South Park Lake America mockery arrived in full force on Tuesday when Trey Parker and Matt Stone announced on Instagram that they are renaming their satirical animated comedy South America, taking direct aim at Apple and Google for updating their map platforms to reflect President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming Lake Ontario.
The statement, posted ahead of the show’s 29th season premiere on 16 September, read: ‘Inspired by the bravery and patriotism of Apple and Google, we are changing the name of South Park to SOUTH AMERICA.’ The post was accompanied by a picture of the South Park logo with a licence plate spelling out ‘AMERICA’ pinned over the word ‘Park’, and a glowing US flag added in the corner.
The executive order and the map updates that prompted the South Park Lake America mockery
The sequence of events Parker and Stone were lampooning began on 27 August, when Trump signed an executive order directing the US government to rename Lake Ontario (the water body straddling the US-Canadian border) to Lake America in federal maps, contracts and documents. According to BBC, the order gave the US Department of the Interior a 30-day window to update the change with the Geographic Names Information Service (GNIS), the official repository of domestic geographic names in the United States.
Days after the order was signed, Google said it had updated Google Maps so that US users would see ‘Lake America’, Canadian users would see ‘Lake Ontario’, and users outside both countries would see ‘Lake Ontario (Lake America)’. The company said it updates Google Maps to reflect name changes in official government sources, which in the US means the GNIS. Apple Maps followed suit the week after, renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America for US users.
The renaming did not go uncontested on historical grounds. NBC News reported that the name Lake Ontario derives from the Wendat word Ontari’io, meaning ‘the lake is beautiful, the lake is big’, and that the name is more than 400 years old. The order came amid rising trade tensions between the US and Canada.
The Lake Ontario order was not the only renaming Trump signalled. ABC News reported that Trump suggested further changes could be ahead, saying: ‘If you think about it, we have a gulf and we have a lake. Now, all we need is an ocean. So maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific. Maybe we’ll change them both.’
A swipe at Paramount too
Parker and Stone used the same Instagram statement to take aim closer to home. The duo also targeted South Park‘s parent company, referring to it as ‘Paramount, a Skydance Capitulation’, a reference to David Ellison of Skydance Media buying out Paramount in 2025.
The Lake Ontario renaming follows a pattern the show has engaged with before. South Park, which debuted on Comedy Central in 1997, has a long history of satirising politicians, tech companies and media figures, including Trump, CBS and Tim Cook. The Google and Apple map updates gave Parker and Stone a ready target: two of the world’s largest technology platforms updating their products to comply with a politically charged executive order became, in the show’s hands, an act of corporate ‘bravery and patriotism’ worthy of its own rebranding.
The Google Maps update itself drew on a precedent the company had already set. It made similar changes with the Gulf of Mexico after Trump renamed it the Gulf of America, applying the same logic of following official US government geographic name sources. With the GNIS now on a 30-day clock to formalise the Lake Ontario change, further map updates across platforms are likely to follow before the South America season premiere on 16 September.