by Ron Magid

Team America posits a world war between stiff action heroes and puppet dictators. Appropriately, its stars are marionettes reminiscent of those from the ’60s Gerry Anderson Supermarionation TV series Joe 90, Captain Scarlet and Thunderbirds.

The men behind the puppets are the Chiodo Brothers: Stephen, Charlie and Edward. Over the course of their careers, they’ve employed every technique imaginable, including stop motion (Vincent, Elf), claymation (Pee Wee’s Big Adventure) and cable control (Critters) to bring inanimate objects to life. But Team America represents their greatest challenge: fabricating, mechanizing and puppeteering a huge cast of animatronic marionettes. Stephen breaks down their division of labor: “Edward did the producing, getting the puppets built for production. Charlie headed the cosmetic crew, making them look good on set. I worked with Trey [Parker], Matt [Stone] and the puppeteers to hone the performances.”

Norman Tempia designed the characters, then backwards-engineered their mechanics some 10 weeks before the Chiodos joined Team America in November 2003. Explains Charlie, “After sculpting the characters, Norman designed the underskull, which he filled with servomotors.” (Each puppet had nine servomotors that controlled eyeblinks, brow movements, jaw and lip movements, smiles and frowns.) “He made everything modular: the distance from every character’s nose to its eyes is the same. Everything plugs into its place.”

Despite the puppets’ identical internal anatomies, Tempia achieved a wide range of personalities, from the stalwart Team America characters to caricatures of Osama Bin Laden and Korean dictator Kim Jong Il.

The 22", 10-string marionettes were built to the same specs as their Gerry Anderson ancestors. “It made a lot of sense,” Edward says. “Our generic male and generic female body structures are one-third scale, which opened up a great realm of doll paraphernalia. Also, the fact that they’re puppets is part of the joke — no attempt has been made to hide their strings.”

But sometimes the joke was on the Chiodos — especially in tight shots, where there could be far more strings than characters. “When you have four puppets, the number of strings crossing faces gets way too distracting, so Trey would inevitably say, ‘Start cutting strings,’” Stephen recalls. But each severed string made the puppeteering of the marionettes harder.

The puppets’ skins were foam latex, as were their hands. As a sly homage to Thunderbirds, insert shots of gloved hands picking up objects were employed, but that’s where the resemblance ended. “They look like simple, traditional marionettes,” Stephen says, “but their radio-controlled mechanical heads really make them more like little robots on strings.”

More than 60 crewmembers constructed some 300 different characters used throughout production. “But we only made 95 hero mechanical skulls,” Stephen explains. “When we were finished with one character, Charlie’s cosmetic department would take the face off, then glue another completely different face — like little prosthetics — on the skull to create a new character. They put beards on, changed hairstyles. A night crew of six repaired and prepared the puppets for the next day’s shooting.”

Parker and Stone rewrote the script daily to keep the satire as fresh as possible, but this created huge headaches for the Chiodos. Much like actors in musicals, puppeteers typically perform to playback. But that wasn’t possible once the rewriting began. “We started out playing prerecorded dialogue with the computerized mouths synched to the playback,” Stephen confirms. “But because Trey was rewriting, there was no time to prerecord, so he did the dialogue on the fly while other puppeteers performed the facial animation on Gilderfluke — a radio-controlled box system — along with him. Trey operated the lever that controlled the puppet’s mouth, lip-synching the dialogue loudly enough so the puppeteers doing the body movements, who were as high as 15 feet above the stage, could hear him and follow along.”

“He’s done three at a time, all having a conversation with each other,” adds Edward. “He would make the mouths open and close while the marionette-ists performed the body movements and the animatronic puppeteers made the eyes blink, the brows move, and the mouths smile and frown.”

Since this is an action movie, the puppets had their own special-effects department, headed by Oscar-winning visual-effects veteran Joe Viskocil (Independence Day), who squibbed the characters for bullet hits and more. According to Charlie, “We’ve built breakaway bodies, blow-up bodies and a variety of stunt puppets, but when it comes to the actual rigging and explosions, it’s Joe’s show.”

The Chiodos, who have stubbornly resisted effects fads, were ecstatic when Parker and Stone hired them to tackle their first marionette action picture. As Charlie concludes, “We’d always hoped people would understand the charm and audience appeal of these puppets.”