Five years ago, Trey Parker and Matt Stone went to the Oscars when a song from their movie, South Park: Bigger, Longer And Uncut, was nominated. It was their big Hollywood moment, the sign of their arrival.

This year's Oscars ignored their latest movie, Team America: World Police, an action film starring marionettes that comes out on DVD tomorrow. The writing was probably on the wall when actor Sean Penn — whose puppet double was torn apart by cats in Team America — wrote that the film would "encourage irresponsibility that will ultimately lead to the disembowelment, mutilation, exploitation, and death of innocent people throughout the world."

Parker and Stone, in both their movies and their long-running animated comedy South Park, have made fun of the liberal left with undisguised zeal.

There's even a term — South Park Republicans — to describe the show's avid, right-leaning fans, often former leftists who lost their patience with the humourless, hectoring tone of the left.

"We don't do our stuff from a political standpoint," said Stone last week, "but it is amazing, if you rip on the left one time, you're South Park Republicans. Which is fine, because South Park's one of the only shows in the United States that will rip on the extremists on that side of the equation, and it's weird that we're the only show that does it."

"That's the amazing thing," adds Parker. "When Team America came out, the reactions seemed to be that about 80 per cent of the people really liked it, and there was no middle ground — 20 per cent of the people were furious. And those 20 per cent were all people on the far left. Nobody on the right — it was all people on the far left who were basically like 'How dare you?!' Especially when the election was two weeks away — 'You could get George Bush out of office! What are you thinking?' And maybe we don't want George Bush out of office. They're like, 'What?!!!' Or maybe we do ..."

"Or maybe we'd like to have our puppet movie be about America and not the elections," says Stone, "and that's why we didn't include any of that specific stuff. They were so offended — the joke being on them they just didn't like."

[ source: METRO ]