Trey Parker and Matt Stone announced Tuesday that South Park is changing its name to South America, eight days before the show’s 29th season premieres on Comedy Central.
The statement went out through the series’ official social accounts, where the display name now reads South America. Parker and Stone credited the switch to what they described as the bravery and patriotism of Apple and Google, then thanked parent company Paramount, which they labeled “a Skydance Capitulation.” The post carried new season artwork with an AMERICA sticker pasted over the sign for the fictional Colorado town.
The target is President Donald Trump’s run of geographic renamings. Trump signed an executive order on Aug. 27 changing Lake Ontario to Lake America and gave the Interior Department 30 days to update federal records. The order came during a trade fight with Canada, after negotiations collapsed on Aug. 21 and 50% tariffs took effect on roughly $20 billion in Canadian exports. Google updated its maps that weekend, displaying Lake America to users in the United States, Lake Ontario to users in Canada, and both names everywhere else. Apple followed on Sept. 1. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said Trump contacted Apple directly to request the update.
MapQuest refused to change the label and kept Lake Ontario, as it had kept Gulf of Mexico the year before. Its iOS app climbed to No. 1 in the US App Store by Sept. 1, ahead of ChatGPT, and reached No. 6 in the Google Play Store.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford compared the order to a Saturday Night Live sketch on Meet the Press. Rep. Debbie Dingell said she would introduce the Hands Off Our Great Lakes Act to reverse it. Trump has since floated renaming New Mexico to New America, drawing a response from Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham. The sequence started two days into his second term, when he renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America and both Google and Apple adopted the change.
The Paramount line refers to the $8 billion Skydance merger the Federal Communications Commission approved last year. That approval followed Paramount’s $16 million settlement of a lawsuit Trump filed over how a 2024 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris was edited. Parker and Stone spent much of 2025 publicly at odds with the company over the merger and over streaming rights that pulled the show off Paramount+ internationally.
The rename lands two days after South Park won Outstanding Animated Program at the Creative Arts Emmys on Sept. 6. The award went to “Sermon on the ‘Mount,” the season 27 premiere that put Trump in bed with Satan and went after Paramount directly. It was the show’s first win in that category since 2013. The series marked the victory by posting an image of a cartoon Trump holding the trophy, a reference to Trump’s long-running complaints about never winning an Emmy for The Apprentice. The White House had dismissed the show as fourth-rate during that season’s run.
How long the show stays South America is unsettled. As of Tuesday afternoon the series was still listed as South Park on Paramount+, and neither Paramount nor Comedy Central has said whether the change extends past the announcement.
Season 29 premieres Sept. 16 at 10 p.m. ET/PT on Comedy Central, with episodes streaming on Paramount+ the following day in the United States, Canada and Australia.
Sources: Deadline | Variety | The Hill | Forbes | Axios | TechCrunch | TIME | Cartoon Brew | Raw Story
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