Ciao, cinemaphiles!
A couple of weeks ago, Ian and Dave headed to the polls and asked you which of three films you’d like to hear us talk about. By an overwhelming majority you voted for Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Luckily for Ian and Dave it’s one of their favourite movies so they had no trouble yakking it up. It’s all here: praise, personal backstory, history, nitpicking, much love, and a classic Ian and Dave argument!
Want to hear more? Well, let them fansplain it for you.
Thanks for listening.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Great episode guys, thanks for doing it. I wanted to point out one of my favorite visual jokes in the film. When Connie Booth is taken off the scales, you can see the side the duck was on is on the ground. When a scale is empty, both sides should be even, so the duck was stacked against Connie Booth to begin with (ha). I’m a baker, and I use a scale like this everyday (only smaller), that’s why I noticed it. This and all bass guitars on Spinal Tap’s Big Bottom are my favorite subtle movie jokes. Looking forward to the next vote, thanks again!
Oh my Gosh, what if the duck was the witch the whole time?!!!
Enjoyed the Holy Grail episode.
For Ian – there’s a fun DVD extra in which Palin & Jones revisit the castle locations. Fun to see how much they squeezed out of basically a single location.
Thanks, David. It’s hard to find any clips of this on YouTube. All I could come up with was this short excerpt:
For interested parties, here is a documentary produced by the BBC in 1974 about the filming of Holy Grail. Lots of interesting tidbits here!
Have you guys seen for yourselves or ever heard mention of the ‘subliminal message’ in this film? At least I think it’s this one. (Maybe it’s Life of Brian). But there’s one frame that flashes up so fast with a wall of text that was supposedly a joke at Pepsi’s expense.
If there are 24 frames in every second of film, apparently Pepsi once took 1 frame out of each second of a movie and replaced it with a logo (unnoticeable to the naked eye) then put Pepsi vending machines in the foyer of the movie theatre alongside Coke ones. (This may have been around the time they were introducing vending machines.) Anyway, people went nuts for Pepsi over Coke.
Whether it happened or not, who knows, but I swear there was a frame in this film that was a ridiculous wall of text that was their silly attempt at making fun of subliminal advertising. You can’t search for anything like that on the algorithm-based internet. Funny how Google doesn’t want you to know anything about “subliminal advertising” when you search for it.
Anyway. Apologies if you talked about that and I missed it. Sometimes the kid comes in and talks at me about Minecraft. No respect, I tells ya.
I don’t consider myself that much of a Python fan, but when you started going through the movie scene by scene I realized just how much of the dialogue I remembered. A lot of its scenes hold up viewing after viewing. I much prefer it over The Life of Brian even with its stronger narrative. I did like the “Blessed are the cheesemakers” line but the callback to the swallow, African or European, at the bridge scene has got to be one of the greatest payoffs in film comedy ever.
Its anarchic erudite goofiness had a pretty big influence on me and my brothers when we were in high school. There was a Python super fan in my drama class. She transcribed the dialogue into notebooks…she must’ve had an audio recording of the movie…then she illustrated the scenes with her own cartoons. She’d even written to Terry Jones and showed us the letter he sent back to her. I recall he’d cheekily fed the page of paper into his typewriter at an angle. She played the bassoon and performed an instrumental version of “Brave Sir Robin” with my twin brother on oboe and two other students on clarinet and flute.
Spamalot is a lot of fun in its own way. It’s meta about big budget musicals the way that Holy Grail is about Arthurian legends. I like how the songs cleverly deconstruct Broadway/West End conventions: eg. the despairing monologue (“I’m All Alone”), the under-use of a big star (“Whatever Happened to My Part?”) and the money duet: “This is the Song That Goes Like This.” It was nice they included “Always Look On the Bright Side of Life” and the audience got to sing along. But like The Producers which also mocks the world of musical theater, it works best as a piece of musical theater so here’s hoping someday Dave can see it live and then he and Ian can fansplain it as well.
I really loved listening to you two talk about this, one of my favorite films, more in depth than on Sneaky Dragon. It’s great hearing you !saying those lines from it, bits I know by heart.
