Team America at 20: How an X-rated puppet satire shocked the world (and outraged Sean Penn)

When the South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone set out to make Team America: World Police, an absurd puppet comedy satirising US foreign policy and Hollywood’s liberal elite, they had no idea it would drive them to the brink of marionette-induced insanity. “It was the worst time of my entire life,” Stone said during the film’s press tour. “I never want to see a puppet again. It ruined all the serious relationships in my life … You feel like a piece of s***, none of your friends like you, your parents don’t like you, but you have a movie at the end.”

Twenty years on from its release on 15 October 2004, Team America now boasts cult status as one of the funniest, most outrageous and definitely most offensive comedies ever made. Influenced by self-serious action films such as Top Gun, the film follows a heavily armed taskforce who take it upon themselves to thwart a terrorist plot from North Korean ruler Kim Jong-il. The team, which includes newly recruited Broadway actor Gary (voiced by Parker), must also contend with the Film Actors’ Guild (yes, “FAG” for short), a cadre of self-righteous Hollywood liberals led by “the greatest actor in the world” Alec Baldwin, who are strongly opposed to Team America’s “policing”.

It now seems unlikely that such a film, featuring more than a handful of racial stereotypes, homophobic acronyms and deliberately dodgy accents, would be made today, but Parker and Stone are more than OK with that. In various interviews and even the film’s DVD commentary, the duo vowed never to work with puppets again – Parker even once joked that he would rather watch his own mother die than make a Team America sequel.

The film was produced by a crew of about 200 people, and required at least four puppeteers at a time to manipulate a single marionette, of which there were 270 in total. Shooting the simplest of sequences, like the scene where Gary walks down an alleyway and enters a limousine, was a painstaking and time-consuming task.

“With humans in a real location, a scene like that would take maybe two or three hours to shoot, at most,” Eric Jewett, the film’s first assistant director, tells me today. “It was a different deal with the puppets.” The marionettes used during production could only walk six feet at a time, and were unable to turn corners. Unwanted shadows were constantly being cast on the set, and the puppeteers would have to stop and reposition themselves multiple times just to get Gary through a door. “We spent the entire day – 7am to 6pm – accomplishing this ‘simple’ scene.”

The technical difficulties with the puppets were so extreme that Parker, Stone and their longtime South Park writing partner, Pam Brady, were constantly forced to rework the script to accommodate the marionettes’ physical limitations. Production was subsequently delayed several times and the team faced a genuine struggle to complete the film in time for its release date. Nothing, however, was going to deter Parker and Stone from achieving their very precise vision for the project. Ever the perfectionists, the duo were intent on keeping the action as real as possible, refraining from using special effects and instead capturing every puppet stunt live on film.

The marionettes were created by the Chiodo brothers, a trio of sibling special effects artists who had previously designed puppets for films including Elf and Disney’s Dinosaur. Perfectionists themselves, the brothers were taken aback when Parker and Stone actually asked them to tone down their usual level of mastery. “They built the marionettes to Trey and Matt’s specifications, tied tiny fishing lines on, and gave demonstrations of how they could walk, fight, dance, and kiss, which we filmed,” Jewett explains. “Matt and Trey thought it looked too realistic. They asked for bigger, more visible strings and herky-jerky movements. This was not what the Chiodo brothers expected. Puppeteers pride themselves on creating the illusion of living creatures. Now they were being asked to smash that illusion.”

For the film’s Paris sequence, in which Team America member Chris (voiced by Stone) takes on a terrorist in hand-to-hand combat, Jewett says the Chiodos choreographed a fight scene worthy of Jason Bourne. “It was puppeteering at the highest level. Trey and Matt watched the fight. Then they said, to the dismay of the Chiodos, ‘That was good, but this time just smash them into each other.’”

Over the course of the film, Team America inadvertently end up doing far more damage to capital cities and famous monuments than any terrorist could ever dream of – “Damn, I missed him!” says team member Joe as his missile flies past its target, hits the Eiffel Tower and sends it crashing into the Arc de Triomphe. Plenty of celebrity characters are also killed in gloriously gory fashion, but it was the infamous puppet sex scene between Gary and Lisa that presented the biggest issue in terms of censorship.

