Canned Dead Parrot. Created in 1994 by Bear, Bear & Bear LTD. Prior to obtaining an official licence from the Python’s, the company did their best to rip off the “Dead Parrot” Sketch” from 1969. Although the can does not contain any direct mention of Monty Python, it’s very clearly a reference to their famous skit. Inside the can is a plastic bird cage with a toy parrot hanging upside down. 
 
If your dream has been to one day be the proud owner of a loo roll (that’s toilet paper for our non-UK readers) officially sanctioned by Monty Python’s Flying Circus, then today my silly-walking friend is your lucky day. According to the website Monty Python’s Daily Llama there are allegedly 1,500 different items currently up for auction, such as the promotional foot that was created in conjunction with the Spamalot musical at New York’s Shubert Theatre in 2005, and an actual container of “Canned Dead Parrot” which is a clever nod to one of the most memorable moments from the Flying Circus television series (the Dead Parrot Sketch performed by John Cleese and Michael Palin). Many of the items were produced in small quantities like the 1072 bottles of “Spamalot” steak sauce that were released in 2007 in honor of the musical’s run at London’s Palace Theatre, making them incredibly rare collectibles in many cases.

If you’re a Python super-fan like I am I’m sure you’re going to strongly consider picking up something from the auction, which includes a wide array of vintage posters from the U.S. and Germany and a even copy of the 1990 Monty Python’s Flying Circus computer game from 1990. Say WHAT? More information on the items up for auction can be found on Monty Python’s Daily Llama. I’ve posted a number of my favorite items from the auction below along with some background information pertaining to their creation, rarity and history. As great as some of this stuff is I would have liked to have seen a piece of “Venezuelan Beaver Cheese,” a “hovercraft full of eels” or even an action figure based on Michael Palin’s bicycling enthusiast “Mr. Pither.” But you can’t always get what you want, can you?
 

This computer game was the very first officially licensed product by Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Made by Core Design, the same company that put out ‘Tomb Raider,’ the 2D shooter had the players help “D.P. Gumby” find four missing pieces of his brain.
 

“Gumby” plush figures. Ranging in size from nine, twelve and fourteen inches tall these plush figures were the first toys officially licensed by the Pythons.
 

Another cheeky creation from Bear, Bear & Bear LTD. Incredibly this roll of toilet paper contains famous images and quotes from the ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus’ TV series such as the “Ministry of Silly Walks”; “Nudge, Nudge”; everyone’s favorite gender-bending sing-along “The Lumberjack Song” and others. Comes with faux fingerprints in accordance with the box’s claim that this TP is in “slightly used” condition.
 

This promotional “coconut” was sent to members of the press and Python VIPs as a part of the “Special Edition” release of ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’ by Columbia/Tristar Home Entertainment. An actual coconut it was outfitted with a zipper in the middle that when opened revealed a promotional t-shirt.
 
More Monty Python memorabilia for you to spend your money on, after the jump…

 
“Saddlebags, saddlebags,” was an utterance that could be heard around my local school yard during the mid-1970s. We used it to signify someone talking absolute bollocks or, as an extended form of et cetera, et cetera whilst channeling your best Yul Brynner. More importantly, it was the demarcation line between those who grew-up with the Norwegian Blue of Monty Python and those who fell under the influence of Rutland Weekend Television from whence the term “saddlebags” came. Of course, part of the reason for this generational shift was age and viewing access—Python had kicked-off on very, very late night TV in 1960s, while Rutland Weekend bounced into my life at the sensible and dare I say, neatly turned-out time of nine o’clock in the evening.

Rutland Weekend Television was a spin-off from Python, the brainchild, creation and vehicle for the multi-talented Eric Idle. The Pythons have often (rightly) described themselves as being like The Beatles of comedy. There’s John Cleese and Graham Chapman as the sarcastic and ambitious John Lennon; Michael Palin and Terry Jones as the nice but bossy Paul McCartney; Terry Gilliam as a kind of hybrid Ringo Starr (with a possible hint of Keith Moon); and Eric Idle who is the George Harrison of the band—which probably explains why Harrison and Idle were such good friends. (Harrison made a guest appearance on the RWT Christmas special as a pirate.)
 

 
After the final TV series of Monty Python in 1974, each member had gone off to make their own solo “album.” Cleese had left just before the fourth series, which certainly imbalanced the show’s dynamic, to make Fawlty Towers. While Jones and Palin devised the delightful Ripping Yarns; Gilliam moved into movie-making with Jabberwocky; and Idle published his brilliant and often pant-wettingly hilarious novel Hello Sailor (apparently first written in 1970) and the series that certainly opened my eyes to the potential of television comedy and the genius of Eric Idle, Rutland Weekend Television.
 

