By Robert Scucci
| Published
There’s one ill-fated series from South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone that’s so vile and disturbing that the project was scrapped before it ever got off the ground. In the early 2000s internet boom, Princess, a series of animated shorts from the perspective of an innocent Lhasa Apso dog, was picked up and financed by Shockwave, the sister-site to Macromedia Flash. Originally setting out to produce 39 three-to-five minute shorts, Parker and Stone, who were given complete creative and artistic control over Princess, produced two episodes that can only be found on the Internet Archive and YouTube, as they never heard back from Shockwave after submitting their proof of concept.
You’ll find out why in a second.
The Princess Premise
Across about nine minutes of runtime between two short episodes (“Princess Hears a Strange Noise,” and “Princess Meets Officer Friendly”), Princess features a married couple going at it in the bedroom, the resulting accidental (and horrifically messy) decapitation of the wife, a visit from a police officer investing the all-too-common Viagra-induced incident, a necrophiliac posing as a coroner so he could “have some time alone” with the body, and the couple’s son walking in on the “coroner” in the middle of said alone time, which is all seen from the perspective of the titular dog who lives with the family.
What’s so misleading, and what causes so much shock (aside from the incidents I just spelled out), is how Princess opens with the sweetest, most misleading intro music, gleefully singing “Who’s that fluffy bundle of love? It’s Princess!” After the intro, however, you’ll realize what you’re getting into when the first scene in “Princess Hears a Strange Noise” uncomfortably kicks off.
Doomed From The Start
Shortly after Parker and Stone submitted their first two episodes of Princess to the heads of Shockwave, the executives were so disgusted that they immediately shelved the project, hoping that it would never see the light of day. Originally commissioned in 1999 and produced in 2001, nobody knew that Princess existed, which is probably for the better. It wasn’t until 2004, when the now defunct Trio.TV put out a documentary called Shocked, that Princess was unleashed online to the public.
Though only two episodes of Princess were completed, a third episode, entitled “Princess Finds a Red Balloon” was in the works but abandoned after the project was scrapped by Shockwave indefinitely. At the time, Parker and Stone encouraged fans of the series who were skilled with Macromedia Flash to pick up the story where they left off, but no such episodes ever materialized, at least to my knowledge.
Considering that Macromedia stopped developing Flash in 2005, and Adobe stopped supporting the Flash player in 2020, it’s pretty safe to say that we’ll never see new episodes of Princess.
Probably For The Better
While I’ve always admired Trey Parker and Matt Stone for pushing the envelope with their cutting satire and social commentary, I’ve got to admit that it’s probably a good thing that Princess never had a chance to become a full online series. Given how South Park was just starting to become a cultural phenomenon, I could only imagine how badly a 39-episode run of one of the most vulgar cartoons I’ve ever seen would have damaged their careers this early on if they got hit with lawsuits that would take attention away from their flagship series.
Personally, I think this series was a bit tasteless for Parker and Stone, but I admire how audaciously they pursued the notion of “having complete creative control” and did literally whatever the hell they wanted just to see how far off the deep end they could actually go. By the same token, Princess isn’t smart, nor does it have any underlying message that lets you see its vulgarity in a more profound light; it’s simply vulgar for the sake of being vulgar.
But if you want to see Princess for yourself in all of its perverse and explicit glory, you can find the two existing episodes floating around on YouTube, as well as the Internet Archive if you’re brave enough.
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