“South Park” Issues Apology for Lifting “Inception” Parody Dialogue

The folks at CollegeHumor.com must have thought they were stuck in a dream - or perhaps a nightmare - after last week's "South Park."

The long-running Comedy Central series unleashed a parody of the mind-bending summer hit, "Inception," but apparently lifted several lines of dialogue for the episode from a video that appeared on the web comedy site in August, reports Entertainment Weekly. 

"It's just because we do the show in six days, and we're stupid and we just threw it together," said show co-creator Matt Stone by way of issuing an apology for the usage. "But in the end, there are some lines that we had to call and apologize for."

Stone explained that their goal was to mock the intricate - and at times, convoluted - language of the film.

"It was like, 'Let's parody the gobbledygook' - because honestly, that movie - all those explanations, and explanations of explanations," he said.

But when he and Parker could not locate a movie theater still showing the movie and were unable to secure a DVD of the film, they sought out other parodies and discovered the CollegeHumor video.

"We thought their joke was that a lot of those lines were actually in the movie," Stone said. "They were banging them against each other, and showing that the 'Inception' characters didn't even know 'Inception.' That was a mistake and it was an honest mistake."

Dan Gurewitch, one of the writers of the CollegeHumor parody, accepted the apology by way of his personal blog.

"All is well," he wrote, "and we're going to meet up with Matt and Trey when they're in New York."

Selected Reading: Entertainment Weekly, New York Times, New York Daily News

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