The South Park 25th anniversary concert was a fun throwback for longtime fans of the anarchic animated series, but the special event’s set list was missing the show’s most successful song ever: “Chocolate Salty Balls.” Over the two and a half decades that the show has been on the air, South Park has changed quite a bit. Once a gleefully offensive, scatological cartoon that was only invested in shocking viewers, South Park is now a more thoughtful satire of current events — albeit one that still loves to disgust its audience.
While its tonal shift has allowed the show to stage many acclaimed episodes, there are a few early-season South Park staples that the series could — and should — bring back. For example, South Park hasn’t done a gory Halloween episode in some time, and the musical numbers that were once common to South Park’s weekly outings have grown rarer over the years. As such, fans were offered an exciting bit of nostalgia with the announcement of South Park: The 25th Anniversary Concert.
The special event saw the show’s creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, take to the stage in their hometown of Denver, Colorado, and play a selection of South Park’s most memorable musical numbers with support from Primus and Ween. However, the set list for South Park: The 25th Anniversary Concert revealed that the track “Chocolate Salty Balls” wasn’t played at the show, despite the song being a big hit with fans and even a legitimate number one hit in the United Kingdom. Since South Park season 25 recently used an orchestral cover of “Chocolate Salty Balls” in the show’s marketing materials, the concert’s failure to include the song feels like an obvious oversight. However, there is a major reason why the creators of South Park opted to steer clear of the popular single.
Chef Was The Biggest Missing Part Of South Park’s Concert
Matt Stone and Trey Parker have voiced most of the main characters in South Park, with one major exception. Legendary soul singer/actor/composer/songwriter Isaac Hayes played Chef, the soulful cafeteria worker who never worried whether his dating advice was appropriate for his audience of eight-year-olds. While a lot of South Park’s early-season formula was hated by fans of the show’s later, more politically charged humor, the supporting character of Chef was an exception. A longtime fan favorite, Chef was an essential part of South Park’s appeal until Hayes abruptly left the show in 2006.
The circumstances of Hayes’s departure and the subsequent choice to kill off Chef are contentious at best, with Stone and Parker claiming Hayes hypocritically disliked South Park‘s mockery of Scientology while Hayes’s son later stated the decision was made for his father after the singer suffered a stroke. In any case, Chef, the character who sang “Chocolate Salty Balls,” was killed off brutally in a season 10 episode. This left South Park without Chef, and Hayes’s untimely death in 2008 meant the show’s creators could never properly revive the character, save for a few minor background jokes. As such, the South Park 25th anniversary concert was unable to justifiably include “Chocolate Salty Balls,” despite it being the show’s most famous song.
