Kenny's dead! Long live Kenny!

It was a more innocent time — before bin Laden, before 'Dubya,' even before Lewinsky. The word "Jalalabad" never crossed American lips, chads remained utterly unimpregnated and a cigar was still just a cigar. It was the winter of 1996-7, and the public was just beginning to appreciate the uses of Al Gore's exciting new invention: the Internet. Suddenly, you could buy books online for prices slightly lower than those at Barnes and Noble, shipping and handling not included. You could learn about breaking news right as it occurred, without so much as approaching a TV or a radio. And the pornography — oh! the pornography!

The undoubted stars of the Internet, however, were neither Jeff Bezos ('86) and his ilk, nor Jenna Jameson (36-24-36) and hers. No, they were four foul-mouthed young men named Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, Eric Cartman and Kenny McCormick. While the boys of South Park have since gone on to cable television's Comedy Central, not to mention the local multiplex, way back when they were nothing more than fuzzy shapes on a low-quality video called "The Spirit of Christmas," slowly making its way along the information superhighway.

No one who was alive that magical winter will ever forget his or her first encounter with "The Spirit of Christmas." The interminable download. The profanity. The kung fu battle between Santa and Jesus. The climactic appearance of Brian Boitano. But above all else, the heroic passing of Mr. McCormick, a death which left his compatriots railing fruitlessly against the cruel Fates. "Oh my god!" the children cried. "They killed Kenny! You bastards!" With those eight words, the world was changed forever.

Chaplin's Tramp marked the arrival of the motion picture as a popular source of entertainment. Mickey Mouse marked the addition of sound and Howdy Doody the arrival of television. Kenny was the first great character in our popular culture to be born and bred on the World Wide Web, a medium previously limited to the sort of Dungeons and Dragons addicted techies who would never succeed in capturing the hearts or minds of Joe and Jane Public. Yet Kenny not only captured America's heart; he also broke it with his untimely demise, only to stitch it back together again with his eventual rebirth.

Since then, we as a nation have spent five and a half glorious years watching little Kenny die gruesomely each week, only to return and die even more gruesomely the next. For a generation living through the fluid vicissitudes of the Cyberspace Age, it was one of the precious few regularities on which we could safely rely. Like another beneficiary of death and resurrection almost two millennia ago, Kenny McCormick was a source of solace in troubling times, of deep metaphysical comfort as empires fell and new orders rose to replace them.

Now, it's all over. With the start of South Park's sixth season on television, Kenny remains six feet under, never to rise again. He's been replaced by a former supporting player named Butters, a sniveling blond kid with a drawl suspiciously like that of Princeton's own James Maitland Stewart '32. Butters, suffice it to say, is no Jimmy Stewart. And he certainly is no Kenny McCormick.

The show's cruel co-creator, Matt Stone, couldn't care less. "I couldn't care less," he told the Knoxville News-Sentinel. "I'm so sick of that character." Apparently, Stone and his staff got tired of "figuring out ways to kill him. It was funny the first 38 or 40 times we did it," he explains. "Then it turned into, 'OK, how can we kill him now?'" And with South Park's ratings as high as they've ever been, Stone and the gang felt free to give up on this creative challenge, rather than continue to search for new and ever-better modes of McCormicide.

Kenny, however, is not Mr. Stone's to destroy. Kenny belongs to us all. He was invented, remember, by a pair of geeky kids without a big budget or Hollywood backing, working only for Mr. Gore's great do-it-yourself cyberstudio. There, he will live on forever, dying and being reborn on countless fan pages for the rest of eternity, as he has been since that momentous winter of '96-7.

In the immortal words of the anthem of that era, Kenny may get knocked down, but he'll get up again. You're never going to keep him down. Michael Frazer is a politics graduate student from Riverdale, N.Y. He can be reached at mfrazer@princeton.edu.