 
Idle’s concept for Rutland Weekend Television was brilliant but simple: a TV broadcast station in Rutland (a tiny—but real—landlocked English county in East Midlands) from where a continuity presenter introduces a series of films, musical numbers, documentaries, light entertainment and chat shows. The format gave creator and writer Idle to show-off his incredibly inventive magpie-like talents with which he lampooned every kind of TV and film genre—and many of his ideas would later be reused by other (lesser) talents.

From its opening credits and introduction from mine host, a cloying, simpering, insincere idiot as you can imagine, I was hooked. This was comedy gold that tapped into a generation who had been weaned on TV and understood the inventive and playful way in which Idle spoofed the format and language of television. In the opening episode, the sketch that confirmed (for me) this was definitely classic and important TV featured Eric Idle and Henry Woolf speaking nothing but gibberish:

Eric Idle: Ham sandwich, bucket and water plastic Duralex rubber McFisheries underwear. Plugged rabbit emulsion, zinc custard without sustenance in Kipling-duff geriatric scenery, maximises press insulating government grunting sapphire-clubs incidentally.

(It’s the “incidentally” at the end that makes this quote seem all too plausible, especially in a decade where language was being mutated by Marxist sociologists into into utterable, alienating, dystopian bilge, incidentally.)

This was literate intelligent comedy that destroyed the whole artifice of television interviewing and its use of intonation to express thoughts and emotions in one fell swoop. This was also the sketch where “saddlebags, saddlebags” came from, as you can imagine. It was like watching a great scene by Harold Pinter or Samuel Beckett. Indeed, Henry Woolf who was one of RWT‘s regular cast members was the very man who had original produced and directed Pinter’s first play and was friends with the playwright from his early years.
 

 
Not only was there Idle and Woolf but the genius of Neil Innes from the Bonzo Dog Band (who had previously worked with Idle, Jones and Palin on the legendary children’s series Do Not Adjust Your Set), David Battley and Gwen Taylor. The series was made on a miniscule budget (knowing the BBC probably a bus pass, a table and chairs and some paint), but the lack of funds hardly stifled Idle’s startling invention. If ever there was a man deserving to be called the heir to Spike Milligan then it is certainly Mr. Idle—though this two bit typist believes Eric is greater than Spike for a variety of reasons. Of course, the most famous spin-off from RWT was The Rutles—Idle’s mockumentary All You Need Is Cash—which grew a life of its own with Neil Innes’ brilliant songs.

Alas, RWT only lasted two series and a spin-off book and album (which I still proudly own), and has (to the best of my knowledge) never been repeated by those anonymous controllers at the BBC. Worse no DVD has ever been issued, which has nothing to do with Mr. Idle (I have personally been assured) but all to do with the Beeb. Thankfully, some absolutely delicious bastard has uploaded the whole series onto YouTube, so you can now see what you’ve been missing, as you can imagine.
 
More from Rutland Weekend Television, after the jump…

 
John Cleese would spend hours finessing a script—choosing the right word, or considering where best to place a comma for greatest comedic effect. His writing partner, Graham Chapman preferred to sit quietly, listening, smoking his pipe, and from time-to-time suggest an idea that would often turn an average sketch into something extraordinary. One such example, was Chapman’s inspiration to insert a dead parrot into some old material that led to the writing of one of Monty Python‘s most famous routines.

The “Dead Parrot Sketch” developed out of something Cleese and Chapman had previously written for a one-off special called How to Irritate People. Produced by David Frost, How to Irritate People was a collection of sketches introduced by Cleese, and co-starring Chapman, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Michael Palin, Connie Booth, Gillian Lind and Dick Vosburgh. The programme was notable for being the first time Palin worked with Cleese and Chapman, a year before they created Monty Python’s Flying Circus, as Palin explained in Bob McCabe’s biography of Chapman, The Life of Graham:

‘...that was the first time I’d ever worked with John and Graham, as an actor, and that was very much like a miniPython, except that I wasn’t writing with Terry [Jones]. I was an actor with their material, but we changed it a little bit in rehearsal and we’d really enjoyed doing that, even though the end result had not been successful, largely due to problems with recording.’

