump in South Park.

In the annals of great of satirical art, from James Gillray's The Plumb-pudding in Danger to David Low's Rendezvous, a place should surely be reserved for Donald Trump's tiny penis. It was the most talked-about joke in South Park last year, and now the series' creators have revealed how they made the... er... character design.

For those who haven't seen the infamous sketch (don't worry, I'll link the video below), the first episode of South Park Season 27 featured a surreal live-action scene in which a naked Donald Trump wanders through a desert. While much of US president's likeness was AI-generated, it turns out that one part of his body was a real and very simple prop.

In recent seasons, South Park has been adding live action and AI deepfake-generated visuals to the show's traditional digital take on paper cutout-stopmotion animation. But in their appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! this week, creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone revealed that the naked Donald Trump's tiny penis in the Sermon on the 'Mount episode, was simply a finger wearing a small flesh-coloured ring designed to look like foreskin. The pair jokingly describe the low-tech setup as their “deepfake AI rig".

So it's not exactly Studio Laika's Wildwood, but I guess this counts as a (tiny) win for handcrafted animation in this AI age, even if it was mixed with deepfake footage.

The original scene can be seen in the YouTube video below from around a minute in.

Trey and Matt bringing up this scene again now suggests that the upcoming South Park Season 29 won't hold back in its satire of Trump and other political figures. The show's tight production timeline allows it to respond unusually quickly to current events, even to topics that are in the news in the same week.

The new season is due to premiere on 16 September on Comedy Central.

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