Here’s Why Quentin Tarantino Saw ‘Team America: World Police’ Five Times
Quentin Tarantino is a massive, massive fan of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s filmmaking and has included Team America: World Police on his list of all-time favorite movies, an accomplishment that the two South Park creators should consider to be an incredible feet.
In their 2004 action-comedy puppet satire, Parker and Stone unleashed a hilarious, obscene, stop-motion assault on the culture of A-list actors using their fame to speak out on political issues as if they were actual experts. The very acronym of the Film Actors’ Guild communicated Parker and Stone’s distaste for the Hollywood elite who saw themselves as world leaders just because they appeared in blockbuster films, and every depiction of or allusion to an A-list entertainer in Team America was simultaneously vulgar, ingenious and insulting — save one.
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When Team America first hit theaters, Tarantino, fresh off the success of Kill Bill: Volume 2, went to see the movie in theaters “five or six times,” not just because it was a hilarious, high-octane takedown of American culture, but because Tarantino is literally the only celebrity in Hollywood whom the movie complimented.
“When Team America came out, I saw it like five or six times,” Tarantino explained. “That’s a movie that nobody wanted to be referenced in, because they skewered everybody!”
However, in Team America, there is a brief but resonant homage to Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies when the team walks down a hallway in slow motion to the tune of Tomoyasu Hotei’s iconic hit “Battle Without Honor or Humanity,” just as it played in the scene that introduces Lucy Liu’s character in Kill Bill: Vol. 1.
So, while celebrities like Alec Baldwin and Sean Penn were getting absolutely roasted by their puppet portrayals, Tarantino was able to watch Team America and come away feeling flattered. “When Team America gets together and they play that Kill Bill music that pumps you up, I go, ‘Oh my God, I’m the only person in town that’s referenced respectfully in Team America!’” Tarantino explained.
Tarantino would later include Team America on his list of top 20 favorite movies from 1992 to 2009, while other less complimented celebrities featured in the film would rage against Parker and Stone for insulting the honor and political infallibility of the noble American A-lister. Penn famously wrote a letter to the duo in which he criticized their apparent decision “to encourage irresponsibility that will ultimately lead to the disembowelment, mutilation, exploitation and death of innocent people throughout the world.”
Honestly, the South Park creators unintentionally inspiring a wave of graphic and grotesque violence as described by Penn sounds like the premise to a kick-ass Tarantino film.
