It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s...Supermarionation!Yes, yes, childrens, the weirdest show we all totally dig now is out in a brand spanking new set and I, for one, am both thrilled and a little bit ascared. See, when I was a kid, I remember stumbling upon repeats of Thunderbirds, the 1965 oddity from Space: 1999 guru Gerry Anderson, and thinking ‘oh my sweet holy shizz, what on God's green Earth are those?!’Puppets. They were puppets. And they freaked me the hell out. They also drew me in with their massive eyes and action-packed tales, but I couldn’t explain that then. No, back then it was just strangeness. Sweet, captivating strangeness.Some years later, I can happily report that the new 40th Anniversary Collector’s Edition box set is more fun to watch now than the show ever could have been then to my as-yet-uninformed mind. Maybe it’s because I can now appreciate the ingenuity Anderson employed to make main (wooden) man Jeff Tracy and his I...
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South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone just love raising tempers by spoofing controversial subjects. They riff on the Middle East conflict in their latest big-screen venture, Team America: World Police, filmed entirely with puppets. Their in-your-face antics include a puppet sex scene (yeah, you read that right), which was drastically reduced to obtain an R rating instead of an NC-17 for the comedy.
"It was probably twice as long as it is," Parker says. "A lot of the shots were longer, and it had a few extra special positions of lovemaking that just showed they really loved each other. The MPAA decided that you all weren't adult enough to see that."
"It was the only thing that the MPAA had a problem with in the whole movie," adds Stone. And Parker chimes in: "Which is pretty funny, because it was one of the easier things to shoot. We've all had experience doing that as childr
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