The show appears never to have been shown on British television, but was aired in the US on January 21st, 1969. The programme contained elements of material later used on Python, in particular the “Car Salesman” sketch, which eventually became the famous (Dead) “Parrot Sketch.”

The “Car Salesman” was more than a piece of creative comedy, it was an idea suggested by Palin, and based on his own dealings with a less than scrupulous garage owner, as Cleese explains:

‘..that was based on a man called Mr Gibbins, which is Helen [Palin’s] unmarried name. And Mr Gibbins ran a garage somewhere in Michael’s area, and Michael started to tell me about taking his car in to Mr Gibbins if there was something wrong with it, and he would ring Mr Gibbins and say, “I’m having trouble with the clutch,” and Mr Gibbins would say, “Lovely car, lovely car.” And Michael said, “Well, yes, Mr Gibbins, it is a lovely car, but I’m having trouble with the clutch.” “Lovely car, lovely car, can’t beat it.” “No, but we’re having trouble with it.” “Well, look,” he says, “if you ever have any trouble with it, bring it in.” Michael would say, “Well, I am having trouble with it and I have brought it in,” and he’d say, “Good, lovely car, lovely car, if you have trouble bring it in,” and Michael would say, “No, no, no, the clutch is sticking,” and he would say, “Sign of a quality car, if you had a sticky clutch first two thousand miles, it’s the sign of good quality,” and he was one of those people you could never get to take a complaint seriously. And Michael and I chatted about this, and I then went off and wrote a sketch with Graham about a man returning a second-hand car…’

The sketch has Chapman, as a Jacques-Tati-like customer, dealing with Palin’s furtive car salesman.
 

 
More on the metamorphosis of the “Dead Parrot Sketch,” after the jump…
 

 
‘All of my films have really been statements about America, strangely enough,’ said director Terry Gilliam in this documentary about his work and career, made for The South Bank Show in 1991.

If you look closely at them, or I sit and try to describe them in some way, they’re all me reacting to that country I left. They’re seen through the eyes of somebody who lives in Britain, who’s been affected by this world, but they’ve all been messages in film cans back to America.

They’ve been disguised with the Middle Ages and the Eighteenth Century and everything, but it’s about that. This one [The Fisher King] has no disguise—that’s what’s interesting about it. It’s there, it’s naked, this is the world.

Gilliam concludes the interview by dismissing any possibility of complacency in light of the success of The Fisher King .

Let’s say this film is successful and America is going to offer me money, there will be that tendency to say, “Oh, I’ll make more like this.” It’s easier to make films like this because I don’t have the same battles and I hope the perverse side of my nature is still there to rescue me from this, because I think that’s what’s kept me going is the sheer perverseness and because the easy path is that way…(Makes hand gesture) [and] I don’t do it

I think I’ll know when I’m really middle-aged when I go that way. If the next film is an easy film—you know it’s over. You’ll know he’s middle-aged, he’s fat, he’s a slob, he’s given up the battle.

As if that is ever going to happen, Mr. Gilliam!
 

 
Watch Terry Gilliam’s latest film ‘The Wholly Family’ after the jump…
 

 
You could say it all started with Adolf Hitler. That was who John Cleese could impersonate when he was at school. Highly wrought, apoplectic impressions of the deranged Nazi leader. It brought Cleese laughs and popularity, which all made the shy young schoolboy feel less awkward and less self-conscious about himself, and particularly his height.

Being Hitler was also a release for his anger, his frustrations, and it allowed him to develop his natural comic skills. Most importantly, it offered Cleese an alternative career to the one his family expected.

‘When I was 16, everyone told me, “John, the thing to do is to get a good qualification. You go in an accountant’s office now and by the time you’re thirty-seven, you’ll have several letters after your name, you know you’ll be able to get married…” It was that kind of feeling. Fine. It’s one type of life, but it was laid down to me as a sort of golden pathway leading up to the A.C.A.’

A sense of duty saw Cleese study Law at Cambridge University. He soon found it frighteningly dull, and after 3 years, was more proud of a 12-minute sketch he had written and performed for the Cambridge Footlights than his knowledge of libel laws or past trials.

The sketch was the start of his long and successful career as a writer and performer, firstly in Cambridge Circus, then The Frost Report, At Last the 1948 Show, to Monty Python’s Flying Circus and the brilliant Fawlty Towers. Each of these shows, in their own way, allowed Cleese to vent the anger he could never express in his public life.

‘I know something’s manic in me,’ thirty-six-year-old Cleese explained in this BBC profile. ‘Yes, there is something manic somewhere in me, and I think it’s something to do with being trapped in a shell of lower middle class reasonableness, politeness.

