The Titles - Season 3

"I didn't have to submit my ideas to the group. I used to turn up on the days we recorded with a can of film under my arm, and in it went." - Terry Gilliam

As we celebrate the greatness that is Monty Python's Flying Circus, and as we tirelessly (tiresomely?) break down their content, it can be easy to overlook the titles. Consistent and unchanging, there's no point in exploring them on an episode by episode basis. But they deserve a place in the Monty Python canon, and certainly the Gilliam body of work. And so we take a break from the stream of episodes and character assassinations (I'm sorry, I mean "bios",) to consider the brilliance of the Titles. But first, some character assassination!

It’s amazing to consider how easily Gilliam’s cultural contributions could have been snuffed out.  His Occidental College work for Fang has probably not been archived, and Help! Magazine folded soon after Gilliam joined the editorial team. He’s not very lucky that way. He freelanced for Car-Toons and Surf-Toons, neither of which still exists, and once he joined The Londoner magazine, it predictably folded. His work for Idle’s We Have Ways of Making You Laugh has not been seen since, and most of the Do Not Adjust Your Set work has been erased as well, due to ITV’s tendency to tape over their shows. If not for Monty Python and its insistence on taking control of their own work, the show might never have made it long enough to impact on us like the cultural meteor it was.

Of course, maybe it was Gilliam—something deep in his subconscious that tended towards creating work with little or no permanence. Witness the almost desperate attempt Universal made to shred Brazil. Look at the movies he has made since, all of them plagued by Gilliam’s inability to actually forge his vision without running up the budget beyond any possibility of recompense. A recent viewing of Twelve Monkeys special features documents Gilliam spending hours and hours getting a hamster in a wheel to run on cue. This was an unimportant shot, but a rare opportunity for Gilliam to display his visual sensibility, since the shot took place in the dystopian future. So Gilliam had at it, pissing off his star Bruce Willis, who was ostensibly the subject of the shot. “Just sit there naked for another hour, Bruce, while we get this hamster to work the wheel.” The hamster wheel is scarcely noticeable in the final version, but hey, the wheel is spinning, and Willis won’t work with Gilliam again. (This is the man who worked with M. Night Shyamalan—twice!) Maybe in retrospect the wheel wasn’t that important.

Fortunately, Gilliam’s tendency towards self-destruction has been thwarted insofar as the body of his Monty Python work is concerned. This brings us to Season 3 Titles.

We abandon the previously iconic rose vines, trade them in for pipes. Brass plumbing snakes its way up the left of the screen, finally leaking a huuuuge drip of water that reads "Monty". A twin pipe emerges out of the side, perpendicular to the first, but it soon snakes into paralell-ish motion, finally issuing its pre-ejaculate bubble, which nestles against the first. The name on the second reads "Python", with the possessive "s". Now, simultaneously, two other pipes make their way up and down the screen, and they issue

their own bubbles, with the words "Flying" and "Circus" on each one.
Clearly, this is the same pattern as the original credits, only instead of a rose vines, we have plumbing. Plumbing is a very big part of British life, with numerous pipes pressed into service to control the damp that pervades the country. Roses are also a big part of British life-- they even fought a war over them. Gilliam is pulling out all the icons to connect this comedy show with the proper British

touchstones. But as we'll see in a moment, he's not getting all sentimental. He's also railing against parochial inefficiency.
Just as in the vines, when we pull back from the drips, we find more pipes, a maze of pipes, a dense, impenetrable thicket of pipes, so dense that the title bubbles are no longer visible.It should be added, the pipes are not like the standard uniform pipes you used to see on computer monitors back in the 90s. These pipes are all drawn, of various sizes and shapes-- I like the one in the middle lower right that zig-zags. Someone (and I bet I know who) spent a lot of time drawing this elaborate testament to

