And Now for Something Completely Different (1971) on Netflix
Recreated for the cinema without an audience, the sketches from a British television comedy show's first two series are linked by an announcer, while a Colonel interrupts anything too silly.
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- Rotten Tomatoes88%
Trailer
Plot summary
The first feature from the team behind Monty Python's Flying Circus collects sketches from the program's first two series, restaged for cinemas with no audience present. Familiar routines appear, among them the Dead Parrot, the Lumberjack Song, Nudge Nudge, Hell's Grannies, the Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook and Upper Class Twit of the Year, alongside cut-out animations. An announcer appears between some items to announce a new one, and the Colonel interrupts sketches he judges too silly. The sketches were rewritten and shortened for the film, and new linking material joins some of them, with animation sequences between items. It was assembled to bring the group to American viewers who did not know the show.
Cast
- Lesley Juddas Distraught Mother
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about And Now for Something Completely Different (1971)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- John Cleese said that at test screenings the audience thought the film was terrific and fell about until forty-five minutes in, then stopped laughing. The film was recut twice more and audiences stopped at the same point each time, which Cleese put down to the film having no story.
- Terry Gilliam designed the opening credits with the Pythons' names in blocks of stone, and Lownes insisted his own name be shown the same way. Gilliam refused at first, gave in, then created a different style of credit for the Pythons, so Lownes' credit is the only one that appears in stone.
- Lownes tried to exert considerably more control over the group than they had been used to at the BBC. He objected so strongly to the character Ken Shabby that the appearance was removed, along with a further sketch, Flying Sheep; stills from both were published in Monty Python's Big Red Book.
- The whole film was made for 80,000 pounds, 40 percent of it put up by Lownes, and the budget is joked about on screen: in the Killer Cars animation Eric Idle's narration promises a scene of such spectacular proportions that it could never be seen in a low-budget film like this one.
- To keep the cost down the crew worked on location in England and inside an abandoned dairy rather than a more costly soundstage, starting on 26 October, ten days after recording finished on the second series, and ending on 9 December 1970.
- The phrase that gives the film its title is credited to Christopher Trace, founding presenter of the children's television programme Blue Peter, who used it in all seriousness as a link between segments.
