Matt Stone and Trey Parker may be best known for South Park, but they also have an overlooked comedy that deserves more love. In 1998, the South Park creators teamed up with the director of Airplane! and Naked Gun for the comedy BASEketball. While Stone and Parker only starred in the film, they brought a lot of South Park humor with them.
BASEketball features Stone and Parker as Doug and Joe, two friends who invent a new sport combining baseball and basketball after regular sports leagues collapse due to corporate dealings. The movie pokes fun at professional sports leagues while also serving as a hilarious tale of two friends who head in different directions when finding success.
BASEketball Brings Everything South Park Fans Love About Matt Stone & Trey Parker
Stone & Parker Brought Much Of Their Humor To The Comedy
BASEketball is an interesting Matt Stone and Trey Parker movie because it is one of the only ones they ever did that they had no part in writing. However, this does not mean they didn’t come up with many of their lines in the movie. Stone and Parker heavily improvised many of their scenes, and the humor of South Park shone through.
The game of BASEketball has three players on offense and three on defense. When the offense has the basketball, a player lines up to take a sH๏τ. A person on defense then stands across from them and tries for a “psych out,” which involves either throwing out insults or attempting to distract them from making the basket by doing something stupid.
This is where South Park’s humor comes into play. Parker and Stone deliver lines that do everything from insulting their opponents, their teammates, or just about anyone from pop culture in the 90s. The movie also shares South Park’s tendency to deconstruct its subject, which in this case is professional sports in general.
BASEketball Was The Last Great Movie From The Director Of Airplane! & Naked Gun
The Zucker Brothers Invented BASEketball Years Before The Movie
Of course, this isn’t a Matt Stone and Trey Parker movie. They only starred in it and had the freedom to improvise their lines. This was a David Zucker movie. Most comedy movie fans know Zucker as the director of two of the best spoof movies of all time. In 1980, he made his directorial debut with Airplane!, a spoof of disaster movies.
Zucker then proved to be a master at spoof movies, directing the Val Kilmer spy spoof movie Top Secret and the police procedural spoof, The Naked Gun, which was loosely based on the classic Police Squad television show. It was 10 years after that latter movie that Zucker directed BASEketball, which took aim at inspirational sports movies.
However, in a sad turn of events, BASEketball was the last great original comedy for Zucker. Following this, he made My Boss’s Daughter, which has a rock-low 7% Rotten Tomatoes score, and then went on to make two installments in the Scary Movie franchise. After An American Carol, Zucker hasn’t directed a film since 2008.
BASEketball went on to become a real-world game inspired by the movie.
It is also interesting to note that David Zucker and his brother Jerry invented BASEketball as a game before making the movie years later, collaborating with the South Park creators (via The Things). Matt Stone explained this while discussing the movie bombing at the box office:
“It seems like the Zucker brothers invented it years and years ago. They actually used to play it at their house every Saturday. Then they tried to do a TV pilot with the concept but that failed, then of course they did a movie and we destroyed it.”
Saying they destroyed it referred to its poor performance at the box office and in reviews. Critics slammed it, awarding it a low 41% Rotten Tomatoes score. However, as the audience score of 74% shows, the film earned its fans later on home video. For fans of South Park, there is a lot to love about BASEketball, and it deserves a better reputation.