‘Sometimes I get very angry and I find it frightfully difficult to be angry, and I think anger in particular—people talk to me at parties, and they really do talk, talk at me. And I have fantasies of picking things up, cheese dips and…[mimes rubbing the dip in someone’s face].

‘But I’ve never had the courage to do it.’

Broadcast in February 1976, after the highly successful first season of Fawlty Towers, this profile of John Cleese includes interviews with the great man himself, his then wife and co-writer, Connie Booth, as well as performers, writers and friends such as Tim Brooke-Taylor, Antony Jay, Alan Coren and David Frost, who said of Cleese:

‘I think it was the element of benevolent-sadism in his work really, in the sense that his humor can be immensely cruel—and the nice thing is that he means it.’
 

 
Previously on dangerous Minds

‘Sez Les’ What John Cleese did after ‘Monty Python’

John Cleese Carefully Considers Your Futile Comments

With many thanks to NellyM
 

 
I probably owe Terry Gilliam money. I nicked his book Animations of Mortality when I was a kid as I wanted to improve my skills at drawing cartoons. Gilliam’s work was a big influence, (along with Ronald Searle and Ralph Steadman), and I spent hours perusing the pages of my pilfered goods, learning how to create art from a Master

What joy, therefore, to find Mr Gilliam’s daughter Holly has started a blog uncovering her father’s brilliant work, uploading discoveries on an almost daily basis.

Since October last year, Holly has undertaken this mammoth task of organizing her father’s archive:

....all his work from pre-Python days, as a cartoonist, photojournalist & assistnat editor for Help! magazine, through all his original artwork and cut-outs for Python animation, posters, logos and generally everything Python, to his storyboards, designs and sketches for his feature films and other non-film related projects (including his opera of “Faust” and that infamous Nike commercial).  Why!? Because I have been lucky enough to be surrounded by my father’s amazing work all my life and I think it should be seen by everyone so I am organising the archive so it can eventually be put in a book and an exhibition.

Holly is to be commended for this fabulous undertaking and I’m more than delighted she is sharing her father’s spectacular art works, and am now certainly willing to cough up the five quid owing on the book.

See more of this on-going project at Discovering Dad aka delving into Terry Gilliam’s personal archive. Or, follow Holly on twitter for updates. All images copyright Terry Gilliam.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Terry Gilliam: How he made stop-frame animations in his bedroom

 
Bonus Gilliam’s Monty Python illustration, after the jump…
 
Via Laughing Squid
 

 
Now this is delightful. Terry Gilliam has always seen the world differently. One of his fellow Pythons (Michael Palin?) said Gilliam described the world through his own particular language. Once, while flying over the Atlantic Ocean, Gilliam looked out of the window and remarked, “Wow, a whole bunch of water.” It’s wrong, but it’s also wonderfully right.

Gilliam (along with Ronald Searle and Ralph Steadman) was a major influence on my mis-spent doodling career, not for the illustrative style but for his uniquely original approach to animation and story-telling, where stories didn’t have to be linear, or have endings, and ideas counted for more than punchlines.

Here is Gilliam, looking like a hot young film star, in the studio of his Putney home (actually his spare back bedroom), explaining how he put together his famous “Fig Leaf” animation, from 1970.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

British TV 1974: The secret teachings of Terry Gilliam

 
With thanks to Nellym
 

 
An early interview with some of the members of Monty Python (John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin), recorded during filming on the Yorkshire Moors - “Of course it’s changed a bit now. They’ve put the rocks in, haven’t they? That used to be the bathroom over there,” quips Palin, while Jones seeks attention by falling over, and Chapman sips his G&T. Filmed for the BBC regional news program Look North, this was originally broadcast on May 23rd, 1973.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

‘Away From It All’: Little-known Monty Python ‘travelogue,’ 1979

‘Sez Les’: What John Cleese did after ‘Monty Python’

Monty Python vs. God

“Peace and tranquility, my ass! Take one photograph of the wrong building here, and they’re taping electrodes to your reproductive organs.”

Seldom-seen and practically unavailable (until it got stuck on YouTube, of course), of all of the various Monty Python pieces, the 1979 short, “Away From It All,” is probably the least-known thing they ever made. It was screened before The Life of Brian, but only in theaters in Great Britain and Australia, where boring, groan-worthy travelogues were still being routinely shown prior to feature films.

