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No one in South Park has internet access and there’s no telling when, or even if, it will come back. Desperation sets in as the fear of the unknown spreads rapidly across the country. When Randy hears there still may be some internet out in California, he packs up his family and heads west in search of a signal. |
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| Originally Aired |
16th April 2008 |
| Guest Starring |
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| Trivia |
- The Marsh family traveling west is based on the experiences of the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath and its movie adaptation, where they travel to California looking for jobs and end up in a itinerant camp.
- As in the film, the massive migration to California in search of the internet is a reference to the Dust Bowl, during which farmers, no longer able to grow crops on their land, headed west to California in search of jobs.
- The first reveal of the Internet is a reference to the movie Independence Day, when they show the alien ship for the first time.
- "The Internet" is shown as a gigantic wireless router similar to many Linksys routers. The router has a flashing orange LED, which is "supposed to be solid green," which implies a routine problem such as failure to obtain a DHCP lease. Kyle repairs the router by power cycling it.
- The scene in which it is announced that it is "Tuesday...8 days without Internet" is derived from The Shining.
- Eric Cartman and Kenny McCormick have no lines in the episode, despite both having computers, as seen in Make Love, Not Warcraft. They are shown briefly, though, when the Marsh family is leaving for California.
- When the reporter announces that Kyle will try to fix the problem, different TVs in the world are shown. One of them appears to be Times Square. In this scene, half of a billboard for the film Hairspray can be seen.
- Randy's speech on the abuse of overlogging in Native American attire parodies the speech Steven Segal did about the abuse of oil in the film On Deadly Ground.
- When the government researchers try to communicate with the "Internet" they play a series of notes on a keyboard. This is an homage to the scene in the 1977 movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In the film, the humans try to communicate with the UFO using music played on a keyboard. The original note sequence from the movie was G, A, F, F, C; in this episode the last note is altered to avoid copyright violation.
- The Drudge Report is referred to twice in the episode. It is a news aggregation site run by Matt Drudge. It was made famous for breaking the story of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.
- Many of the laptop computers have a half an Orange on the cover, parodying the Apple logo.
- In Shelley's room, there is a Sadie Dakota poster up on the wall behind her. Sadie Dakota is an allusion to the hit Disney Channel show, Hannah Montana.
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