The Titles - Season 2

"Maybe there is a god after all. Or maybe it's a different one. The old one got fired." Terry Gilliam
  
As we parse and replay old Monty Python bits, we often forget the titles, so familiar are they to us, opening each and every show. They are excluded from the albums, necessarily, and when people speak of their favorite Python bits, no one mentions the first class silent comedy that plays out before each episode gets well and truly underway. Only the foot, the glorious squashing foot, stomping the titles once at the beginning and once again at the end, has transcended the show to become a permanent fixture in the zeitgeist. (I once had a drama professor compare the end of an Ibsen play to Monty Python's foot. Now, that's zeitgeist!) But the titles established not only the look and the farcical free-form content, but the attitude of Monty python as well-- silliness laced with rage and violence, taking what had come before and twisting it into new and scarcely recognizable shapes.

Gilliam was a huge fan of MAD magazine (surprise!) and Harvey Kurtzman, its creator. Having worked on the Occidental College humor magazine, FANG, (it's fascinating to see the many careers that are launched by college humor publications, from Harvard Lampoon to the Occidental Fang,) he went to New York in '62 and met the man himself. Mr. Kurtzman was working on a self-published magazine, called HELP!-- did the Beatles crib that title for their '65 movie and album?-- and hired Gilliam as associate editor. The most famous and propitious work he did for Help! was a fumetti strip (a comic book with photographs instead of drawings,) starring John Cleese as a man molesting his daughter's Barbie Doll. Cleese was in town doing a revue of his college sketch work on Broadway. (For our younger viewers, this was before Broadway got into cannibalizing Hollywood and its own past glory with re-stagings of old musicals and movies. They used to actually do original content on Broadway. I know, right?!) And although I wouldn't presume to call this the start of a friendship, it definitely got the stars in alignment for the rest of Gilliam's career.

Help! folded in '65, and Gilliam, hilariously, went to work for an advertising firm. Imagining this anti-authoritarian, anarchistic angry young man in the bowels of Mad Ave. gives me belly laughs, and I think an exquisite series could be made out of it. But it wouldn't be long running. By '67, Gilliam had had enough, and left for London, where he asked Cleese for a job contact. Cleese pointed him towards producer Humphrey Barclay and a show called "Do Not Adjust Your Set", which happened to employ Idle, Palin and Jones. Gilliam had found his place. From that happy connection came the show we are discussing in general, and these credits in particular. Let's take a look at Season 2, and see what new human oddities Gilliam has in store for us.

As always, will you buy the box set already?  The blog's free-- least you could do is pay for a box set.

Okay, this season starts out the same as last season-- flowers blooming, the words "Monty Python's Flying Circus erupting from the stamen, The fertile garden from which these roses erupt is a man's bald head, his dead eyes regarding us as he sits placidly in concrete, and then gets squashed by the iconic foot. Moving on...

We begin in a black and white industrial contraption, full of turning gears, levers and pipes. Amidst all of this Rube Goldberg-ian machinery, an errant hand and foot, as well as a chicken torso, The chicken torso has a suit jacket and white shirt, and but for the feathers erupting out of its rear, we might think it no more than a plump man. The chicken torso floats obediently in front of the foot. Meanwhile, in the center of the frame, a blue suited man, squat with wide-legged striped pants and a gaunt Civil War era face, stands docilely on a rising piston. The piston  lifts the man towards the hand, which grasps his head, as another piston juts out from the man's right and dislocates his torso, removing it entirely from his body. The torso falls out of frame, the legs still on the piston, the heads still in the hand. Whatever will he do? No breathing,

 eating or sex! Fortunately, the chicken torso is there. The foot pushes the chicken torso into the space no longer occupied, the hand drops the head (which has a bowtie dangling beneath it) onto the torso. The blue suited man is now...Chicken Man! The foot is not impressed. With mechanical cruelty, the foot pushes Chicken Man off the piston, and he falls out of frame. Gilliam is dealing with the eternal question "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" The answer is clearly "The chicken, and the chicken came in the midst of mechanized low-cost indifference." Might this be analogous with Gilliam's Madison Avenue experiences?

Having landed safely on a conveyer belt, Chicken Man is transported through a metal coil. Once he

"What's in the box?!"

 emerges, a hand places a box over him, lifting him off the assembly line. Things start to move fast now. The hand places the box in a barren landscape,reminiscent of Sedona, with strange, swirly mountains in the background, a real (not animated) cloudy sky overhead. The front of the box folds out to reveal a face-- We know this face! This is the melancholy man who had naked ladies flying out from the top of his skull in the season 1 titles.

Hey! We know that guy!

Now, plastered atop the face of the box, the top of his head noticeably absent, he smiles, a big, fake toothy grin. I don't believe it for a minute.He seems to have the most awkward of underbite, and his eyes retain the sad whimsey. But then, he pulls his party trick. The teeth retract into his upper and lower lip, like cat claws. It's just as well, because the disembodied head of a bandaged man, looking very Karloff-ian, bursts out of his mouth, erupting like projectile vomit right at us. This poor, sad bepectacled man has the most interesting things popping out of his head-- much like Gilliam.

When the Karloff-ian head can get no larger, it splits like an Apple stock certificate, revealing no more topless head, and no more box. Just a hand, displaying  a bald head. For the record, this is the fourth disembodied head in this credit sequence. This particular head is blue, and looks very much like Walter White, only with different eye wear, and blue.

Eggs a la Heisenberg

But the hand clearly thinks this head is an egg, and behaves appropriately, placing it under a hen nesting on one of the far off swirly mountains. The chicken startles as the egg hatches, and who should come out but-- Chicken Man! Having been assembled, he now must be born.

"I'm the one who cracks."

(Vince Gilligan should have put that in the Breaking Bad finale-- no one would have seen that coming.) Though the chicken came first, by way of a magic cardboard box it has managed to be transported inside the egg, to fool us all. God is the practical joker supreme, misdirecting us to the wrong conclusion. Is the Bible full of similar practical jokes? "Let's see how long they stick around through all the 'begats'." Is this why God got fired?

Having been born, this bird's gotta fly. Wings sticking out of his jacket in lieu of arms, the Chicken Man flaps away off left.

When the camera picks him up again, he is flapping before a glorious rainbow in a cloudy sky, pulling a banner with the name "Monty Python's Flying Circus", like one of those irritating planes advertising beer over the beach during Spring Break. Chicken Man then gets the fate that all of those advertising planes deserve-- a giant foot squashing him into oblivion. The foot comes out of the clouds this time, giving us no doubt that this is the foot of God. Would the foot have squashed him if he hadn't been shilling for the Brits? Or was God destroying the evidence of his practical chicken-egg switcheroo? We'll never know.

There we go- an epic origin story of Chicken Man, made by hand and foot, then boxed, but reborn in the flesh, only to have that flesh flattened, as disembodied heads surround him. What is the meaning of this?  Man's transient, mutable mortality? An analogy for the packaging of imagination? The triumph of art against all things but its own eventual end?

Or was he just being silly? Did he never imagine that someone would dissect it decades later? If not it was the only blind spot in his otherwise all-seeing imagination.

Next week; Episode 21 - "Archeology Today" (I'm singing all ready. "Tooooo-dayyyyyy....")