South Park began as an animated short down by Matt Stone and Trey Parker when they met at film school in the University of Colorado. Their low-budget animated short “Jesus vs. Frosty” captivated FOX executive Brian Graden who requested the duo make him a video Christmas card. Stone and Parker’s video became a huge online success and inspired the long running Comedy Central series. Since its beginning, South Park has become a staple of pop culture, a terrifying evolution of cartoons for adults like the Simpsons. Catch phrases to hit songs to pop culture references with real life relevance, South Park is our newest resources for telling us how to feel about everything else. South Park begins its 12th season this March.

One of the most vulgar and profane movies ever is also a touching tale of tragedy and woe.  Matt Stone and Trey Parker turned their wise, troupe of 3rd graders into musical stars in a liberal adaptation of Les Misérables filled with the touching love ballad “I Can Change” sung by Saddam Hussein and the epic “Blame Canada” that logically blames Canada.  What other musical can include a giant demon, a terrorist, and a giant clitorises.

Superheroes, demons, and plants are not your standard musical subject matter, but for the unique genre of Geek Musicals, they are the C# to our A major chord.  Musicals dwell in a world of fantasy and disbelief that geeks are well versed in making the genres oddly compatible yet rarely recognized.  Here I highlight the 7 best geek musicals, judged on their subject matter, entertainment value, and quality of songs.  Only musicals with released performances, either on stage or film, were considered.  Each musical includes a musical video, so prepare to hum, laugh, and cry through the list of the Best Geek Musicals here at Geek Musical Week on Prodigeek.

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One of the greatest Star Wars video games owes it all to those little building blocks called Legos. Lego Star Wars gave the duel trilogy a hilarious and enjoyable romp through the galaxy with tons of collectables, vehicles, and playable characters. More Lego games including the just released Indiana Jones and upccoming Batman lead me to wonder what else can the franchise build.

7. Power Rangers

They might be campy and kiddy, but they still have awesome video game potential yet to be realized. Awesome martial arts moves with cool weapons and giant robots all to fight a bizarre assortment of monsters. With hundreds of monsters, Zords, and different kinds of Power Rangers over the years, there’s tons of unlockables to give this game long legs. Just remember co-op. This is a team effort.

6. South Park

Let’s see the mature side of Legos by turning the foul mouthed kids of Colorado into colorful blocks of fun. Let’s even risk the cliched sandbox approach, rebuilding the entire town of South Park in Legos with missions from the show, like fighting vicious turkeys and Mecha-Streisand.

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The entertainment industry has manufactured and made-up musical groups pretending they’re successful as a way to lure unsuspecting fans (I’m looking at you *N Sync).  But some bands actually are made-up - they first appeared in fictional worlds, sometimes even crossing over to our reality to make an extra buck.  These are the most entertaining and talented fictional bands.

7. Fingerbang

The classic boy band from South Park triumphed at the South Park Mall with their self-titled mega hit.  This edgy band when farther over the edge than any edgy band before by putting a girl, dressed as a boy, into the boy band.  Now that’s guts.

6. Josie and the Pussycats

Speaking of girls dressed as dudes, this 1970’s pop sensation exploded out of their popular Archie comic book and cartoon series, the main source for new musical acts in December 1970.  The bubblegummy, sometimes crime fighting team have even appeared in 2001 blockbuster that made very little money.  Still, being comic book characters, they barely aged and have hauntingly remained relevant in the time world of Archie Comics.

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Your favorite mountain town will be coming to your local website soon. MTV Networks will release every South Park clip ever on SouthParkStudios.com.

Following their successful model with Daily Show clips, MTV and Comedy Central aim to attract online video viewers to their own sites, rather than user-run sites like YouTube.

This is exciting news from a company originally slow in using the web for distribution. MTV and Comedy Central’s parent company Viacom is suing YouTube for $1 billion for copyright infringement for showing Viacom shows on the site. This move by Viacom shows the company is at least trying to provide an alternative to get their content, experimenting with new distribution methods rather than just forcing people to watch TV at specific times.

Though one thing concerns me, specifically the idea of MTV showing all South Park clips, not episodes. Does this mean every South Park episode will be broken up into short, digestible clips? If so, this is not ideal. The Daily Show benefits from being broken up as clips for the purpose of searching and sharing specific segments. South Park, however, is a full story and benefits from having the full context. Hopefully MTV will feature the full episodes, maybe in addition to clips. Though please do not include a commercial between every clip. I might have time to watch a full episode on your site, but I don’t need to sit through five 15 second commercials for Ford cars.

Either way, this is a nice step forward for big media conglomerates. Now if Viacom can just drop their stupid lawsuit, we’ll be all set.

Memory and bandwith concerns aside, this is a new age in streaming video. The website DailyEpisodes.com offers the entire runs of the Simpsons, South Park, Futurama, Family Guy, and American Dad on fast streaming video in slightly better than poor quality. This barebones site with a slew of Google Ads makes impressive use of third-party video hosting to offer hundreds of gigabytes of video. Before getting into piracy concerns, this is quite impressive.

As for the piracy, this is a concern. The best file-sharing programs, like BitTorrent, can be cumbersome for the casual computer user. But these Dailymation hosted videoes are so simple to use, most people are apt to use it. In this sense, I would guess the site’s no-effort layout hurts the masses from visiting (helping to keep the media companies from finding out, possibly). But the simple fact this site can exist is as exciting as it is worrisome for the use of this technology.