Raisins (South Park episode)
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Raisins is the name of the 14th episode of the seventh season of South Park, which aired on December 10, 2003.
The episode title refers to a restaurant that is a parody of Hooters, where the waitresses are of elementary school age (and thus, have breasts the size of raisins).
Synopsis
The boys are playing football. Bebe comes up to tell Stan that his girlfriend Wendy is breaking up with him. Stan starts to withdraw from life, and all he thinks about is the breakup.
In an effort to get Stan to not think about Wendy, the boys take him to Raisins. All of the employees are female, and they all pretend to like their clients, who are all boys. By pretending to like the boys, the girls manage to get the boys to give them a lot of money.
Being taken to Raisins doesn't help Stan with his problems. Meanwhile, Butters falls in love with one of the waitresses (Lexus), and obsesses over her throughout the episode, even though it is obvious she doesn't care about him.
Stan then goes through a series of unsuccessful attempts to get Wendy to be his girlfriend again. First he tries to get Kyle to ask Wendy why they broke up, but Kyle gets annoyed and walks off. Then he tells Jimmy to say that Wendy is a "continuing source of inspiration" to him. Jimmy tries to tell Wendy this, but because of his stuttering, he ends up repeating the syllable "cont" multiple times. Wendy gets mad, thinking that Stan is calling her a cunt.
Stan then realizes he needs to ask one of her friends to talk to her for him. He asks Bebe to, but she tells him to do something to show Wendy how he feels, something romantic. He asks her what she should do, and she tells him to "stand outside her window, and play Peter Gabriel". However, when Stan does this, both Wendy and Token appear at the window. They then shut the drapes so they won't have to see Stan.
Stan's bad mood is intensified when he figures out that Wendy left him so she could be Token's girlfriend. Kyle, who is mad at Stan, tells Stan that he should hang out with the Goth kids if he is so depressed. Stan then becomes friends with the Goth kids, who are obsessed with non-conformity, while paradoxically forcing Stan to conform to their ways.
Butters runs out of money because he is spending it all at Raisins. He tells his parents that he needs more money for his girlfriend. Butters' parents decide to go along with Butters to see his girlfriend. When Butters is out of sight, Butters' dad makes the mom pay off a bet; she was betting Butters would grow up to be gay.
When Butters and his family enter Raisins, Butters' parents realize that Butters' girlfriend doesn't really like him. They try to explain this to Butters, but Butters thinks that they don't approve of his girlfriend and decides to run away with her. As soon as he leaves, Lexus says that she isn't his girlfriend.
Because he doesn't have a girlfriend, Butters starts to withdraw from life just like Stan did. While crying in a gutter, Butters sees the Goth kids, who came to see him depressed. Butters says that even though he's sad, he's happy that something could make him feel so strongly. Butters knows that he has to accept the bad things in life as well as the good.
Butters makes Stan feel better about breaking up with girlfriends. Stan decides to stop being a Goth and go back to his normal life. The episode ends with Stan back to normal, playing a football game with the boys in his class. Wendy and Token walk by, and Stan expresses his hatred for the two of them. Stan then goes back to playing football.
Parodies
- Benny's, the place where the Goths drink coffee, is similar to Denny's, a food chain where Goths often sit together drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.
- Butters's parents' bet about whether Butters would grow up to be a homosexual parallels a bet made by the mayor and the chief of police in an episode of The Ambiguously Gay Duo.
- The scene where Stan holds up a boombox playing a Peter Gabriel song mirrors the famous scene from the film Say Anything; the major difference is that in the movie, John Cusack's character, Lloyd Dobler, plays the song "In Your Eyes", which is romantic, and Stan plays "Shock the Monkey", which is definitely not.
- Another Say Anything homage can be seen when Stan seeks advice from the Goths; the scene's set up like Lloyd's encounter with the guys outside the Gas 'n' Sip.
- Raisins is the same as the Hooters bars, except it caters to children, not adults.