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'Make Love, Not Warcraft' Episode Wins An Emmy
WoW Insider has the word that the South Park Episode "Make Love, Not Warcraft" has won the Creative Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program. The episode, which heavily features machinima shot inside a Blizzard-run World of Warcraft server, has proven extremely popular with fans of both the game and the show. So much so that the DVD set including that episode includes a 14-day trial for WoW, and extensive commentary on the episode from the show's creators. From the WoW Insider post: "This isn't the first Emmy that South Park has won, but perhaps this kind of attention will get WoW more positive (or at least humorous) attention in other television shows. Though, when it comes to TV ratings, 9 million people worldwide does not a target audience make. For example, American Idol was considered slipping when it only had 30 million US viewers for an episode. Would you like to see WoW references appear more often on TV? Or are you too busy playing to care?"
My husband and I just had the opportunity to watch the episode again on DVD. We listened to the commentary by the South Park creators and found it interesting how the episode came to be.
Best part about what I learned is that Blizzard was gun-ho to help out with the episode.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
An Emmy certainly isn't as prestigious as an Oscar. There's so much stuff on TV, they have to give the things out like candy sometimes. Keep in mind, though, that it's still an award where each category only has one winner. Plenty of shows get nominated for Emmys that don't win.
Just like any multicategory award, you should see what category it won or was nominated in to decide how much prestige to afford to the award. Getting an Oscar for Best Picture is a much bigger deal than getting an Oscar for Best Audio Direction or whatever, as important as I'm sure the guy in charge of audio insists his job is.
I suspect the South Park episode was probably in a fairly competitive category, though. South Park isn't going to get an Emmy for putting out crap.
In fact, checking to see what category it actually won, it got the "Creative Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program (for Programming Less Than One Hour)". There's a lot of excellent animated programming that would fit in that category, so it's a pretty big deal, I'd say. If it'd been for something like technical merit for the use of machinima, then it would've been pretty lame.
I'm guessing The Simpsons Movie (like the show itself) was much more family-friendly than the South Park film. I doubt many kids walked out of The Simpsons Movie asking, "Mommy, what's a clitoris?" ;-) Mass market appeal has its financial rewards.
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