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South Park is known for frequently killing off Kenny McCormick. His character suffers the brutal fate of dying all the time, and then reappearing in the next episode as though nothing happened.

But believe it or not, Matt Stone and Trey Parker wanted to officially kill off a different main character in season 5, never to return. Who were Stone and Parker planning to kill off?

Stan And Kyle From The Episode 'Clubhouses'
Stan And Kyle From The Episode ‘Clubhouses’ | Getty Images

Matt Stone and Trey Parker were sick of killing Kenny in every episode

In season 5, Stone and Parker decided to kill off Kenny for good because they were sick of having the character die in nearly every episode. They thought the running gag was growing stale and that his character was just a prop. Plus, they were really starting to like Butters as a character around this time, and they wanted him to replace Kenny as a fourth member of the group.

While making a behind the scenes commentary video on the episode, Parker says,

“Let’s do an episode where Kenny dies, and it will be super serious. And we’ll just play it as a drama with no laughs.”

“The kids for the first time really give a sh*t that Kenny’s dying,” says Stone. “It’s that idea that we play it seriously, you know, what if your best friend is dying?”

“What was interesting was, this was the episode where we killed Kenny off,” says Parker. “Because we were basically sick of killing Kenny. So we were like, Let’s kill him. Let’s have him die, and he’ll be gone forever.”

Eventually, Kenny returned to the series but was gone from South Park for about a year.

Matt Stone and Trey Parker were initially planning to Kill Kyle instead of Kenny

Before making the more logical decision to kill off Kenny, Parker and Stone were debating whether or not to kill the voice of reason on South Park, Kyle Broflovski.

“Actually, I remember, the idea was that we were going to kill Kyle,” Parker notes in the commentary video. “We were going to make it a big thing. We’ll kill Kyle, and Butters will step in. Because this was around the time when we really started to like Butters as a character.”

Why did the ‘South Park’ writers plan to kill off Kyle?

1998 "Death", "Kenny", "Cartman", "Kyle", and "Stan" are the characters in the hit series "South Park."
1998 “Death”, “Kenny”, “Cartman”, “Kyle”, and “Stan” are the characters in the hit series “South Park” | Getty Images
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Kyle Broflovski now stands out as one of the most essential characters on South Park. He serves as a foil to Cartman’s evil ways, which is pretty significant to nearly every episode. Yet in the first handful of seasons, Kyle wasn’t as fleshed out. He was too similar to Stan, and that’s why they wanted to let one of the two boys go.

“You know, it always seemed to us like Kyle and Stan were really similar,” says Parker. “And that’s just because Matt and I are pretty similar. So it was like, ‘Let’s kill off one of those two.’ Let’s kill off Kyle, and since Matt does Kyle’s voice, we’ll bring in Butters, and he’ll be the other kid. But then the more we thought about it, we were like, ‘No,’ and that’s where the whole idea stemmed for, ‘Let’s kill Kenny for good.’ Because he’s really just a prop, and we have to kill him in every episode. So we killed him in this episode, and he stayed dead for a good year.”

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