When you gave us “Sneakers” the “homework” of sending in our top 10 films last year, this was on my list, and I mentioned that I, like you, David, saw it in the theater. BUT in 1975 when it first came out! Because I am older… 🙂
Like you also, David, I have a copy of the record, “Matching Tie and Handkerchief” which I bought in high school. I had the same experience with that crazy double grooved side! It really freaked me out! (Sometimes I can get singing: “by the time of the Norman conquest, the rural framework was complete…”)
I have just a couple comments where I had a bit of a disagreement with you, Ian, which I’m sorry about in advance. You were unhappy with the closing line of the Black Knight – but I think it DOES work because although he called their fight a draw to Arthur’s face, he’s still a boasting, taunting fellow and to the King’s departing back, he’s “saving face” if only to himself. Makes sense he would take up the taunt again.
Also, they could have made the movie work with Merlin and Guinevere, etc., but why? They made the story their own, so original and a lot more fun with Tim the Enchanter and others who were not in the original Arthur legends. I mean, most of the this movie stays away from those old tropes. It’s not supposed to be a retelling of the real stories, right. As you both have said, it’s really quite close to perfect as it is!
And again, thanks for reviewing this film! I think I’ll watch it again tonight!
Excellent show, Dragons! Dave’s peppering in factoids from the script was an added bonus that I appreciated. Generally, your Fansplainers episodes about movies from last century suit me fine. More of that, please! 🙂
For those of us, myself included, who are fairly new to your listening audience, and may have missed out on hearing you guys comment on this: the words “Sneaky Dragon” scan with “Monty Python” … is that intentional or coincidental?
As for Merlin and Guinevere not being included, I offer two thoughts —
1. Could’ve been a “saved for the sequel” kind of deal. Looking back from today, of course we know this was Monty Python’s only King Arthur movie, but in the moment when they were writing it, that wouldn’t necessarily have been how they were thinking of it. They might have wanted to leave those characters open to be introduced in other movies they could later make.
2. As you guys say, this is a sketch-oriented movie. Maybe they just didn’t think up material involving those components of Arthurian lore, or if they did, then what they included in the script were the sketches they considered the funniest, and those sketches happened to not include certain characters. Certainly I prefer that we got a movie as funny as we got, as opposed to perhaps a different and less funny version of the film that obligatorily included any given A, B, and C ideas or characters.
Watching this movie last night made me want to dig out and reread the three “Knight Life” books by Peter David. Of course the comedy style is not the same, but those novels are also very funny King Arthur adventures.
A couple of Spamalot! spoilers. Guinevere is in it as is the Lady of the Lake and there’s a connection between them. Also they do find the Grail.
Hey guys –
Love hearing you dissecting movies – reminds me of the pre-VCR-at-least-in-my-house days sharing a bunk bed with a cousin and recounting movies to one another from memory. In retrospect I love the way a new version of the film being recounted would be conjoured up in one’s imagination – something that need never happen again.
A little later in life – that is, whilst at secondary school – the Python albums were lovingly played and replayed to one another, again entering that imaginative space of the mind’s eye. I particularly remember going on a school trip to various nearby folly buildings listening to the delightfully cumbersomely named “Album of the Soundtrack of the Trailer of the Film of Monty Python and the Holy Grail”.
As well as containing skits from the film, the album contains brilliant metacommentary on the watching of the film at the supposed ‘premiere’. It also features new bits, beautifully written performed and produced just for the album. Plus the whole thing can be found online! Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
David, you’re so right about the annoying addition of the wrong film at the start. It is done in such a deadpan manner that, on first play, I thought it had been a mis-stamp at the factory. Not very funny, more annoying, especially since I wanted to get right to the opening credits and the moose lore.
The extended ending portion of Castle Anthrax scene that also appears on the commemorative DVD wasn’t in the initial 1975 release that ran in Michigan. However, the Grand Rapids cinema that handled that first weekend run did give everyone a coconut when leaving the show.
I can’t recall what seemed funnier – getting the coconut or the mystified expression from the ushers, who apparently hadn’t seen the show, doing the dispensing.
ALSO
Regarding the puzzle records – I had one in my collection for years until a move made it a jigsaw puzzle. However, according to my notes on the Victor Talking Machine Company, they had released their first 3 track (!!!) record in 1901 (!!!!), on a 7 inch, 78rpm bit of one-sided shellac (# A-821, to be specific) called “The Fortune Telling Record.” It featured the very early recording comic S.H. Dudley, apparently offering a different fortune depending where the soundbox was dropped.
And that, my friends, is all the typing allowed by my keepers this evening.
Stay safe and well…or wellish…