Background and career
Randolph Severn "Trey" Parker III (born October 19, 1969) is an American animator, filmmaker, songwriter and actor. Born in Conifer, Colorado, Parker studied film and Japanese at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he met his creative partner Matt Stone. As students, they made the independent film Cannibal! The Musical (1993). They found fame with the animated satire South Park (since 1997) and the feature South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999). Their satirical action film Team America: World Police (2004) stars a cast of marionettes. With Robert Lopez, they cowrote the musical The Book of Mormon, which premiered on Broadway to positive reviews. Parker has received five Primetime Emmy Awards and a Peabody for South Park, four Tony Awards and a Grammy Award for The Book of Mormon and an Academy Award nomination for the song "Blame Canada" from South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, co-written with Marc Shaiman. In 2026, he was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame.
Randolph Severn Parker III was born in Conifer, Colorado, the son of insurance saleswoman Sharon and geologist Randolph "Randy" Parker II. His nickname "Trey" refers to him being the third generation of his family to be named Randolph Parker. He was a shy child who took honors classes. He idolized Monty Python, and his later ventures into animation were influenced by Terry Gilliam. He was inspired to write funny songs after seeing This Is Spinal Tap (1984). He played piano, and early influences included country music and Elton John. Parker has described himself as "the typical big-dream kid." He made short films with a group which included his future collaborator Eric Stough. He developed a love for musical theatre and joined the Evergreen Players, a community theater company. He sang in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and Flower Drum Song and designed sets for Little Shop of Horrors. At 17, he wrote and recorded a comedy album, Immature: A Collection of Love Ballads For The '80's Man, with friend David Goodman. He was president of the Evergreen High School choir counsel and played Danny Zuko in the Evergreen production of Grease. After graduating high school in 1988, Parker spent a semester at Berklee College of Music before transferring to the University of Colorado Boulder, where he majored in film and Japanese. He took a film class where he met Matt Stone—a math major from the nearby town of Littleton—and the two immediately bonded over anti-authoritarian ethos and Monty Python. Parker made Giant Beavers of Southern Sri Lanka (1989), a Godzilla parody with beavers; fellow student Jason McHugh recalled that the idea nearly got him laughed out of class. Parker and Stone wrote and acted in many short films together, among them First Date, Man on Mars and Job Application. Parker recalled that he and Stone shot a film nearly every week, but he has lost most of them. Parker used cutout animation on American History (1992), a short made for his animation class. It caused an unexpected sensation, earning Parker a Student Academy Award. At CU, the duo studied with experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, whom they cast in their first feature film.
In 1992, Parker, Stone, McHugh and Ian Hardin founded a production company, Avenging Conscience, named after a film which all four hated. Parker employed cutout animation on Avenging Conscience's first film, The Spirit of Christmas (1992, referred to as Jesus vs. Frosty), a short pitting the religious figure against Frosty the Snowman. Observing the showdown are four foulmouthed friends who would feature in his later work. The quartet created a three-minute trailer for the fictional film Alferd Packer: The Musical. Parker had long been fascinated by Alferd Packer, a nineteenth-century Colorado prospector accused of cannibalism. Parker's relationship with his fiancée fell apart and, "horribly depressed", he funneled his frustrations into the project, naming Packer's "beloved but disloyal" horse after her. The trailer became a sensation among students, leading Virgil Grillo, the chairman and founder of the university's film department, to convince the quartet to expand it to a feature film. The group raised $125,000 from family and friends. Parker, under the alias Juan Schwartz, co-produced, directed and starred, creating an Oklahoma!-style musical with ten original show tunes. Parker needed a three-syllable word and coined shpadoinkle as a placeholder. It became is a running gag in the film. It was shot in Loveland Pass as winter was ending, and the crew endured freezing weather. Filming locations included the Lake City, Colorado courthouse where Packer was tried. Alferd Packer: The Musical premiered in Boulder, Colorado on October 31, 1993. The group submitted it to the Sundance Film Festival, which did not respond. Parker told McHugh he had a "vision" they needed to be at the festival, so they rented a conference room in a nearby hotel and put on their own screenings. MTV did a short segment on The Big Picture regarding the film, and they made industry connections through the festival.The film was sold to Troma Entertainment in 1996, and was retitled Cannibal! The Musical. Upon the duo's later success, it became their biggest-selling title. It has become a cult classic and adapted as a stage play by community theater groups and even high schools nationwide. Lloyd Kaufman submitted the film to Comedy Central, which replied: "Thank you for submitting and resubmitting Cannibal! The Musical, but it is simply not up to our standards for broadcasting." Today, the letter is displayed in Parker's office at Comedy Central.
