Why Team America: World Police Was Temporarily Banned 10 Years After Its Release

There really just isn't another movie on this planet quite like "Team America: World Police." Directed by "South Park" co-creator Trey Parker from a script by Parker, fellow "South Park" co-creator Matt Stone, and Pam Brady, "Team America" is loosely a riff on the 1960s British TV series "Thunderbirds," using marionettes and various other forms of puppetry to create the entire movie. It's weird, it's vulgar, and the vast majority of the jokes have aged like milk, but there is some incredible craftsmanship on display and it's an interesting time capsule for the "edgy" comedy of 2004 and global politics at the time. "Team America" is about an international counterterrorism team taking on North Korean dictator Kim Jung Il, who himself is represented in a cartoonish puppet form. There's lots of swearing, some puppet-on-puppet violence, and even an explicit puppet sex scene, and somehow it's also apparently Jodie Foster's favorite movie. "Team America" has gained plenty of notoriety over the years, but it was still a bit of a shock when it was temporarily banned from theaters a full decade later. 

This strange, controversial film has always had a small cult following who love its decidedly un-PC humor, but it got a bit of a resurrection in 2014 due to another controversial movie helmed by "Superbad" directors Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg: "The Interview." Both films poked serious fun at North Korea, and unfortunately in this case, they got poked back. 

In 2014, Rogen and Goldberg's "The Interview" became the subject of an international incident when hackers got into Sony's emails and threatened to release all of them, along with other threats, if they didn't pull the movie from theaters. "The Interview" follows James Franco as a journalist who interviews and pals around with Kim Jung Il's son, Kim Jung Un, who replaced him as supreme leader of North Korea after his death in 2011. North Korea was not happy, denouncing the film. That led to the hackers pulling their little stunt, and in response Sony ended up pulling "The Interview" from theaters entirely, eventually releasing it digitally after things had settled a little. It was a major case of censorship for bizarre reasons, and it ended up hitting "Team America," too.

Some theaters that already had showtimes planned for "The Interview" decided to screen "Team America" instead as a bit of protest, since it made fun of North Korea so heavily. While this was admittedly a pretty funny idea, the folks at Paramount didn't want to end up in the same hot water as Sony, and they didn't allow anyone to screen the film, effectively banning it from theaters. That meant that theaters like Alamo Drafthouse and the Plaza Theater in Atlanta had to cancel their showings, which led to a lot of audiences feeling jilted and concerned about the state of censorship in America.

Things eventually calmed down a bit and people can now joke about the time Seth Rogen almost started a war with North Korea, but it was a shocking bit of censorship at the time and things were genuinely pretty tense. It's pretty wild, considering we're talking about a movie where a man is blown apart to Katy Perry's "Firework" and another movie where Matt Damon can only say his own name, like some kind of deranged human Pokémon, but they were held from theaters all the same. Both movies have plenty of reasons to be offended, but taking offense is no reason to censor something. While it's understandable that Sony and Paramount wanted to keep audiences safe from potential terrorist threats, it's also surprising that such huge corporations would bow to such demands. The whole ordeal was unpleasant and bizarre, though "Team America" has continued to have a small cult following and seems to have escaped the tiny theatrical ban relatively unscathed. 

"Team America" is an odd film because it's both kind of wonderful and kind of terrible at the same time, riding the line between entertainingly bad taste and the truly atrocious a little too dangerously. The best thing it gave us is the song "America, F*** Yeah!," and honestly, that still rules.