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Parker and Stone knew they were pushing the limits, but they were outraged when the Motion Picture Association of America – the US equivalent of Britain’s BBFC – decided to give the film a harsher, audience-repelling NC-17 rating rather than the more teenager-friendly “R” they were expecting. The original cut of the scene, which featured the puppets urinating and defecating on one another, had to be hacked down – it went from a minute-and-a-half to 50 seconds. And at least nine separate edits were presented to the MPAA before the board decided the film could be granted an R.

Jewett recalls the day the sex scene was filmed. “Trey had me gather the crew for a little speech. Everyone had read the script, so we knew what we were about to do. But Trey gave all of us permission to take the day off if we were offended or uncomfortable with what we were about to see. No one left. The result was a comedy bit like no other.”

The equally famous vomit scene, however – in which Gary drowns his sorrows in alcohol and then endlessly spews his guts – proved to be an even bigger challenge for many crew members. “It made a lot of people nauseous,” Jewett says with a smirk. “We connected a 50-gallon drum of viscous, beige fluid to the puppet’s head with a tube, and the special effects guys started pumping. Gallon after gallon of vomit spewed out of Gary’s mouth, then stopped – and then started again. Puke went everywhere. It ran off the set onto the floor, and under our shoes. Trey and Matt demonstrated their mastery of comedic timing with the stopping and starting, and it was hilarious. But people had to leave the room.”

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Alongside the dry-heaving, rewrites, delays and marionette problems, Parker and Stone also opened themselves up to vitriol from the various celebrities they mocked in the film. Baldwin, Samuel L Jackson, Susan Sarandon, Helen Hunt, Tim Robbins, George Clooney and Matt Damon were among the main targets, but it was Sean Penn who took particular exception to his puppet parody. The Oscar winner was so enraged he actually sent Parker and Stone an angry letter, lambasting the pair’s apathetic attitude towards voting and accusing them of “encouraging irresponsibility”.

“I remember I called Trey and I was reading it to him and was like, ‘This isn’t real, is this real?’,” Stone recalled in an interview with ABC News. The duo obviously found the whole thing hilarious, particularly since Penn managed to emulate his own self-righteous parody by inviting the pair to one of his tours of war-torn Iraq. Parker added: “What was so crazy was that in the movie the big thing we were making fun of him for was [saying] ‘I’ve been to Iraq, you don’t know what you’re talking about, I’ve been there’. And he writes in the letter ‘I’ve been to Iraq’.” The funniest part, however, was the way in which Penn signed off the note: “All the best, and a sincere f**k you.”

Of all the celebrities parodied in the film, though, Damon undoubtedly took the most memorable beating. The actor is portrayed as a simpleton who can only say his own name. To this day, it is simply impossible for anyone who’s ever seen Team America to look at the actor’s face and not feel at least a slight urge to yell, “MAAAATTT DAAAMON!”

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When asked about the film in 2016, the actor said he was confused by the portrayal. “I believe those two are geniuses, and I don’t use that word lightly,” he wrote during a Reddit Q&A. “I’m a big fan of theirs but I never quite understood that one.” It turns out there was no reason for him to take it personally, though, as Parker and Stone only decided to give the character that personality because his puppet came out of the oven looking a bit, as they put it, “mentally deficient”.

While Parker and Stone might not have felt it at the time, the suffering they endured to create Team America was most definitely worth it. Yes, it received mostly positive reviews upon its release, but its real legacy is that wry smirk you see on someone’s face when you ask them if they’ve ever watched it. It’s that look that says, “I know I’m not allowed to find this hilarious, but I absolutely do.” It’s that ironic sense of patriotism it gives you, even if you’re not American (“F*** yeah!”). And it’s the most flagrant reminder there is that Academy Award winner Sean Penn has, in fact, been to Iraq.