Tolkien Black
Fictional character from South Park
Tolkien Black is a fictional character in the adult animated television series South Park. He was voiced by Trey Parker in early appearances, but South Park art director Adrien Beard took over in 2000 and has performed the character since. Until 2022, the character's name was Token Black as a play on tokenism, and he formerly had the last name "Williams". His name was retconned in the episode "The Big Fix" to be Tolkien, after J. R. R. Tolkien, though earlier episodes now have his name spelled Tolkien in the closed captioning.
01Biography
Tolkien attends South Park Elementary, initially as a third-grade student of Mr. Garrison's class before moving up to fourth-grade.
He was originally the only black student attending the school until Nichole Daniels was introduced in "Cartman Finds Love".
Residing in South Park, he is the only child and son of Steve and Linda Black, who were originally the only African American family in the town until the Daniels family first appeared.
02Character
Creation and design
Tolkien debuted in the series' first episode, "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe", though having no spoken lines. He was composed with construction paper and animated through stop motion. From "Weight Gain 4000" onward he is animated digitally, though in a way which mimics the original use of the construction paper. Tolkien is not offered the same free-ranged motion as hand-drawn characters, as he is shown on one angle, and is animated with a jerky fashion.
Tolkien is African-American, with dark brown skin and short black hair, and usually wears a light purple long sleeve shirt with a yellow letter "T" on it, and dark blue jeans. Up until season 5, Tolkien, along with other African-Americans, had darker skin. Adrien Beard speaks with his normal vocal range and is edited with Pro Tools, which alters the pitch to that of a 10-year-old.
Following the release of "The Big Fix", Tolkien's name was edited in all previously released material to match the retcon, including subtitles of past episodes. Because "The Big Fix" establishes that Stan and Randy have been unaware of Tolkien's real name up until this point, Tolkien's name is still subtitled as "Token" in their dialogue. Stan and Randy are meant to represent the audience, as the episode contains a scene of a character directly speaking to the audience about Tolkien's real name.
03Reception
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Tolkien Black”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Token Black2.webp by Unknown author, Fair use
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