10 Movies That Went Into Totally Unnecessary Detail
2. Kim Jong Il's Puppet Wore Hand-Crafted Prescription Lenses - Team America: World Police
Despite Team America: World Police being a fundamentally ridiculous work of cinema, directors Matt Stone and Trey Parker were nevertheless incredibly exacting about the filmmaking process, and insisted upon an unexpected degree of realism during production.
Case in point, for the eyeglasses worn by North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il (Trey Parker) throughout the movie, the duo didn't merely settle for a random piece of glass or plastic - they actually had teeny tiny eyeglasses hand-crafted which even had a real prescription, to the tune of $300.
While it's reasonable to assume that Stone and Parker wanted to use real eyeglasses to subtly magnify Il's eyes, the effect is so minimal, and audiences have evidently taken it so obviously for granted, that it seems like an awful lot of effort for such a minimal return.
Then again, this is the production that also spent $1,000 on crafting each individual Uzi for the movie's terrorist characters. Wild.