There is a specific character in South Park that has been mysterious for its complete run, despite the fact he has been one of the main characters ever since the pilot.

A character with probably the most death counts on an animated show ever. And I’m obviously talking about Kenny Mccormick. And in this series of threads, I’m going to try and debunk the theory of “Who exactly Kenny Mccormick is, what are his powers and his origins?” but first, it’s best to start with the origins of that concept.

We all know the catchphrase “Oh my God! They Killed Kenny!” and the follow up “You Bastards!”, however…The mystery behind the constant comebacks of this character was never truly solved. Making Kenny one of the most mysterious characters of the series.

And it’s not even like Kenny’s mysteries weren’t explained, even tracing back to the first season, Kenny’s death already had some kind of odd mystery around him that seemed to be leading towards an explanation or at least theorizing possibilities left to the viewers later on.

Even tracing back to the very first concept of South Park.

1. KENNY AND ALIENS.

In the first South Park episode, “Cartman gets an Anal Probe” which has two versions, the pilot episode and the real first episode that was unaired. We had our first canonical Kenny death, which was ironically one of the most brutal and gruesome deaths he ever got.

• He gets shot

• He get ran over by cows

• He gets ran over by a cop car

• And his body then gets torn apart by the boys as they try to prove to Cartman Kenny is really dead. All in one episode.

Though, what most people don’t know is that in the original version of this episode, Kenny would magically appear again at the end of the episode along with the boys at the bus stop before Cartman would crash back down from the spaceship. Yep, he just reappeared out of nowhere, he died and came back in the first ever episode of South Park. What’s interesting is the boys reaction to it, they don’t seem shocked but they acted like something was off, though they quickly moved on from it and seemingly had already forgotten about his previous death despite having not forgotten about any of the other events they witnessed that same day.

When you know more about the original concepts of South Park and why it started off with aliens, you start to see a potential for an interesting theory. “South Park” was roughly planned out to be a show like “Gravity Falls”, inspired by X-Files, based on the alien/UFO and paranormal history related to the real world iteration of the South Park Town the creators were familiar with from having grown near that place. The town had some history with aliens and paranormal activities so they wanted to make the show about a town being faced with odd and strange phenomenons the 4 boys would be dragged into basing the humor off the boys’ oblivious states of mind to the extremely ridiculous situations they were in. Starting off strong with the idea that aliens were watching over the town of South Park and inserting devices inside everyone’s ass, not just Cartman’s.

Which is something that would later on remain canon and even make a comeback in the show and the games.

With this idea in mind, you start to take Kenny’s death and revival a little more differently in this pilot. They were already establishing a weird thing going on with Kenny, associating him with the strange phenomenon occurring in South Park related to the aliens. Considering Kenny was also the only character with his face and voice being obscured, you could easily jump to the conclusion that if THIS idea for South Park remained, Kenny would be associated with aliens or the paranormal. Here are some theories you could come up with with just this episode:

• Kenny potentially being an alien himself

• Kenny being an alien experiment

• The visitors sending a clone of Kenny whenever he dies and brainwashing the kids into believing he had never died with the devices they all have inside their asses. And using Kenny as some kind of observer, and South Park as a lab experiment on humans which they monitor and watch for fun.

• South Park Town is a TV show for aliens and they kill Kenny for fun, bringing him back in the next episode through a clone of him and making the boys forget about his death through brainwashing.

Why am I mentioning it? It’s because this was our first potential opportunity to theorize about Kenny’s deaths, but this, was sadly not kept in the aired version of the episode.

However this didn’t mean that the idea of Kenny getting killed and magically coming back unharmed as if nothing happened wouldn’t reappear and be given an explanation anyway.

Which we will be focusing on in the second part…