Following Cannibal!, the group, sans Hardin, moved to Los Angeles. Upon arrival, they met a lawyer for the William Morris Agency who connected them with producer Scott Rudin. As a result, they acquired a lawyer, an agent and a script deal. Despite believing themselves to be on the verge of success, the duo struggled for several years. Cannibal! got the attention of producer Pam Brady. They unsuccessfully pitched Time Warped', which would have involved fictionalized stories of historical figures, to Fox Kids. The first pilot, "Rom and Jul", involved romance between Australopithecus and Homo erectus. The trio created two separate pilots but, despite Brady's approval, the network disbanded Fox Kids. David Zucker, a fan of Cannibal!, asked the duo for a 15-minute film for a party celebrating Seagram's acquisition of Universal Pictures. Zucker told Parker, "The script is really funny. You'll have a blast." Parker found there was no script. Zucker explained, "Oh, no. I meant the script I know you're going to write is going to be really funny." The duo improvised much of it an hour before it was shot. Your Studio and You is a spoof of 1950s educational films starring Sylvester Stallone, Demi Moore, Steven Spielberg and others. Parker recalled "You could probably make a feature film out of the experience of making that movie because it was just two dudes from college suddenly directing Steven Spielberg." Between shooting the pilots for Time Warped, Parker penned Orgazmo, about a Mormon missionary moonlighting as a porn star. When it later entered production, half of the budget came from Kuki, a Japanese porn company which wanted to feature its performers in mainstream Western media. Independent distributor October Films purchased the rights for one million dollars after its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film received an NC-17 rating from the Motion Picture Association of America, which resulted in poor box office performance. Parker and Stone attempted to negotiate with the organization on what to delete from the final print, but the MPAA would not give specific notes. The duo later theorized that the organization cared less because it was an independent distributor which would bring it significantly less money. Brian Graden (then at Fox) asked the duo to produce a video Christmas card that he could send to friends. The Spirit of Christmas (1995, referred to as Jesus vs. Santa), is a variation on the theme of their earlier short. Graden sent copies to Hollywood executives; meanwhile, someone digitized it and put it on the internet, where it became one of the first viral videos. George Clooney is said to have made 300 copies for friends. Parker and Stone began talks of developing the short into a television series. Comedy Central's Doug Herzog said of the short "It literally was the funniest thing I'd ever seen. We said, 'Develop a show.'"
The pilot episode of South Park was made on a budget of $300,000 and took between three and three and a half months to complete; animation took place at Celluloid Studios in Denver during the summer of 1996. Like Parker and Stone's Christmas shorts, the original pilot was animated entirely with traditional cutout animation. The town of South Park was named for the real Colorado basin, where, according to the creators, a lot of folklore and news reports originated about "UFO sightings, and cattle mutilations, and Bigfoot sightings." The setting provided a home for the show's subversive, surreal humor. Starring are four foul-mothed friends, Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, Eric Cartman and Kenny McCormick. At the time, Comedy Central had a distribution of just 21 million subscribers. The company marketed the show aggressively before its launch, billing it as "why they created the V-chip". The resulting buzz led to the network earning an estimated $30 million in T-shirts sales alone before the first episode was even aired. South Park premiered in August 1997 and immediately became one of the most popular shows on cable television, consistently averaging between 3.5 and 5.5 million viewers. The show transformed the fledgling network into "a cable industry power almost overnight". Due to the success of the first six episodes, Comedy Central requested an additional seven; South Park completed its first season in February 1998. An affiliate of the MTV Network until then, Comedy Central decided, in part due to the success of South Park, to have its own independent sales department. By the end of 1998, Comedy Central had sold more than $150 million worth of merchandise for the show, including T-shirts and dolls. Over the next few years, Comedy Central's viewership spiked, largely due to South Park, adding 3 million new subscribers in the first half of 1998 alone, and allowed the network to sign international deals with networks in several countries. Parker and Stone's philosophy of taking every deal led to their appearances in films, albums and outside script deals. Among them was BASEketball, (1998), a critical and commercial flop, and rights to produce a prequel to Dumb and Dumber, which was never completed. Comedy Central released Chef Aid: The South Park Album and Mr. Hankey's Christmas Classics in the late 1990s. "Chocolate Salty Balls" (sung by Isaac Hayes's Chef) was a number one hit in the UK.
