Begging your attention please for the strange tale of Shin Sang-Ok, and bear with me, because this is our only obscure Korean film reference for this entire issue.

In 1978, North Korea’s theocratic dictator, kidnapped South Korean director Shin Sang-Ok and his actress wife. After sending the pair off for three years hard toil in the re-education camps, Kim put his favourite filmmaker back behind the camera to make propaganda musicals for the North Korean cause. For the next five years, no budget was too lavish and no set too immense for the Dear Leader, but the Shins somehow gave their official minders the slip during the 1986 Venice film festival and took refuge in the US embassy. These days, the elderly Mr. Shin makes kiddie chop socky flicks such as 3 Ninjas Knuckle Up, resides in Hollywood and goes by the name Simon S. Sheen.
“Trey (Parker) and I had read up on Shin Sang-Ok,” explains Matt Stone, the 33 year old co-creator of South Park and Team America; World Police. “That inspired us. We were really intrigued by the fact that Kim Jong-Il is so into musicals and movies that he sits at home and thinks ‘I love this guy’s work. Why don’t I kidnap him?’ We had already done Saddam Hussein in the South Park movie and we weren’t sure how things with Osama Bin Laden would pan out, but once we started researching Kim Jong-Il, it was clear he was our guy, he was Team America’s villain. If anything, we’re not sure we did the Dear Leader justice. He’s really crazy and I think in Team America he just comes across as a regular musical-loving short-assed maniac who demands worship and parades and then kills people.”
While Team America is happy to take aim at the North Korean despot, persons from the current US administration are curiously absent from the film’s marionette cast. Was it the case that Matt and Trey had mined Bush The Younger et al. for all their ghoulish worth during their 2001 sitcom, That’s My Bush!, or were they just too soft a target?
“Yeah, exactly, the latter,” nods Matt. “Bush is an easy target for really lazy joke writers. It’s just so obvious. It’s the kind of stuff you expect to hear during the monologue on a bad chat-show. Who cares? And we really don’t know shit about politics. All we know is that you should be able to say ‘here’s some bad things about America’ without being seen as unpatriotic or somehow in favour of what happened on 9/11.”
Well, conventional humour has never been the man’s forte. He and Trey Parker first bonded over Monty Python sketches at the University Of Colorado and it was all downhill from there. In between watching sickening German Shit Videos (“The whole texture thing there makes me want to puke,” offers Matt), Mr. Stone did gain a degree in Mathematics before entering the world on no-brow animation with The Spirit Of Christmas, a short wherein Jesus and Santa battled it out with martial artistry and chainsaws.
The Comedy Central channel were quick to spot the boys’ potential and the anarchic subnormal delights of South Park hit the airwaves in 1997. Since then, there have been numerous attempts to crossover to cinema, presumably to escape the hordes of “pimply fifteen year olds” that Matt claims to always have on his tail. To date their filmography is hardly illustrious, and even the most blemished adolescents were unimpressed with Cannibal! The Musical, BASEketball and Orgazmo. But while Team America has similarly caused little sensation at the US box-office, it’s still easily their best movie to date.
“It’ll probably go down better here,” Matt says. “I mean, there’s a better understanding of satire here. The shows we love, like Little Britain and The Day Today, don’t have equivalents on American TV. Just as long as it does well enough to get ‘I’m So Ronery’ an Academy nomination for Best Original Song. For Trey and I, that’s our great hope because then we can invite Kim Jong-Il over to perform it live.”
It could happen. Well, apart from the Kim Jong-Il bit. The boys were nominated by the Academy previously for the song ‘Blame Canada’ from South Park; Bigger, Longer and Uncut, an occasion which saw them stroll up the red carpet in copies of Gwyneth Paltrow’s famous candy-pink number and J-Lo’s midriff-slashed Versace frock.
“The Oscars were actually great and really freaky,” Matt smiles. “We had dropped acid - well, we had to in order to go through with the dress thing - and we spent the night just looking around, going ‘Wow, look at that’ and laughing at all the bullshit.”
But will the boys be able to co-ordinate outfits this year? Relevant corners of the internet are rife with rumours that the boys will never work together again after Team America. Several stories have Matt saying that he’ll never work with puppets or Parker again.
“No honestly, that’s bullshit,” claims Matt. “It’s true that I’ll never work with puppets again, but I had a whole new fucking respect for Trey after Team America. He just kept going. He had four weeks to put together the DVD cut of the movie and he did it. And it was really tough going. I hated it. I broke up with my girlfriend. I fought with all my friends. I never slept. I lived on caffeine and cough syrup and sleeping pills. Puppets are a pain in the ass, you know? Their faces don’t move, so it’s hard getting them to do what you want.”
Messrs. Parker and Stone did, however, manage to manipulate their latex cast into an impressive variety of sexual positions, thereby fulfilling many bizarre Lady Penelope fantasies from the wonderful cyber-world of slash fiction.
“What do you mean there’s Penelope porn?” cries Matt incredulously. “Jesus, there’s some really sick shit on the ‘net. What did you say the address was again?”

Team America: World Police is on general release.