South Park. © Comedy Central

When it comes to cult status, Trey Parker and Matt Stone's South Park is without doubt the undisputed champion `toon right now. Already the most successful original series ever on Comedy Central, the crudely drawn and even cruder exploits of Stan, Kyle, Cartman and Kenny are soon to make their debut on TV in both the U.K. and France (Mon Dieu! Ils ont tué Kenny!) and a feature film version is also being discussed. Meanwhile, South Park T-shirts are selling like hot cakes, orange snorkel coats are making a big come back and every network exec and studio boss in the business wants their own series just like it.

But cult phenomena are by no means confined to the scatological humor and mindless violence of South Park's foul-mouthed infants or those other badly drawn delinquents, Beavis and Butt-Head. There are equally obsessive fans of Nick Park - just look at the whole cottage industry that Wallace and Gromit have spawned - and Canadian animator Richard Condie, neither of whom have ever relied on fart gags or decapitation scenes. In fact, it seems that almost anything - from the classic animation of such Warner Bros. artists as Tex Avery, Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones, to TV series such as Rocky and Bullwinkle and Crusader Rabbit - is capable of inspiring the kind of devoted attachment which, according to Webster's New World College Dictionary at least, constitutes a cult.

The New Popularity Guage
One sure fire way to judge a show's cult status is by the amount of web activity it generates. "Perhaps the proof of the pudding, as they say, is if it's a cult, check out the number of web sites," says Albert Miller, who lectures in animation history at Woodbury University in Los Angeles. South Park alone now has hundreds of web sites devoted to it - from YouKilledKenny.com to Mr. Hat's Hell Hole. Even the most obscure animated series is sure to have some form of on-line following. "You just go through the web and it's like, `My god, people have created a fan club out of this?!'" adds Miller.

Take The Simpsons, for example. Richard Raynis, producer on the series, doesn't really class it as a cult show. "I really think of a cult phenomenon being limited to a small eccentric audience," he says. However, since he got hooked up to the Internet, he's discovered a whole new world of fanatical followers. "When we've wanted to go back and remember what happened in different episodes we've gotten information from the net," he recalls. "I think there was one episode when we wanted Homer to say, `D'oh!' 40 times and we wanted to pull [the footage] from old episodes, so we actually went to the `net and some fan had cataloged them all."

Enter the Merchandise
Another indication of the show's devoted following are the legions of fans willing to spend money on even the most bizarre memorabilia. "You go into Matt's office and he's got a whole collection of bootleg Simpsons merchandise, some of it's really funny, like some of these weird statues from Tijuana," says Raynis. "There was one that had Bart's body and Homer's head."

What is it about this series that makes people collect plastic models of the characters or spend all day discussing the most recent episode in an Internet chat room? "There's so much that goes into The Simpsons and King of the Hill, that if someone really wants to look closely and analyze them there's potential to do that," says Raynis. "The way they are produced is obsessive and there really are layers of things going on in these shows." He also believes that the distinct, creator-driven style of both shows plays a crucial role: "It's important that The Simpsons has Matt Groening and that King of the Hill has Mike Judge. The audience feels like they're connecting with a creator. So much other animation is so processed. I don't think either Matt or Mike considers himself a really accomplished artist, yet there's something about their point of view or their strange underground style that is appealing."