141 - Team America: World Police (feat. Stephen Stout)

Stephen Stout (Puffs) and the lads hop into their red, white, and blue helicopters and completely obliterate France as they cover Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s 2004 fraught satire of the War on Terror: Team America: World Police. Topics include Parker and Stone’s origins, the film’s overwhelming racism, and what a movie so steeped in the post-9/11 hysteria of the early 2000s means twenty years after its release.
Stephen Stout: Twitter ( / stevestout ) // Instagram ( / stevestout ) // Spock Hats Twitter ( / spockhats )
Puffs: Website (www.puffsthepl...) // Amazon (www.amazon.com...) // Broadway HD (www.broadwayhd...)
Media Referenced in this Episode:
• Team America: World Police. Dir. Trey Parker and Matt Stone. 2004.

• “Launching a small-scale offensive (www.latimes.co...) ” by John Horn. The Los Angeles Times. Sept. 12th, 2004.

• “Team America-World Police: Down-Home Theories of Power and Peace” (journals.sagep...) by James Gow. Millenium: Journal of International Studies. Volume 34, Issue 2. February 2006.

• “Playboy Interview: Parker & Stone” (www.playboy.co...) by Playboy Staff. June 2000.

• “Puppet Masters - Interview with Matt Stone and Trey Parker” (web.archive.or...) by Heather Havrilesky. Salon. October 12th, 2004.

TWOAPW theme by Brendan Dalton: Patreon ( / brendandalton ) // brendan-dalton.com (brendan-dalton....) // brendandalton.bandcamp.com (brendandalton.b...)
Commercial: “TWOAPW, Fuck Yeah (Abridged)”

[@PanAndScanBuddy]

This is a deeply unsettling image, thank you
19:57 The video Brian describes is "Your Studio and You" and it's on RUclips several times if you search that
1:51:58 Wait! You forgot one of my favorite bits, where they do America Fuck Yeah extremely slow and sad!

[@MrJohndoakes]

41:00 The trick with "that British guy" (Gerry Anderson) was able to move past marionettes, did his own budget sci-fi film "Journey to the Far Side of the Sun" (1969), and he was able to reuse props from that to make the bizarrely paranoid show "UFO" (1970-71) which became "Space:1999" (1975-77) when they would not renew "UFO." He did these two shows for ITV, not the BBC, and you would see them re-run on US TV for years (usually on independent UHF stations), alongside "The Avengers" (only the color seasons), "The Saint" (ditto), and "The Prisoner." Also, even when Anderson was doing marionettes there would be the occasion closeup shot of a hand actor pushing a button or turning a wheel if the action needed it.

[@MrJohndoakes]

The deal with the live-action Gerry Anderson shows was that they used models for all the vehicles larger than a car; it was jarring on "UFO" because that was partially set on Earth in a very 1969-looking 1980. "Space:1999" was entirely set an a Moonbase on Earth's moon that was accidentally blasted into deep space in 1999, so it was more consistent.

[@refitdan]

Just finished listening to the podcast version of this. Excellent episode (and I loved all of Brian's references).