Breaking News — We'll miss ya, Kenny

Oh My God! Kenny Dead for Good
Tue Apr 9, 6:16 PM ET

There were no flowers, no eulogies and few tears: Kenny McCormick, the diminutive, soft-spoken child of South Park whose personal tragedies he so bravely concealed underneath a tight orange hooded sweatshirt, has died.

This time, it’s for real. After getting killed countless times since the Comedy Central series debuted in 1997–only to be alive, healthy and mumbling incoherently on the next episode–creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone quietly dispensed with him at the end of last season.

Over 80 episodes, Kenny has been impaled, mutilated, microwaved, dismembered and even crushed by the Mir space station (news – web sites)–all of which prompted the catchphrase response, “Oh my God! They killed Kenny! You bastards!”

But those bastards finally silenced Kenny for good on December 5, giving him a terminal muscular disease.

“It was the one episode where [all the characters] cared [he was dying] for once,” Stone tells the Knoxville News-Sentinel newspaper. “After that, we said, ‘Why doesn’t he just stay dead?’ And it was like, ‘Okay, let’s just do that.’ It was that easy of a decision.

“I think a lot of people probably haven’t noticed,” he added. “I couldn’t care less. I am so sick of that character.”

It was an appropriately unsympathetic goodbye to a character that’s been maimed so badly over the years. Stone said it simply became too difficult to come up with new and exotic ways for Kenny to die.

“We got sick of figuring out ways to kill him,” Stone said. “It was funny the first 38 or 40 times we did it. Then it turned into, ‘Okay, how can we kill him now?'”

This season, Kenny has been written out of the opening credits and replaced by Butters, a blond-headed schoolmate often ridiculed by Cartman, Stan and Kyle.

South Park fans have expressed mixed feelings about the changeup. “This is the first time I’ve actually thought Matt and Trey have made a stupid mistake,” writes one Kenny fan, ike642000, on the SouthParkStudios.com Website. “You don’t see Matt Groening killing off [baby] Maggie in The Simpsons (news – Y! TV) for not talking, do you?”

Others, however, don’t seem to mind Kenny’s permanent demise.

“I love Kenny just as much as any other diehard fan…but I think he’ll be able to accomplish so much more in death than he did as a principal character,” writes another, who’s pleased that Kenny’s death “makes room for more of Butters. Butters rules!”

Not that Stone and Parker care. The creators have developed a reputation for doing what they please–even if their fans don’t exactly agree. They famously ticked off South Park lovers in 1998, when they promised to reveal the identity of Cartman’s father during an April 1 episode, only to instead air an irritating cartoon-within-a-‘toon, The Terrance and Phillip Show.

Meantime, Butters’ fate as a leading character isn’t sealed, either: Wednesday’s episode will feature Cartman, Stan and Kyle firing him as their “replacement friend,” leading the trio to hold auditions for someone new.

Until then, let us mourn dear Kenny. His tombstone now adorns the Comedy Central Website with the inscription, “Sleep well, little child, the Lord holds thee now.”