We all love South Park for its humor, satire, the vulgar words and the creative ways of saying the word "s**t" as often as possible in a single episode. Did you know that every new South Park episode is delivered right on the day it airs? Other than the sheer creative talent of the South Park production crew, the show credits its hectic production to Apple computers.

JJ Franzen, technical director at South Park Studios says, "We have very complex stuff that needs to be done very fast and we need to know that we can trust the machines to handle whatever we throw at them without crumbling. ThatÂ?s why we use Macs."

It used to be that the Studio used construction paper cutouts to play as Stan, Kyle, Cartman and Kenny and the other characters. Such a method became too time-consuming, however; the Studio then decided to mimic the original look and feel of construction paper puppets using SGI workstations.

The animation crew uses Adobe Photoshop and Maya. They scan the original paper cutouts and backgrounds, and use these as textures in Maya. Using computers in producing episodes cut down the process from 3 months to 6 days. Recently, a new special-effects technique in producing the cartoon has been introduced: Motion, a graphics software from Apple, which allows snow to appear more naturally in South Park, Colorado.

After animation and audio, the editorial department cuts the episode for broadcast using Macs running on Avid. The team has custom-built the studio to include a 120 processor render farm, more than 30 Mac workstations, and almost 10 terabytes of Xserve RAID storage space.

Prior to using Apple, Maya was rendered on Windows workstations. But Maya would crash often, requiring the entire system to be rebooted. When Maya was released for the Mac, the team made the switch, and now, whenever the application crashes, only the application has to be rebooted - not the entire system.

South Park Studio says that their Mac workstations are fast and reliable. They're coupled with a 120-processor (AMD Athlon) Linux render farm, effectively doubling the amount of shots that the team could do. Macs could definitely keep up with the South Park crew's insane production schedule.

Frank Agnone, supervising producer at South Park Studios in Los Angeles, says that Apple's quick-to-master style is very useful. "Apple is known in the industry as being very user friendly and when youÂ?re making a big switchover, that factors in ... With Apple and Mac OS X, in-house production could make the transition easily."

ProCare is $99 membership program that offers exclusive services and offers at local Apple retail stores. ProCare members are entitled to such goodies as next-day turnaround on in-store repairs; no waiting at the Genius Bar with up to seven-day advanced reservations; free setup and transferring of files when you buy a new Mac; free one-hour workshops; special discounts on selected Apple and third-party products; and a price match guarantee in case you see a Mac cheaper somewhere else.

To hype its ProCare package, Apple Store employees made a promo video piggy backing on South Park's popularity. Yes, we think the video animation is slick. But, really guys, South Park isn't South Park without, at least, killing Kenny.