South Park: How Capitalism Destroyed Cartmanland
When Eric Cartman finally realized his dream of owning a theme park in South Park, it all fell apart thanks to the realities of running a business.
Eric Cartman has a lot of dreams about South Park. Most of them are quite racist and luckily very few of them actually materialize. But there was one episode where his huge dream came true. As is often the case, things got worse pretty quickly for Catrtman. And this time it was thanks to the conceptual pendulum known as capitalism.
Bearing in mind that Cartman contains multitudes, he can be defined by two key traits. First of all, Cartman loves money. Frankly, the main reason he tolerates his own mother is that she is his main source of income and that he is a greedy young man. It actually fits well with Cartman’s second key trait, he’s an incredibly selfish boy who hates everyone on the planet.
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What fans found out about Cartman in Season 5, Episode 6 was that his selfishness and dislike of people had an interesting source. A lot of it came down to not wanting to line up for anything, especially theme park rides. It was something that drove Cartman crazy. So when Cartman’s grandmother passed away and left him with a million dollars, he was finally able to sort out all of his problems in one fell swoop.
Cartman used the money to buy North Park Funland, a failed amusement park he loved and changed it to Cartmanland. He did this so that he could have the whole park to himself. Since no one else was allowed in Funland, that meant he didn’t have to queue for any of the rides. And that’s exactly what he did. Well, until the realities of capitalism catch up with him and his amusement park.
Cartman didn’t understand that Funland didn’t work on magic. He needed electricity and water. The rides also tended to break down and someone had to fix them. There were also the concession stands. Cartman didn’t go to an amusement park without eating a lot of food.
However, none of this could happen without money, and there is no money without thousands of customers taking advantage of the park. This reality set in pretty quickly on Cartman, given his situation. Even though he wanted to keep Funland to himself, he needed the money to keep it up and running, and he spent his entire amusement park purchase in the first place. This meant that he had to destroy the Eden that he had created in order to save it.
Cartman had to start letting people into Funland so he could fund his operation. While this became incredibly profitable under his tenure, it meant he had to share the park. It was then that the realities of capitalism and the fundamentals of business completely shattered Cartman’s dream of a funland utopia without a people. His greed and his hatred of people both failed him.
The irony is that he ended up selling the park back to its original owner, Mr. Foon. Then the IRS showed up and took all of Cartman’s money to cover most of his back taxes on all of his profits on top of leaving an additional $ 13,000 bill. It was a hard lesson in capitalism for Cartman, and the real cost of taking two steps forward in business often translates into three steps back.
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