Published in Beat Magazine, December 15, 2004

Matt Parker and Trey Stone avoid controversy like Colin Farrell avoids alcohol, so it should be no surprise that the latest cinematic offering from the slightly warped minds behind South Park would have drawn fire from American censors. Currently in cinemas, their movie Team America: World Police took at least nine edits to avoid an NC-17 rating (banning anyone under 18 from seeing it) by toning down a sex scene. Apparently it made no difference that the scene in question was between two marionettes.

Apart from the risk of such a scene leading to an overflow of jokes about “having wood”, it is hard to imagine what could be dangerous about watching a bit of string puppet sauciness. The Team America cast look remarkably like the Thunderbirds, so perhaps the censors were concerned for the reputation of Lady Penelope; there are too many people who believe she indulges in a bit of rough trade with Parker as it is. Maybe the dolls weren’t practising safe sex, so the offending footage may have trivialised the risk of sexually transmitted termites. Either way the Motion Picture Association of America needed a lot of convincing to let minors see the film.

It has been said before, and will be again… um, now actually… but the American tendency to have all sorts of conniptions about sex in their media while allowing eighteen different flavours of violence is quite bizarre. It seems that in order for a scene to be broadcast without trauma (to the watchdogs, that is), the following rule applies - if one character does something to physical to another, only one of the two may enjoy it. It’s a wonder that the population of the US is still breeding!

But back to the subject at hand. With such a clamp on puppets physically expressing themselves, how would the MPAA have handled something like Meet the Feebles?

There is a Peter Jackson that Hollywood doesn’t talk about much. Long before he showed us how nine hours of a short guy carrying a piece of jewellery could gross about three billion dollars worldwide, the New Zealand director was more concerned with shock and splatter than sword and sorcery. His first opus, 1987’s Bad Taste, told a gruesomely illustrated tale of a small town being used as a base/abattoir for an intergalactic fast food chain – I’d like to see Morgan Spurlock try that McDiet for a month. The money from Bad Taste helped fund a journey into the seedy muppet underworld behind the Fabulous Feebles Variety Hour. Ignoring the junkie frog and the homicidal hippo for a moment, the sexual hijinx backstage went through more permutations than a Rubik’s cube. Elephant with chicken, walrus with cat, rat with poodle, walrus with hippo… it was like someone plied the fauna on Noah’s Ark with champagne and oysters. The fact that the Feebles were all animals might have given their promiscuity a bit more of a National Geographic aspect, if you can imagine any of David Attenborough’s subjects going through Vietnam flashbacks, or singing about sodomy. To answer the above question, Meet The Feebles never did get an MPAA rating, and probably left the censors that viewed it unable to look at Kermit or Miss Piggy the same way again.

So, after much back-and-forthing, Team America got stamped with the US version of the R rating, which states that those under seventeen can only see the film with a parent or adult guardian - for “adult guardian” read “seventeen year-old friend”. But why all the consternation? According to producer Scott Rudin, films that have humans going through similar sexual gymnastics have avoided the NC-17 tag (a tag that, in the US, is regarded as toxic to box office success as the words “starring Madonna”), and most of the world’s Star Wars figurines have gotten just as frisky, as their owners have dealt with puberty. None of the characters of Team America are even anatomically correct, so those fetishists waiting for the extended DVD version for a bit of hardcore puppet action will be sadly disappointed.

Perhaps this is another symptom of America’s clamp on anything erogenous since Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” (I love that term – it sounds like someone’s closet short-circuited) at the Superbowl, or possibly Stone and Parker’s pedigree has earmarked them for deeper scrutiny – remember Satan and Saddam in bed, in South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut? Whatever the reasoning, if there’s a demand for a bit of wooden whoopee, then there will be a supply. Those teens unwilling to settle for Team America’s watered-down thrills may soon be sneaking into the nearest Club X, to leer at porn stars who are more building supplies than flesh anyway, or taking their parents’ credit card numbers to www.puppetpimp.com. If this is so, then the creators of Team America: World Police will have compromised their vision of how two bits of timber express their love, for nothing.