South Park creators can't keep track of the show's complicated lore, so they use fan sites to help stick to canon: "Oh, yeah, we did that"

After 28 years' worth of new episodes and spin-off movies, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone admit they sometimes use fan sites to help them keep track of the long-running franchise's ever-expanding lore.

During Thursday's Comedy Central Animation panel at SDCC 2025, the duo was asked by host Josh Horowitz who "the keeper of knowledge" is between them or whether they ever refer to a "Show Bible" to remember what ground they've covered in the past.

"It's them," Parker said, gesturing to the audience in Hall H. "We can look on any kind of South Park fanbase or whatever and find, 'Oh yeah, we did that. That's who that kid's mom is? This random kid... what did his mom do for a living?' Let's go on the internet, you guys have said it."

"Do you guys ever pitch an idea and then realize, 'Wait, we did that already 17 years ago'"? Horowitz wondered.

"Every week," Parker joked. "We know, let's do it anyway."

"It happened today. Or if it's not a whole episode, it's a storyline," Stone added. "Did we do that? Oh, yeah, no, we already fell in love with a robot. We can't do that again."

Elsewhere in the panel, Parker, Stone, and Beavis and Butt-Head showrunner Mike Judge revealed that they'd once entertained doing a crossover between their two titles "a long, long time ago". So long ago, in fact, that it was around the second and third seasons of South Park in the early 2000s. "The idea was to have Beavis and Butt-Head babysit Cartman," Parker laughed.

South Park is streaming now on Paramount Plus. For more, check out our ranking of the best South Park episodes. Keep track of all the latest news from this year's San Diego Comic Con with our regularly updated live blog.