Trivia / Team America: World Police

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• Acting for Two: This happened a lot. There were only 10 voice actors in the entire movie, and Trey Parker alone did the voices of Gary, Joe, Kim Jong Il, Hans Blix, Carson, Tim Robbins, and the drunk in the bar.
• All-Star Cast: The Japanese dub cast is notable for including several high-profile Anime voice actors;: Toshiyuki Morikawa (Gary), Kenyū Horiuchi (Joe), Rikiya Koyama (Chris) and Urara Takano (Sarah).
• Approval of God: Many of the high-profile actors who Parker and Stone insulted in the movie thought it was hilarious, and nearly all of them wished that they'd been contacted so they could voice themselves acting like spineless morons and dying in gruesome ways.
• Auteur License: Trey and Matt forfeited their salaries in exchange for complete creative control from Paramount, feeling that they didn't really need the money. The drawback was that they had nothing to look forward to on days when they were particularly burned out.
• Bringing in the Expert: Parker and Stone partly made the film because of their frustration with CGI, so they hired a lot of special effects artists from the movies that they were parodying. The pyrotechnics and modeling teams had worked on Independence Day, and the cinematographer had worked on Spider-Man 2 and The Matrix. The latter jumped at the chance to work with puppets because he was sick of all the green-screening and composite shots he'd had to do for the last few years. Kim Jong-Il's glasses are real prescription glasses because they hired a real optometrist to make the lenses (Parker apparently kept requesting they be bigger).
• Creator Backlash: The unanticipated workload of an all-marionette feature, attempting to make a studio blockbuster as spontaneously as a South Park episode and the compromises they had to make in order to have total creative control convinced Trey and Matt to stay out of feature films for a while. It wouldn't be until 2019, when South Park would announce its renewal until season 26, that the two began teasing the possibility of new features.
• Creator-Preferred Adaptation: Kind of. While he didn't enjoy the movie personally and is generally not a fan of Black Comedy to begin with, Thunderbirds creator Gerry Anderson said that this movie is a better adaptation of his series than the live-action one which came out the same year.
• Dueling Works: As mentioned elsewhere, this Affectionate Parody of Thunderbirds, done in the style of the original series, was released three months after a licensed live-action adaptation of the series was released.
• Executive Meddling: Parker and Stone got hit with this hard during the production, mainly by studio heads trying to tone down the vulgarity and sexual content, enough that they mutually agreed to never do a big-budget movie again. Paramount also apparently became savvy to their censor decoys and would often approve them in favor of what they were meant to distract from.
• Fake American: Sarah is voiced by Toronto-born Masasa Moyo.
• Mid-Development Genre Shift: There seem to be a lot of conflicting stories going around as to what exactly the film's concept began as- some sources say Trey and Matt originally wanted to make an R-rated Thunderbirds movie, or wanted to remake either Armageddon (1998) or The Day After Tomorrow (the former is more likely as its referenced in this film) with puppets, while leaving the script entirely unchanged. Another story says it was originally written as a sequel to the cult film Megaforce.
• The Other Marty: Josh Keaton, of Transformers: Prime and The Spectacular Spider-Man fame, reportedly recorded some dialogue but got dubbed over. He was surprisingly cool about it.
• Reality Subtext: Michael Moore's treatment in this film came out of revenge from Matt Stone. He wasn't happy when Bowling for Columbine deceived moviegoers into thinking he favored Moore's causes.
• Throw It In!: According to Stone and Parker, they hadn't originally planned to make Matt Damon any smarter or dumber than the rest of the actors guild. However, when his borderline-caveman looking puppet came in, they decided on the spot to make him a drooling idiot who could only say his own name, which Matt Damon himself was initially more confused by it (because he didn't understand what they were mocking him for) but thought it was hilarious nonetheless.
• Troubled Production: Trey and Matt legitimately had no idea how difficult an all-marionette action film would be (judging by the source material) and clashed with the puppet-makers when they were told that even the puppetry that was meant to look bad on purpose took a considerable amount of puppeteering expertise, rehearsal and money that would not allow for the same kind of spontaneous script-changes that would come with making an episode of South Park, and even then, they were making last-minute changes a mere four days before its red carpet premier. As mentioned above, they also forfeited their salaries in favor of complete creative control when Paramount started coming down on them about censorship, making them more apathetic to their already disillusioned vision. It also didn't help that they jumped into production immediately after wrapping season 7 of South Park, then, when production on the film wrapped, immediately jump into production on season 8, leaving them physically and creatively exhausted by the end of the year. The result was Parker and Stone swearing off feature films for several years so they could just remain in their comfort zone on South Park.
• What Could Have Been
  • Matt Damon was originally supposed to be portrayed as intelligent and articulate, closer to his real-life counterpart, but when Trey and Matt saw that his puppet looked "retarded" they decided to portray him as such, with the resulting Running Gag giving him much more screentime.
  • At one point, Ben Affleck was going to be shown as a member of F.A.G., being portrayed as a literal hand puppet as a reference to Parker and Stone's previous portrayal of him.
  • The deleted scenes and animated storyboards show that the film was supposed to have slightly deeper character development, less subtle racism, and I.N.T.E.L.L.I.G.E.N.C.E. called F.O.N.Z.Y.

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