There was some controversy surrounding "Up the Down Steroid" and the 2005 film "The Ringer", as both feature the same plot: someone pretending to be disabled in order to compete in the Special Olympics. According to the episode's DVD audio commentary, series co-creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone did not think that they ripped off "The Ringer", since the idea to them did not seem hard to come up with, and they did not even think it was big enough for a twenty-minute episode let alone a two-hour film.