Trey Parker On 'Team America: World Police'

[Monday, October 18th, 2004]
Trey ParkerWriter and director Trey Parker says that his satirical puppet movie Team America: World Police was inspired from watching reruns of Thunderbirds on television. "We were just sitting around watching TV, and Thunderbirds was on Tech TV," Parker told Sci-Fi Wire. "We said, 'God, this could be really funny. We'll do this, but we'll make it filthy.' We said, 'Let’s do South Park does Thunderbirds.'"

Parker says he and partner Matt Stone initially thought that their idea was being made by someone else. "We called our agents, and we were like, 'We want to do Thunderbirds,'" Parker said. "They were like, 'Sorry, guys, someone's already doing it.' For like a day, we were super bummed out, because we were like, 'Someone's doing a puppet movie, and that's genius.' It wasn't until the next day we found out that they were doing it live-action."

The story, which follows a group of international agents who fight terrorists from a stronghold in Mount Rushmore, went through some major changes. "We rewrite well into post-production," Parker said. "And not just slightly. We were changing whole storylines. [The studio] was really nervous, because they knew that our style was to get to set and change absolutely everything. People were like, 'You know you can't do that with this, because these are puppets.' And we tried. But we found out you can't do that, because every day you would get to set, and it would be like, 'With this set these puppets can't do that.' We were like, 'We're going to do what we do, which is just sort of guerrilla-style figure out how to get something on film.'"

More On 'Team America: World Police'...

E-Mail This Article » Share your comments on 'Team America: World Police'