Over typical “world travel” stock footage, narrator “Nigel Farquhar-Bennett” (John Cleese) becomes increasingly unhinged as the film un-spools. Clearly “Nigel” could use a holiday himself.

Stay with it. It’s extremely subtle… at first!

This has been going around on various torrent trackers for the past 6-7 years, but this YouTube upload is the highest quality version I’ve yet found.  Despite the numerous times the Python catalog has been repackaged on VHS and DVD over the decades, you’d think that this hilarious short would have been included at some point, but that’s not the case.
 

 
If John Cleese hadn’t gone into Monty Python, then he would “have stuck to his original plan to graduate and become a chartered accountant, perhaps a barrister lawyer, and gotten a nice house in the suburbs, with a nice wife and kids, and gotten a country club membership, and then I would have killed myself.”

Ah well, the best laid plans of mice and men. Sensibly, Cleese opted for plan B, and all the success that entailed. It was therefore a surprise when Cleese quit Python in 1973, after its third TV series, and joined up as a supporting player to stand-up comic called Les Dawson, in his comedy sketch show, Sez Les.

Dawson and Cleese could not have been more dissimilar - Dawson short and plump, Cleese tall and skinny. Dawson was working class and self-educated, who had worked a long apprenticeship of stand-up in the working men’s clubs in the north of England, while maintaining his day-job as a Hoover salesman. Cleese was middle class, university educated and was upper-middle management, white collar material.

Dawson had originally wanted to be a writer, inspired by Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, he had hitched the highway to Paris, where he found work as a pianist in a brothel. Unable to find a publisher for his poetry, Dawson returned homewards, and inspired by his experiences as a pianist, tried his hand as a comic. Though he made his name with mother-in-law jokes, Dawson was a clever and verbally dextrous comedian, who dismantled jokes, only to recreate them in a funnier form. Cleese described Dawson as “An autodidact, a very smart guy who was fascinated by words.”

After a winning run on the talent show Opportunity Knocks, Dawson earned his first TV series, Sez Les (1969-1976), and fast became one of Britain’s best loved comics. In 1974, Cleese joined Dawson on the series, and the pairing (like a hybrid Peter Cook and Dudley Moore) proved highly successful. Both men had great respect for each other, and more importantly had a genuine affection which came over in their performances together.

Cleese eventually left to make Fawlty Towers, but for 2 series of Sez Les in 1974, Dawson and Cleese were top drawer comedy entertainment.
 

 
More from Dawson and Cleese, after the jump…
 

 
“Baby Marx” is an ongoing TV pilot project by Mexican artist Pedro Reyes currently on exhibit at the prestigious Walker Art Center in Minneapolis from August 11 to November 27.

Reporting on the advent of the Second French Empire in 1851, Marx famously repeated an insight he had read in a letter from Engels, itself a variation on Hegel: if all great world-historical facts and personages occur twice, the first time they do so as “grand tragedy,” the second as “rotten farce.” A century and a half ago, Marx and Engels regarded this repetition with despair, brandishing the category of farce as a denunciation of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s dictatorship.

In the context of advanced capitalism, however, Pedro Reyes (Mexico City, 1972) asks us, with Baby Marx, to re-evaluate the political inheritance of both repetition and farce.

Taking up a recent trend in the production of Hollywood blockbusters, Reyes proposes to “reboot” the nineteenth century debate between socialism and capitalism. Media moguls such as Ronald D. Moore (Battlestar Galactica) and J.J. Abrams (Star Trek) have similarly resurrected dystopian, Cold War-era visions of the future to great commercial success. Repetition recommends itself in these latter contexts principally as a means of streamlining the production process itself: brand recognition has been subsidized in advance, capitalizing on consumers’ prior emotional investments in the franchise’s narrative.

Reyes and his team are actually shooting new scenes for “Baby Marx” at the Walker Art Center. The behind the scenes process is what the exhibit is all about. I think this is a funny idea, but I don’t think it’s funny enough. I’ve read that Reyes hired two writers from an Adult Swim show to help punch it up a bit in that department. “Baby Marx” has been pitched to HBO and Japanese TV execs, who both apparently turned it down. In the age of The Daily Show, South Park and Bill Maher, something like this would require an absolutely savage satirical wit to make it come alive and so far this project lacks that, in my never so humble opinion. It’s cool, but it could be a lot better.

The first installment of “Baby Marx,” produced for Japan’s Yokohama Triennial in 2008:
 

 
More “Baby Marx” (and Monty Python’s “Communist Quiz Show” sketch) after the jump…