The Titles-- Season 1

"I'm a better cartoonist than I am a bomb maker." - Terry Gilliam

And now for something completely different!

For each season (or "series", if you really want to be anal about it,) the animator did a different title sequence. The images seem random, and basically just set a silly, madcap tone. But as we break down the sequences, we begin to see a farcical, slapstick mind at work-- a mind that resents authority and isn't afraid to use their images against them.  A mind teeming with prurience and rage. A mind that breaks the worlds into shapes instead of classes, dimensions instead of importance. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you Terry Gilliam! (All of the pictures below are his work.)

Born in Minneapolis, MN, but all grown up in L.A. during the mid-sixties, Gilliam had a front row seat at the un-televised revolution. The Watts riots were in his back yard, the Black Panther movement just up the street. After studying Mad Magazine in high school, he studied political science in college. As a "commie long-hair" he was often pulled over by cops for driving while totally cool. Reagan's gubernatorial win in '67 was probably the last straw. He moved to England and soon got work with Jones, Palin and Idle on "Do Not Adjust Your Set".

Though Monty Python was determinedly non-topical, the temptation to strike out at current events must have been irresistible for someone like Gilliam. Still, his talent enabled him to sublimate his critiques into a surreal visual world of bright colors and ornate letters. The photographs were propriety. Gilliam inserted them into his world, and mangled them. Let's see him in action as we breakdown the titles for the first season. (Or "series"... shut up already, you anal twits!)

The music is a marching number, and it begins with a bell. As the music commences in earnest, we see a brown screen. Creeping up the left side are two red roses. The roses climb to the top of the screen, then abruptly blossom. Sticking out of the center, like some elephantine stamen, are the words "Monty" and "Python's", bright yellow at the bottom and black at the top, font reminiscent of carnival tents.

Why flowers? Could it be that Gilliam related to the flower children movement, as his hair would indicate? Or was this a reference to England's "green and pleasant" land, and the British passion for constant gardening? Or were they just pretty? The flowers are all Gilliam, lush and bulbous, with luxurious cross-hatching to delineate the petals.

A third flower, this one pale blue, joins the others on the left side, blossoming lower and vomiting the word "Flying". Finally, another red rose creeps up the right side, feints to the right, then circles back to the left, curlicuing to face the other flowers and spewing the last word, "Circus".

We pull back rapidly, and the words are gone. Just a tangle of flowers. We pull back-- and holy crap, the flowers are growing out of some guy's bald head. Thank you, Rogaine, but that's not what I had in mind. The man is dressed in a blue suit and black bowtie, with a long nose bisecting his face, forehead, cheeks and chin bulging out, leaving the mouth in shadow. He might have a moustache. His eyes are half-closed and dull. Finally, he seems embedded in the yellow floor, which looks like concrete. As though he were being punished by some inept mobsters, his ass and legs are the only thing submerged. His pointy shoes stick up like meercats. How did he get there, and why is he accepting his debasement with such boredom? Shall we ask him...?

Too late! The foot has come down! The iconic sole of Python, the airbrushed foot comes down from the heavens, straight down, no forward or rearward momentum as though the foot were out for a walk and just happened to land on our poor imprisoned chap, no, this was no accident! Incidentally, at the top of the ankle there appears to be the hem of a garment, a robe perhaps? Does this foot belong to a holy man, or a hedonist? A holy man wouldn't so blithely take a helpless life, and a hedonist has better ways to get his feet all squishy. Maybe there will be clues to this mystery later on.

The roses and the feet have taken half of the march. Now we speed through a series of images, all of them spun out in a rapid-fire Rorshach test. Gilliam brings in the old pictures for this. A ruffled man with a sword stands beside a round, very, very round woman, and dribbles her like a basketball. He has to hold his arm high to do it, making him look as silly as she does, but he manages. Both of them look out proudly to the audience, as if this were their favorite party trick. We pan down quickly, and we realize they're on top of a man's head. The man seems sober and practical, with his glasses, sad eyes and sensible haircut. But the picture of sobriety is rent asunder, as the skull cap and hair cut fly off the man (ostensibly sending Ruffles and his Ball tumbling off to the right,) and scantily clad woman fly out of the remainder of his head. Their feathered boas make them capable of flight, and they escape joyfully from the confines of this dullard's brain.

Is this, perhaps, an animator's final statement of the world-- that prurience, while base and mean, is as close as many of us will ever get to actual imagination or flights of fancy? It certainly seems as if this poor, sane, sad-eyed slob will never have a flight of fancy again, now that the fancies have flown. Maybe we should re-evaluate wet daydreams. They are triumphs of imagination over reality. It's never a bad thing to flip one's mind.

We cut to a cardinal, red-robed and green-faced-- he looks like Cardinal Richelieu, but who knows?--  standing in the center of a Gothic church, mostly black and white. A blue carpet lays at his feet. Suddenly, a strange train with a dwarf engineer zips by, black and white steam billowing from its narrow stack. The train pulls a nude lady lounging her caboose temptingly on the roof of the coach, one knee raised to cover the very naughty bits.
The lady is huge compared to the engineer and passengers-- but she's just right for the Cardinal. As the nude lady zips by, the Cardinal turns, lifts his robes, and reveals he's got a set of wheels, too! He zips off after the naked lady.Or maybe he's more the dwarf engineer type.

Next, a mustachioed man sucks face-- literally-- with what looks like a female corpse. Holding her face tightly in his hands, he kisses her, inhales her, her head deflating and disappearing under the moustache. This murder goes by almost too fast to notice. The woman's puffy sleeves deflate not the least bit, which implies there's some sort of flush valve in her neck,protecting the important bits. The woman only loses her head.

