I don’t watch a lot of television other than football, news, cartoons with the kids (OK, sometimes WITHOUT the kids), and occasionally some sci-fi stuff. Same thing with movies. Typically, most of the movies I end up seeing are with my kids, so they end up being of the Disney, DreamWorks variety. You know, Shrek, Toy Story, Finding Nemo, etc. I’m looking forward to the new Pixar film “The Incredibles” as a family type outing. Everything else seems like rehashes of the same old stuff. Hollywood over the last 20 years hasn’t exactly gone out on a limb with cutting edge stuff unless it was limited release, low budget material. There are exceptions to the rule however.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone (Of South Park fame) decided for their next film to do something different. They wanted to make an action flick. Nothing cutting edge about that. It’s been done to death. These guys wanted something new. So they did it with puppets. Marionettes specifically.
For those of you younger than say 40, in the early sixties a British outfit called “ITC” made a number of TV shows featuring these kinds of puppets with the most well known of them being “Thunderbirds”. There were others as well (Supercar, Fireball XL5, Stingray, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons) all springing from the mind of Gerry Anderson. He had a hand in live action TV series as well (UFO, Space 1999), and movies (Journey to the Far Side of the Sun), but is best remembered for the action puppet series he created. He called these puppets “Super-Marionettes”.
Trey and Matt apparently enjoyed these shows as well and took the concept to an insane degree. Their puppets drink, fight, have sex, and destroy things on a regular basis. They have cars to drive, planes to fly, song and dance numbers to perform, all with detailed facial expressions to make no mistake on exactly what they’re feeling at any given moment. One of the funnier aspects of this movie is that they left in all the obvious strings that are attached intentionally. They could have easily blue-screened them out, but that is part of the gag. The vehicles as well have obvious control strings to move them in the direction they need to go in.
The bad guy in the movie is North Korea’s Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il. He’s doing all sorts of nefarious misdeeds, and who ya gonna call? Why, Team America: World Police of course! This group isn’t exactly covert since they walk (walk?) around with satin jackets with Team America: World Police emblazoned on the back.
The name of this movie is (drum roll please) “Team America: World Police”. It is NOT a family movie and I do not recommend that you take your kids to see this flick. I will be in line to watch though. For more information and some really funny clips, click this link and go to the official movie site. Team America
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