Matt Stone

Slender and tall, with a curly 'fro, Stone found himself as an unlikely leading man when director David Zucker cast him and Parker in the leads of the feature comedy "BASEketball" (1998). While neither Stone nor Parker harbored a desire for a career before the cameras, they readily accepted the offer to participate in the film comedy. Parallels between their characters, who create a popular sensation by combining elements of baseball and basketball can readily be drawn. As "South Park's" pop cultural cachet inevitably cooled after several seasons on the air, Parker and Stone explored new horizons, again pushing politically correct boundaries. The first effort, "That's My Bush!" (Comedy Central, 2001), a sit-com parodying sit-coms by showing President George W. Bush in outrageous variations of cliched, "wacky" sit-com premises, failed to catch on with audiences, as much due to the pro-America sentiments following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as to its own creative shortcomings. Parker and Stone's next major project, however, was appealing subversive and high-concept: "Team America: World Police" (2004) satirized everything from the current political climate to big-budget action films and included a whopping does of the duo's trademark scatalogical humor, all delivered by puppets designed in a clunky, old-fashioned "Thunderbirds"-style.