Team America: World Police
Meh. It's an homage I guess.
Woo! ;D
Still very much inferior to the real thing though. :P
To each his own. :)
I guess I find the humour in Team America a bit blunt at times, and visually I think coupling supermarionation with lots of realistic gore doesn't work that well. Not that the 60s shows have very advanced humour, I just enjoy watching the very silly takes they have on classic sci-fi tropes I guess. :)
"Remember, there's no I in Team America."
"From what Intelligence has gathered, it would be 9/11 times 100.
9/11 times a hundred? Jesus that's....
Yes, 91,100."
"It will be 9/11 times 2356.
That's....I don't even know what that is!
Nobody does."
"Intelligence is down! We have lost our intelligence"
"So rong earthrings!"
I enjoyed that Paris had cobbles shaped like croissants:
(http://i.imgur.com/XYY9E7dl.jpg)
Would anyone mind if I shifted the Team America discussion to a separate thread?
That's fine by me: I didn't even know about it until it was mentioned here.
But it's very much on-topic? ???
I feel like we've moved into discussing whether we like Team America, which is a different topic to whether Team America is or is not supermarionation? And this is a pinned thread so I guess I was thinking we should maybe keep it for helping introduce people to the canon supermarionation shows generally. That was my thinking anyhow.
I didn't notice that this was a pinned topic. I hadn't realised there was even a subforum for the topic!
In that case it makes sense to move it.
Assuming it gets moved: I don't particularly like Team America. It's funny but really doesn't have the legs to sustain a feature-length movie. A series of Robot Chicken length episodes could work, I suppose, but I've no intention of ever rewatching it as what I mostly remember was it dragging!
We have a supermarionation forum now, yes. I wanted somewhere to rant about all the old Fireball episodes I'm watching over dinner every evening :P
I agree that Team America could have worked better as a skit or series of mini-episodes, possibly inside a bigger comedy show.
Why is it not Supermarionation?
I can't comment on the precise puppetry techniques - certainly Team America mimics supermarionation in style (so I've kept the new split thread (yay mini admin moment)) in the subforum. I'd put the high use of gore in Team America as a stylistic difference, despite how suitable puppets are for it the original supermarionation techniques rarely involved actually removing or destroying any parts of puppets. There are also many more direct plays on the fact that in Team America the audience are supposed to be consciously aware of the puppetry going on.
I think there are much bigger differences with what I consider the supermarionation fandom shows, those being Gerry Anderson's original 1960s ones, which all share certain characteristics and themes. Again Team America parodies some of these (the operative/control room split is familiar, also the use of high tech vehicles, villain bases, etc) but in content Team America sets out to do very, very different things, it's a (in my mind a tad clumsy) satire and very self-conscious in how it reflects the real world - whereas the original supermarionation fandom is much more about down-the-line adventure shows and stories. The focus is just very different.
It is difficult in that supermarionation half refers to a specific visual technique but that technique is intrinsically linked with a certain set of shows telling certain stories a certain way, I will admit, but those are my thoughts anyhow.
Quote from: WikipediaTeam America: World Police, a 2004 film by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, is inspired by and uses the same style of puppetry as Thunderbirds. Stone and Parker, however, dubbed their version of the technique "Supercrappymation" since the strings controlling the puppets were intentionally left visible.
Not directly related to the original, but wouldn't otherwise exist in the form it does without them.
Yeah, I think I'd agree with that; as I initially said, it's an homage, but overall it's using the technique for different reasons and doing different stories with it. :)