And Now for Something Completely Different is the ironic name of the Monty Python comedy troupe's first movie. I say ironic because nearly all of the material in the movie had been seen before in the group's television show, Monty Python's Flying Circus. This movie version of some of the best sketches from the first season of that show, along with some from the then upcoming second season, was to be the groups introduction into the American market. However, the movie did far better business in the United Kingdom than it ever did in the U.S.A.; a place the group wouldn't break into for a few more years.

This movie is a series of sketches that are, as in their series, linked together in a stream-of-consciousness manner so that rather than stopping and starting, each sketch flows into the next, oftentimes with the help of animator Terry Gilliam, the only American in the group. This manner of connecting the sketches does help the flow, but this movie despite being incredibly funny in parts suffers from not having a plot. Sketch comedy is great and can be an art form, of which the Pythons are masters, but it's best digested in 30 to 60 minute increments.

It has been so many years since I first saw Python that I can no longer remember what it was like to see them for the first time. I know that my first experience with them was through their second feature, Monty Python and the Holy Grail and that Flying Circus was shown on PBS station WTTW from Chicago every Sunday night at 11PM, Michigan time, just before Dave Allen at Large and Doctor Who, which I watched regularly all through high-school during the 1980s. I also remember that at first I didn't quite get the humor of their series. It grew on me quickly though and soon I had (and indeed still do) many of their classic sketches memorized. Even to this day, some 25 plus years since my first exposure, while watching this movie again, I could say the lines right along with the cast.

And some of the groups most famous sketches are present in this movie. The Dead Parrot, the Lumberjack song, Nudge-Nudge, Marriage Guidance Counselor, Self-Defense against Fresh Fruit, Blackmail and two of my personal favorites, Upper Class Twit of the Year and Hell's Grannies. There are many others as well, some less known and less funny, although in everyone of them there is something original and something to laugh at.

Not all of the sketches are improved by the transfer to film. Self-Defense is trimmed considerably from the television version, for instance, but all of them are crisper and clearer from having been shot on 35mm instead of the video tape of the series.

While most of the sketches hold up admirably, I find that Gilliam's animations don't. When he first did them they were original in style, but they've since been imitated so many times that they've lost that fresh feeling and are definitely the weakest part of the movie and there's a little too many of them.

This movie would serve as a great introduction to Python. If someone had never seen any of the group's movies or television shows, this would be something you could show them as a sampler. If they laugh at this you could move them on to the show itself, if they didn't laugh at it, well they're probably not worth knowing anyway.

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