Parker and Stone signed a deal with Comedy Central in April 1998 that contracted them to produce South Park episodes until 1999, gave them a slice of the spinoff merchandising and an unspecified seven-figure cash bonus to bring it to the big screen. The team was writing the second and third seasons, and described the former as "disastrous". Figuring the phenomenon would soon be over, they decided to write a personal, fully committed musical. Parker and Stone fought with the MPAA to keep the film R-rated; for months the ratings board insisted on the more prohibitive NC-17. It was only given an R rating two weeks prior to its release, following contentious conversations between Parker/Stone, Rudin and Paramount Pictures. They were overwhelmed during the production process, especially between April and the film's opening in late June. Parker admitted that press coverage proclaiming the end of South Park was near bothered him. South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut opened in June 1999 to critical acclaim and grossed $83 million at the box office. "Blame Canada", cowritten with Marc Shaiman, was nominated for Academy Award for Best Original Song. Of the ceremony he said, "I guess we should go, but it's sort of everything that South Park is against." The duo decided to attend in drag and on LSD. He recalls, "There's the moment where we just lost to Phil Collins, and you're sitting there coming down off the acid in a dress, surrounded by people in this theater, and you're like, 'Dude, we have to get the fuck out of here.'" Stephen Sondheim penned Parker a letter calling Bigger, Longer & Uncut the best movie musical in 15 years. Parker called the praise of an artist he revered more meaningful than an Academy Award. Starting in the fifth season (specifically "Scott Tenorman Must Die"), Cartman went from spoiled brat to scheming sociopath. Also in that season, the sweet Leopold "Butters" Stotch became a de facto fifth main character. Parker and Stone continue to write, direct and voice most characters on South Park. The show has adopted a unique production process, in which an entire episode is written, animated and broadcast in one week. Parker and Stone state that subjecting themselves to a one-week deadline creates more spontaneity, which they feel results in a funnier show. The series has received numerous accolades, including five Primetime Emmy Awards, a Peabody Award and inclusions in various publications' lists of greatest TV shows. In 2012, South Park cut back from producing 14 episodes per year (seven in the spring and seven in the fall) to a single run of 10 episodes in the fall, to allow the duo to explore other projects the rest of the year. It parodies pop culture, as in "The Return of the Fellowship of the Ring to the Two Towers". The Church of Scientology objected to the explication of its teachings in "Trapped in the Closet" (an illustrative segment has the subtitle "This is what Scientologists actually believe.") "Cartoon Wars Part I" and "Cartoon Wars Part II" address the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy, with Kyle arguing that the First Amendment right of freedom of speech protects the right to offend: "Either it's all okay, or none of it is." Broadcast syndication rights to South Park were sold in 2003, and all episodes are available for free full-length on-demand legal streaming on the South Park Studios website. In 2007, the duo, with the help of their lawyer, Kevin Morris, cut a 50–50 joint venture with Comedy Central on all revenue not related to television; this includes digital rights to South Park, as well as films, soundtracks, T-shirts and other merchandise, in a deal worth $75 million. Parker and Stone had little to do with the development of earlyvideo games based on the series, but took full creative control of South Park: The Stick of Truth (2014), which received positive reviews. They shared (with Eric Fenstermaker) the 2014 Writing In A Comedy, and Parker won the Performance in a Comedy, Supporting award by National Academy of Video Game Trade Reviewers (NAVGTR). In August 2021, Parker and Stone signed a $900 million deal with ViacomCBS to renew the series for six additional seasons and 14 projects on Paramount+. The show's unique production was chronicled in Arthur Bradford's 6 Days to Air.