Next, an illustration from a Sears lingerie ad stands before draped stage curtains. She's an hourglass shaped woman with curly brown hair framing her face, dark eyes looking warily off to the right, and a tiny mouth. And, of course, the lingerie, purple with black flower shapes hugging her body, a black lace "T" running along her breasts and then cleaving her ribs, running down to the naughty bits. Red ruffles line the top. The lingerie cuts up high on her hip. Although the nightie wraps around her shoulders in narrow ruffled straps, there are two additional straps, tied in a bow at her shoulders and attaching near her cleavage. This obliging, wary woman takes off one of the straps, a promise of more unstrapping in her eyes-- but we've been tricked! The strap is just a fuse! It sets of an explosion that billows up previously unseen lingerie material around this woman's hourglass waist, and the same pressure that expands the lingerie shoots her head right off her neck, blowing it straight up into the heavens. I imagine the woman knew this would happen. Perhaps this is her stripper gimmick, like Gypsy Rose Lee never really undressing. It's a hell of a gimmick, starting to undress and your head flying off. The trenchcoat crowd would never see it coming. It also explains the wariness in her eyes. It must hurt every single show, and there are five shows on Friday and convention nights.

The next shot is in heaven. Five winged nymphs and cherubs (I never could tell those two apart) float above in heaven, looking down on us, carrying grapes as if they were flinging them down at us. And in the first stab at continuity so far in the sequence, the woman's head from the previous sequence, she with the curly hair and the wary eyes, flies up into this serendipitous array and knocks out the cherub on the far left, sending the little naked baby tumbling earthward. The head flies off screen to the left, never to be seen by us again. I imagine her boyfriend will find her and reattach later for the next show.We're deep in a story now. The woman strips, sending her head flying. which hits a cherub and knocks him out of his cherubic grape wielding constellation.

We cut back to earth-- and there's the train with the naked lady atop the coach, still chugging along. The green faced cardinal is catching up, doubtless praying for a tunnel. His prayers are answered in the negative, as the falling cherub crashes down into the cardinal, crushing them both into the green earth. The cardinal's wheels stick up futilely, spinning to no effect.

The carnage is punctuated by a sweet holy woman in blue, who holds up what looks like a black feathered hat (or maybe it's a throttled peacock) to her face, hiding her eyes from the horror of the cardinal/cherub fatal collision.

There's a bit of Theme here-- women losing their heads in the act of seduction, either real or staged. Men getting squashed by heavenly objects. And a visual world of bloodless, random violence. I'm just saying-- there's more to Gilliam than funny lip synching and weird white eyes. He had something to say about the world, and he said it all the time. Even in these silly, brilliant titles.

Next, a man in a yellow striped suit stands buried up to his chest in the dark green loam, looking at us with a frank, bland expression. He lacks the dreamer's eyes of the prior sober man, as well as the glasses. His moustache rigidly conforms to the dimensions of his upper lip and lower nose, His hair is short and combed away from his face. Beside him stands a tiny man in a purple cap, blue jacket, green pants and brown shoes. Unlike the half-buried man, he is a Gilliam creation, with long nose and face. He stands behind an air pump and works the plunger up and down. As he does so-- the frank man's face enlarges, wobbling this way and that, getting larger, larger, filling the frame. There is a moment when all we see are his eyes. The man knows what's coming, but he's too proud to beg. A still moment of exquisite tension--

And the man's head explodes like the over-inflated balloon it is. Reversal! Now the men are losing their heads. As the bits and pieces fly off, a woman stands revealed-- and I mean revealed-- amidst  a cityscape of black and white Roman-looking buildings. The buildings stand alone, isolated by a criss-cross of very broad green streets, and there in the foremost broad street is a broad, wearing nothing but a scarf wrapped around her hair. She smiles giddily, her eyes (once again) looking warily to the right. She lounges invitingly, propped up by one arm. But before we can even appreciate the fact of this libertine, she pulls a stack of letters from behind (where was she hiding it?) and places them demurely in front of her, hiding all but one tantalizing breast. We've seen these letters before, bursting from the center of the blossoming roses at the start of the titles. Stacked, they read "Monty Python's Flying Circus" in the same yellow and black carnival font.

The music is nearing it's resolution. The titles have bookended the goofy animations. We know that it's almost over, and we've had a great time. But Gilliam has one final trick up his sleeve, or down his pant leg. The woman, hiding coquettishly behind the letters, might think that she has escaped scrutiny. But she is wrong. There is one being who sees all, and his scrutiny is serious. He slides down, as if someone pulled down the holy drapes, and there is the man himself, God, leaning his elbows on a surrounding cloud and gazing at the woman's beauty and total nakedness. He doesn't like what he sees. His stern countenance clouded by shadows and beard, he waves his robed left hand in a reproving yet holy gesture. "Summon the Kracken," he seems to say, and in this case, the Kracken is our old friend, the foot.

If we were unclear as to the nature of the foot before, now we know it is an instrument of God himself, a swift and (may I say) undignified punishment for sins real and imagined. The foot plunges down from behind the disappointed God, and squashes both libertine and titles out of our dimension. The final flourish, a squishy sound effect, punctuates the visual, and the noble marching song ends with a final fart.

And that's the titles for Season 1! (Series, season, whatever!) Brilliant, outrageous, alternately slow and fast paced, showing us an original talent in his prime. Well done. Mr. Gilliam, and well worth the renunciation of your US citizenship.

Next week; Episode 8 - "Full Frontal Nudity"(Although, thanks to the squished lady, we kinda get that every week.)