BB exclusive: sneak peek at South Park's sweet, yet-unreleased iPhone app

The new season of South Park debuts tonight on Comedy Central, with a timely episode about America's fears that China will pwn us. A BB pal who's seen a few clips says it's sick; perhaps as gamechanging-ly great as Imaginationland. And as reported previously on Boing Boing, the show's new website offers fans the ability to view episodes in entirety online. You can also buy them in iTunes.

What hasn't been announced yet is this: The South Park guys have cooked up a killer iPhone application. It's not yet available in the iTunes App Store, but I visited the South Park headquarters recently for a sneak peek with Matt Stone (iPhone snapshot above) and the South Park digital team.

Full-size screengrabs follow after the jump.

The app functioned beautifully, with the ability to stream clips, grab wallpapers for your device, read news, and browse the complete episode index. Also: choose character likenesses as "contact images" for your iPhone -- assign a face to the phone book entry of your choice. An incoming call from best friend displays Kyle or Cartman; your weed dealer medical marijuana dispensary is Towelie, and so on.

Some statsporn I gathered:

* The South Park website has had 134 million hits since launch in March. On an average day, the site receives 600,000 - 700,000 hits.
* When a new episode goes online, the website receives one to one and a half million hits in a day.
* There are nearly 300,000 registered users.
* 55 million full shows have been streamed since launch, the most-viewed episode being "Major Boobage" viewed 1.5 million times. The least viewed episode is "Mr. Hankey's Christmas Classics," at 94 thousand views, which I believe to be a crime against all that is good in the world because Mr. Hankey is awesome.

Other newly-launched goodies online that fans may enjoy:

* The Cult of Cartman
* Major Boobage Behind the Scenes
* Super Fun Time: Six Days to South Park
* And the South Park games page.

Speaking of games, there's unannounced news in the works on that front, too. More here on the blog, as soon as we can. Click onward for more iPhone app preview images. Release this thing already!

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SOUTH PARK IPHONE APP: sneak peek screenshots

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A footnote for gaming fans and ad biz followers: the first two episodes of the new season on Comedy Central feature 2-minute-long Ubisoft ads for the Shaun White Snowboarding, Prince of Persia and Farcry 2 titles. The idea is to show in-game footage for the new snowboarding game, rather than running "30 second spots that piss people off," according to a Ubisoft spokesperson (Adweek article).

(Special thanks to Matt Stone, and Todd Benson, Christopher Brion, and Mitch Halpin for the South Park Digital Studios tech tour; and to Jolon Bankey.)

• [Anonymous]

  When can I have this?

• [GeekMan]

  @Xeni: Woohoo!

• [HerbT]

  Never been that keen on South Park.

  This new Brian Eno and Peter Shilvers generative music app looks awesome though.

• [Tenn]

  This site is full of win. Loving the China episode.

• [Anonymous]

  It seems this thing is off the table unfortunately. A moderator on the southparkstudios.com forum said it was up for approval for the app store already right after this posting was made in the beginning of october. apple has probably rejected it for unknown reasons. also boingboing seems not to care to update us on the status unfortunately.

• [Takuan]

  well, I suppose then I must give thought to securing one of these “tele-phonation” thingamajigs, seeing as how they are all the rage amongst the hep crowd. Still don’t see what’s wrong with good old fashioned telepathy, I don’t know, what with no one growing proper tendrils anymore….

• [Anonymous]

  I can’t wait for this, but can’t find anything new about it. Does anyone know when its coming out?

• [GeekMan]

  … but does it work in Canada?

  • [Xeni Jardin]

    @geekman, it will after the Palin administration invades your country and claims it as a new colony of Jesus-stan.

• [Anonymous]

  But will it work in Australia? As we still can’t stream the shows via the website from here.

• [Anonymous]

  This does look amazing, though I really, REALLY hope it lets you stream full episodes (doubt it, but I hope anyway).

• [A New Challenger]

  #!: Yes, it’s just a bit flappier there.

• [Uncle_Max]

  The link for “Super Fun Time: Six Days to South Park” is the same as the behind the scenes of Major Boobage link.

  This is a pretty awesome app, gives me another reason to wish I had an iphone.

• [Anonymous]

  Hi, great report. As you seem to know some guys at South Park could you please do a follow up on what happened to the app as it still has not appeared in the app store On southparkstudios.com one of the moderators wrote on Oct 9th: “Just waiting for it to get approved by Apple”.It seems that to me something might have gone wrong with the approval. So maybe you could do some boingboing digging :) thanks !

• [Nilkimas]

  I loved their website so much, untill they stopped full episodes for France. They are working on French dubbed versions… please for the love of his Noodle Appendage why?

  Not sure if any of you have heard the french dubbed versions. Even if the voices would be tolerable, so much is lost in translation. That and most of the times country specific references are replaced. I like laughing at USians :P

  I assume they will do the same with the app since it will most likely use the same back-end for the data.

  Will be moving to Ireland soon, at least it will be english again then. Just hope they don’t make it an US only app.

• [laz305]

  This is some Harry Potter bs man, wtf? give me a break, we can download the episodes from iTunes but not the app? Please say ef’em man and release it anyway plz plz plz plz plz plz plz please!!!!

• [Cazart]

  I don’t know what you think you’re laughing aboot, but that’s not funny, guy!