South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone had a slightly different plan for their 2004 puppet movie Team America: World Police in the early stages of development. In addition to taking inspiration from the 1960s sci-fi series Thunderbirds, Parker and Stone became fixated on doing a send-up of Roland Emmerich’s disaster flick The Day After Tomorrow as soon as they read its synopsis in a magazine. The idea of making a movie about sudden global warming that would attack the Earth sounded so ridiculous to the duo that it brought them to tears. In fact, Parker and Stone found it hard to believe that a studio was even willing to invest in such a project.
While speaking with Variety in 2003, the pair revealed that they’d put considerable thought into parodying The Day After Tomorrow before transforming the film into the Team America that was eventually released. According to Stone, someone managed to sneak them a copy of the script for the Emmerich movie ahead of its premiere. That sparked the idea of secretly shooting the story word for word using marionettes. On top of that, Parker and Stone planned to release their version on either the same day or the day after The Day After Tomorrow was released.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone Almost Made ‘Team America’ a Shot-for-Shot Puppet Parody of ‘The Day After Tomorrow’
Had the two gone with the latter idea, they would’ve called their movie The Day After That. Unfortunately, as hilarious as they thought this all was, their lawyer convinced them that they’d never be able to get the film released. However, that doesn’t mean that The Day After Tomorrow didn’t still influence certain aspects of Team America. In the commentary track for the Season 9 South Park episode “Two Days Before the Day After Tomorrow,” Parker and Stone admitted that the one thing they loved about Emmerich’s film was the music.
“The music in The Day After Tomorrow is some of the best movie music ever,” Parker confessed. “That’s the only thing that makes these movies even watchable is that the music is so good it convinces you this isn’t as shi—y as it looks,” he continued. Stone then explained that the main theme from Team America was basically just a rip-off of the score from The Day After Tomorrow because they liked it so much.
“I wish we could’ve just bought Day After Tomorrow music and put it under Team America,” Stone said in retrospect.
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