South Park Official PC Desktop Theme & Screensaver (1998)

 Hey there and welcome to Suddenly Disappeared.

You already know that I mostly cover children's games, but that doesn't mean that I only cover children's games.

South Park is a show that I really didn't think I would watch at this young age. I'm 16 now and this show never left my head.

I remember when I was very young that my mom had a South Park tote bag and I was curious. Those cutesy looking characters and the simple art style. Surely it was something I could watch!

Until I actually discovered the show through YouTube videos some years later. After that, I pretty much prohibited myself from watching it until I was old enough. And that "old enough" just happened to be at 15 years old.

I'm now watching the show through the official website (You know it's a good show when they have all the episodes available for you to watch for free) and I've only watched Season 1 and Season 2 so far.

But enough talking about the show itself. It, like almost every other show back in the 90's and 2000's, had its own video game. Three in fact. But we're not looking at them today.

No. Today, we're gonna talk about a desktop program based on the show that allowed you to change your desktop theme and screensaver to something from the show.

It's called South Park Official PC Desktop Theme & Screensaver. It was released around 1998, when Season 2 was around. It's an officially licensed Comedy Central product and was developed by a company named Telstar Electronic Studios (I wonder if they still exist).

It's somewhat similar to Microsoft Plus! and I think it's pretty interesting for a couple of reasons. More on that later.

Enough talking. Let's get going!

Now, even though this was released during Season 2's broadcast, all, if not most of the stuff from this pack comes from Season 1. As someone who watched the entirety of that season and remembers almost everything from it, I'll be able to show you some pretty cool references, as well as inaccuracies that this program has. (And oh boy, it has A LOT of inaccuracies!)

First, let's look at the setup program.

Look! They even have the disclaimer! That's dedication!

Yes, this is an officially licensed product.

This is the setup program. You have the option to copy audio files for the screensavers and the Bonus Pack files. It's around 37 megs. The CD image itself is 40 megs and that's extremely small for a CD-ROM like this.

This is the Start Menu group the program creates after installation. You might notice the misspelling in "Calendar"

The calendar program is just a calendar, but it has an image of a random character from Season 1 with some info about the character. When you click on the image, it plays an audio cue from whatever character appears when you open the calendar. (It starts up with Windows by default, but you can disable this with msconfig (Windows 98 until Windows 7) or the Task Manager's startup section (Windows 8 and 10).

There's also a taskbar program which drops an icon on the taskbar and... that's it.

When you right-click the icon, it brings up some shortcuts to the program's features. There's not a lot to do in here. You can also disable its default startup in msconfig.

Now here's the real meat of this whole program: The actual desktop themes and screensavers. By clicking on "South Park Configuration", you'll be able to change the desktop theme (or "Scheme" as this program calls it), select a screensaver, decide whether the Calendar and Taskbar programs should start up with Windows and also decide if you want to shuffle the desktop theme and screensavers every time you boot Windows.

Let's start with the screensavers, shall we?

Let's start off with Mr. Hankey. This screensaver is actually customizable. There's a "Howdy Ho!" message that you can replace with whatever you wanna type. Then when the screensaver starts, Mr. Hankey spells out the message on the screen.

But here's a problem. The fact that he jumps around endlessly and speaks almost every time he jumps makes the actual time spent to spell out the message a tad bit longer than expected.

The default message can take around 2 minutes to be spelled out completely. Imagine if you were to type a longer message!

The other screensavers are pretty interesting too. So let's look at them!

NOTE: These are only images of the screensavers. If you want to see them in full action, check out this playlist from La Mazmorra Abandon on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFoORIQe4zIL-1_KQU4C7i3XIm5AYSWOy

First is "Kenny Death Montage". Exactly what it's described. And all of the deaths are from Season 1.

The first one is from "Cartman Gets An Anal Probe", the one that started it all!

This one is from "Volcano". One of my personal favorite episodes.

This one is from "Pinkeye", the show's first Halloween episode.

This one's from Weight Gain 4000.

This one's from "Cartman's Mom is a Dirty Slut", the Season 1 finale which is also a two-parter.

This one's from " An Elephant Makes Love to A Pig" and it's one of the funniest deaths in the show.

Another screensaver is called "South Park Montage". A set of 3 clips from Season 1's best moments.

From the very first episode.

The ending of "Weight Gain 4000"

BEEFCAKE!

From "Mr. Hankey The Christmas Poo"

There are other screensavers as well, but most of these, like the Big Gay Al one, the Chef one, the Cartman one, and others that refer to some other characters, are just said character walking around your desktop and spitting out random lines from Season 1.

For example, here's the Cow and Aliens screensaver. It's just a cow wandering around and aliens popping up and saying moo every now and then.

Kenny & The Grim Reaper is a pretty funny one, as it's referencing the episode "Death".

Kenny's Diarrhea (Which is misspelled as "Diarrhoea" in the screensaver title) references the same episode and it's something completely stupid to see, but funny as well.

Kyle and Ike references the "Kick the baby" gag from the early seasons. It's a pretty funny one too.

And away he goes!

The Stan and Wendy one is one of my favorite screensavers of this whole pack. And it references another old running gag.

Before we finish this article, let's take a look at the files on the ISO image because there are some interesting things in some of these files.

For some reason, there are 16-color versions of the cursors and icons, even though most people had 256-color graphics cards or even 32-bit color mode enabled at the time.

Of course, we can't forget the Bonus Pack! It's an additional selection of cursors, icons, sound events and wallpapers that you have to manually choose if you want to have them on your desktop.

This is the font file that's basically the font used in the show. What's strange is that it's almost never used in the program itself.

Here are the sound files for the sound events. There are inaccuracies on them, and you can check out the spreadsheet at the end of the article to see them all!

And that's it for today! If you want to know all of the references and inaccuracies that this program has, I created a spreadsheet containing all of them!

Link to the spreadsheet

Check out the program on Archive.org.

I'll see you later! Keep checking this blog out for more software articles!