Ask chef the voice actor left because joined the whole scientology shit?
this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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I read about it on Wikipedia after the episode came out and it didn't cost me £100,000 to find out the top level secrets.
It was what might be called an "Open Secret".
People knew Scientology was weird and if you looked for it there was information available. It just wasn't wide spread common knowledge at the time.
A bunch of documents were famously leaked and all over the Internet as of the mid 90s.
They literally went so surface level with their criticisms of them. It was all basically public knowledge at that point. Have you seen the movie Bowfinger
A number of people in the entertainment industry either were involved in scientology or knew people who were.
Scientology focused on that group fr a number of reasons.
And by this time enough people left and came forward to get more than enough background.
the scientology papers were all over usenet, the 'church' had been suing anyone who hosted them, but they weren't hard to find, if you knew how to look. But south park distilled the idiocy down to a easily understandable mush, and for that they should be hailed.
I will always love southpark for trapped in the closet, all about mormons, and red hot catholic love, if for no other reason. (and there's lots of other reasons to love south park)
Honestly, I remember watching it and being like, yea, this tracks with what I have heard/know…
That being said, I still went diving for info and found it all pretty easily back then.
Being in Hollywood they knew the people who were involved with that.
I feel like all the crazy beliefs of scientology were pinging around pop culture by the early 90s at least.
Before the internet there were still magazines and tracts for and against scientology.
alt.religion.scientology was a thing on usenet newsgroups
No secrets were revealed. Everything was common knowledge.
Where are you getting this from? There was no lack of online information about Scientology in 2005.
2005 wasn’t the Stone Age, the internet ran quite well and operation clambake originated in 96.
Sounds like a case for the Hardly Boys
They got it from a spurned journalist who critiqued Scientology in the late 90s. They (Scientology) got all in his ass trying to publicly defame and embarrass him. He somehow had access to the info and provided it to Trey & Matt.
This was a segment on the Leah Remini Scientology expose show. There's an ex high ranking scientologist on the show who was trying to get the episode banned before it aired and coercing Comedy Central. Didn't work.
The problems of Scientology had been known for years despite the star power of some of its members. Newsweek did an expose in 1991? 1993? that detailed a lot of the organizations scandals.
Operation Clambake has been around since before Southpark. It's something of a clearinghouse of Scientology information. Their book in L. Ron Hubbard's life is very informative.
Came here to post operation clambake. Spent many an hour there.
Yes, operation clambake was easily findable on the internet back in the day.
Yeah I remember Operation Clambake, The Lisa McPherson Trust and XenuTV.
Sad to say Andreas (founder of Operation Clambake) has terminal cancer.
Back in the 80's I remember there was a legal battle going with the COS in California, and one day our local paper published the whole story of Xenu the Wonder Boy. Apparently a judge ordered it entered into the record so the paper ran it. They got it overturned, but too late lol what a bunch of maroons!!
The premise that the internet wasn't as vast or that information wasn't as available in 2005 is just completely wrong in its concept.
The stuff in the episode was pretty readily available information at that time.
Exactly. Forums and blogs especially were a big thing at that time.
I wonder how old OP is considering that take of theirs. I almost posted the same thing you did. The internet was in its golden era then, IMO.
Correct. Google was founded in 1998-ish and I remember using it by 2001.
There were also several famous ex-Scientologists by then who’d written books
Someone I know ran a FTP server full of MP3s in 99. Information on the internet was not an issue as early as 94.
Sure, search engines like Yahoo and Google were not born until a little after that, but BBS/URL/IIRC were easily accessible and HTML was already growing sophisticated by 95.
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2005 was when the scientology documents were posted on WikiLeaks, so this information was just available on the internet.
I remember telling my friend about Scientology in 2008/09 and it blew her mind how a cult like that existed with celebrities
I was quoting from websites so it was readily available online via google, so that was like 3/4 years after the South Park episode, it was already a known cult because of the celebrities involved in it.
