Dead Celebrities

Dead Celebrities is the premiere episode of the second half of the thirteenth season of the animated television series South Park, and the season's eighth episode overall. It first aired on Comedy Central in the United States on Wednesday October 7, 2009, aired in the UK on Friday October 9, 2009 and aired Saturday October 10, 2009 in Canada.

Plot
For a while, Ike has been seeing ghosts of dead celebrities, with Billy Mays being the one he see's most. No one else belives him until Kyle mentions that Ike's been seeing Mays to Cartman who shows the guys who he is by showing a commericial he was in to promote Chipotlaway. The boys call the Ghost Hunters to find the problem, but the Ghost Hunters end up scaring themselves and both urinating and defecating themselves before running out the house screaming much to the boy's annoyance.

Soon after, Ike ends up in hospital in a coma as a psychic then comes to help the boys. She explains that when ghosts can't accept what happens to them they end up trapped in Limbo where they can't go to heaven or hell. She explains it's like being trapped on a plane that can't leave the runway but you can't get off it. She manages to contact the spirits. She tells them they need to move on, to her surprise they admit they know that but Michael Jackson is the only one who refuses to accept his death. They try to get him to admit he's dead but the force of his denial causes the psychic to get thrown out a window by the ghost, Jackson possesses Ike's body as the other spirits are forced to remain in purgatory, which really is like an airplane stuck on the runway. The only way to release Michael from Ike's body and to free the celebrities from purgatory is for the Michael to achieve his dream. The boys enter Michael in to a beauty pageant because they find out that he always wanted to be accepted as a little white girl. After Michael's singing performance, the two male judges love him. The police then come and take the two judges away for masturbating to the young girls in the pageant, leaving the female judge to decide the final outcome. Cartman sees her eating Chipotle and bribes her with the Chipotlaway. Michael then wins the pageant and his spirit leaves Ike's body and goes back to purgatory. Purgatory then lifts off and takes all of the people to their destination, Hell, which is a towing runway.

Cultural References

 * Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson from The Atlantic Paranormal Society and Ghost Hunters are called in to investigate.
 * Some of the ghosts that Ike sees or are waiting on the plane in Purgatory are Billy Mays, who is advertising various products, Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, Patrick Swayze, Natasha Richardson, Dom DeLuise, Ted Kennedy, John Hughes, Walter Cronkite, Ed McMahon, Adam Goldstein (DJ AM), Arturo Gatti, Bea Arthur, Steve McNair, Ricardo Montalbán, David Carradine, Les Paul, and Oscar G. Mayer, Jr.. Most of the aforementioned deaths have occurred within 2009 alone, a trend that has alarmed the media.
 * Most of the products Mays pitches are fake, with the exception of The Big City Slider Station.
 * The episode also refers to The Sixth Sense when Ike tells his therapist that he sees dead celebrities, reminiscent of the quotation, "I see dead people."
 * The episode features a spiritual medium reminiscent of Tangina Barrons from the film Poltergeist.
 * The episode parodies the movie Little Miss Sunshine and the show, Toddlers & Tiaras, with the children's pageant in the last part of the episode.

Goofs

 * Most of this episode is uncensored on www.southparkstudios.com but near the end of this episode when Ike says "What the fuck am I wearing? " "Kyle what the fuck is going on" and "HOLY SHIT" it is censored. This is understandable because Ike and other various children in South Park are recorded by actual children, and they usually don't have the children cuss; they usually have them say other things and bleep them out to sound as if they said a bad word. For example, you hear Ike say "What the heck?" but they censor out "heck" so it sounds like "fuck". "Shit" could sound like "sit" and "fuck" could be "fack/fak".
 * Kyle has brown hair in the picture in Sheila's and Gerald's room.
 * In the episode "Miss Teacher Bangs a Boy" there was no trace of a closet in Ike's room. It's possible that that Kyle's house was destroyed in Pandemic or Pandemic 2: The Startling by guinea pigs forcing them to rebuild. This could be the reason because they decided to add in the closet. Of course, the houses in South Park are constantly being upgraded over time (e.g. Stan Marsh's kitchen is more modern in Season 14 than it was in Season 1).
 * The alien that you are supposed to enter at www.southparkstudios.com is hidden in the pageant audience with long hair.
 * When watching the Billy Mays commercial the house changes from Cartman's to Kyle's
 * If you look closely, Ike is wearing a white glove when playing in the playground outside the hospital
 * When Billy Mays is trying to sell his products in purgatory he's seated next to Kennedy and Richardson, and behind some unknown people with no lines. At the end when they land in hell he's seated next to someone else. At the part where all the celebrities yell he is not seen.
 * In a deleted scene where the boys and Michael Jackson were in Forest Lawn Glendale Cemetery, the tombstone actually shows Michael Jackson died in July 25, which Michael Jackson really died in June 25. This may have been why it was a deleted scene because there was too little time to rectify the mistake (due to the frantic schedule of South Park).
 * In Spontaneous Combustion, we learn Gerald has impotence, but he still has sex with Sheila. However, this may be the reason he's at the top.