Team America: World Police (2004) on Netflix

Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Team America: World Police (2004)

Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.

• Trey Parker and Matt Stone dreamed the film up while watching Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's marionette series Thunderbirds out of boredom, then asked about the rights and learned Universal already had a Thunderbirds film going, directed by Jonathan Frakes.
• The puppet sex scene came back from the MPAA with an NC-17. Parker and Stone cut it from a minute and a half to 50 seconds and showed the board at least nine versions before it granted an R, while the board said nothing about puppets having their heads blown off.
• The detail work was punishing: a miniature Uzi cost $1,000 to build, Kim Jong Il's spectacles held hand-ground prescription lenses, and even with three dozen marionette operators a simple shot of a character taking a drink could take half a day.
• Matt Stone called the film the worst time of his life, living on coffee through 20-hour days and sleeping pills at night. The print ran so late that journalists at a Los Angeles junket on 5 October were shown only a 20-minute reel, and some producers first saw the finished film with its sound mix at the premiere.
• Matt Damon's puppet can only say his own name because of how the doll turned out: Parker and Stone said they wrote that personality only after seeing the puppet built for him, which looked kind of mentally deficient.
• Alec Baldwin enjoyed being lampooned and offered to voice his own puppet, but Sean Penn, shown claiming Iraq had been happy and utopian before Team America arrived, sent Parker and Stone an angry letter inviting them to tour Iraq with him and ending with the words "fuck you".
• Shortly after release North Korea asked the Czech Republic to ban the film. The Czechs refused, calling the request an effort to undermine their post-Communist-era freedom, and Kim Jong Il, a noted film buff, never said anything in public about his puppet.
• When Sony pulled The Interview in December 2014 after threats from the Guardians of Peace, cinemas including the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin booked free showings of Team America in protest, and Paramount pulled the film from them too, in Cleveland, Atlanta and New Orleans.