Remember in the '00s people OBSESSED over celebrities, where TMZ hounded and stalked anyone famous doing anything. Different time, but having celebrities believing a weird cult, where they pay loads of money to, yeah that was in the gossip mags. John Travolta, the 'kids' in That 70 Show (Matherson) were spoken of in gossip magazines as Scientologists and on gossip websites. I knew of it as a kid in Ireland, and That 70 show aired from 1998-2006 so it was already publicly spoken of before 2005 if I knew of it when watching the show as a kid.
My family was a modest low-middle class and we had a computer with internet access in 97, 98. By 2005 Matt and Trey had probably been using the internet for research for a while.
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The show is produced in LA, where several Scientology centers are located, where all the Scientology celebrities are, and at times random people would be followers as well (they would let you know, just like a vegan would).
Issac was told to bring Matt and Trey in because of their reach.
They denied him, did their reaseach with the writers room, the rest is history
I watched TAM5 the other day. They explained putting "this is what Scientologists actually believe" as a caption. Even with that I thought they were making it up and were just being mean.
Sunken cost fallacy doesnt work on the whole population. Yea the system is set up to make sure those are the only people that get to that level, but some still slip thru the cracks
The internet was still vast in 2005. It just wasn’t in everyone’s pockets.
They answered this in a 2006 interview with Penn Jillette of Penn and Teller. Penn had complained (a few years earlier) to them that Showtime pulled the production of a Scientology based episode of Bullshit! Trey and Matt said “Give us your information because we’ve always wanted to do an episode of how Tom is in the closet”. The baton was passed (so to speak) and the result was Trapped In The Closet.
Bullshit was such a great show.
Books, magazines, newspapers, and TV shows really did exist prior to the internet. Hard to believe, but true.
What the fuck are you talking about? Honestly the internet was a lot more open in 2005 then it is today. Today everything is filtered and sanitized through algorithms and search engines like google. 2005 wasn’t the dark ages, I had a fucking MySpace account in 05. Also, the “secrets” of Scientology were more of open secrets. It’s a big ass cult created by a satanic pedophile.
The Space Opera backstory of Scientology became part of the public record during a court proceeding about some church shenanigans or other. This was several decades ago. It had been written and talked about previously before Scientology gained greater public scrutiny in the last couple decades. Church members didn’t know because they are trained to avoid information like that.
lol the Internet was huge in 2005 wtf are you on about
I’d say it was way more wide open than today. Internet almost feels like cable to me these days.
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It's hilarious that you don't think there was much internet until 2005.
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Because they’re rich white men that’s the prime demographic. They probably got pamphlets in the mail or just walked into a center
They were raised around mormons
By having connections and knowing people in LA
It was well known at the time. There were anti-Scientology websites like Operation Clambake and the Lisa McPherson Trust and XenuTV that had a lot of info. There were lots of legal documents IIRC. The Church of Scientology always publicly denied the Xenu story but IIRC they had had to admit it under oath in some trial that it was an authentic teaching.
They definitely did not learn it from Isaac Hayes. I don’t know what OT level he was on but if he was OT3 (where they learn the Xenu story) or higher he would definitely not tell anybody about it. That would be a major ethics violation. LRH even said people could get so shocked hearing about it they could get sick or even die of they learned about it before reaching OT3.
And that’s the thing about the Xenu story. All scientologists will deny it. Most probably because they genuinely don’t know about it, and those who do know about it will deny it because they have to.
Tell me you weren't alive in the early 00s without telling me
Also check out the Wikipedia page: The Xenu story first leaked in the 1970s , was part of a Court case in the 80s, was shown as a cartoon on BBC:s Panorama in 1987 and it was posted on the Internet in 1994. (Believe it or not, Internet existed way before 2005)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenu?wprov=sfti1#Leaking_of_the_story
He couldn’t come up with a better name then Xenu? A part of me hopes it turns out to be true just for the irony lol 😂
I saw it when it came out and used the internet to learn more about scientology. It was all online. I'm not sure where the idea came from that 2005 internet wouldn't have that info, but there was definitely access to that information.
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