bureaucracy and complexity. It is pre-reminiscent of the pipe systems in Brazil, Gilliam's future dystopian vision. Gilliam seems to understand how complexity works in general. One never starts over with a clean state. One adds to the existing system, creates patches and add-ons, many of which create needless inefficiency, waste and confusion. After all, what is this tapestry of fluid-filled pipes in service of, besides alerting the audience to the name of the show they're watching? All this brass goes to help one single clod squatting in a sink. He gets a moment to smile at us cluelessly before Gilliam's ever present foot comes down from the heavens to squash this rapacious jerk out of existence.
Now we are met with series of short vignettes. Gilliam has abandoned the farcical thru-lines he inserted in the previous titles-- while some of the bits are linked, there are no call backs or running gags. Still, to his credit, he seems to be drawing more of the art, instead of using old photos as he did before.

And here, in the first bit, he proves me wrong. Contrarian bastard! We see a pregnant woman, her head an old photo, but her body drawn and air brushed in the exaggerated 60s era agit-prop style that Gilliam grew up on. The belly is voluminous, while the legs and arms are sticks. The woman waits patiently in her empty room, her arms braced against her rump, like a mid-western farmers wife looking out at her soon-to-fail crops. This is not a hopeful woman. She expects the worse, and she's going to get it.

Send in the clowns! Two "doctors come in, one at a time, both
taking the time to photo-bomb the proceedings. We've seen the first doctor before, selling dolls in a prior episode. Even with a doctors mirror-light strapped to his head, his face stained blue and a red rubber nose tied on, his craggy face and shifty eyes betray him. The other clown, however, I can't

place. He looks a little like Ed Asner, but he's not. He has spikey yellow hair along the sides of his head, forcing the mirror/light on his head to hang askew. In turn, they each pop into frame, an introduction to the coming insanity.
Short, much shorter than the stalwart, uncomplaining preggers woman, they proceed with the procedure. Ed Asner rides in a rolling, sheet draped hospital bed from one side. Craggy Shifty hops up on the waiting chair. Acting in swift concert, if the composer were Spike Jones, Asner grabs the woman's neck from behind and pulls her backwards. The woman opens up like a trash can, revealing a red but vacant interior. Not completely vacant, however-- Craggy Shifty reaches into the pit of her belly and pulls out, by the head, a squatting baby, as stoic and uncomplaining as Mom. (Mom, meanwhile, seems to experience no pain over this procedure-- her expression is unchanged and her arm still rests on

her rump for support. I imagine a lot of woman would prefer this knife-less Ceasarian to natural labor, especially if the seam along the middle rejoins easily, as I'd bet it does.) The baby, incidentally, is a photo, and a boy. Take that, censors!
We move on to the next bit. A man drives a car to a waiting brick wall with a traffic light signalling red. Note that the man operates his car like Fred Flintstone, legs sticking out from the bottom. He doesn't run up to the wall, but he hops. I guess he likes a rough ride.

He is completely drawn, with chin and nose thrusting forward. The traffic light and wall are also drawn, as is the bare Dali-esque background. Only the clouds are photographs. One wonders why this is the route the man has chosen-- he could easily hop around the wall. No matter. This is where the traffic light is, and this is where he will wait for the right of way. As the man waits for the light to turn green and presumably for the wall to disappear, a door opens up at face level and a long-armed fist juts out and clocks the

man in his protruding chin. Harsh! Clear justification for road rage. The man's head bobs back, then recovers as the fist disappears back into the wall, as fists often do. But the man's indignities have just begun. The traffic light and the wall crash in on the man in a triumph of forced perspective, as if the man were some sort of gravity center, sucking all nearby objects onto his head.The collapsing objects flatten the man-- his legs disappear, his long neck telescopes, and soon all that is left of him is the opposite side of the

brick wall, laying flat on the ground like a forgotten stage, or a plank without a ship. Many of us end the same way, in the ground with nothing but flat barren markers to note that we were ever there. I'm sure that Terry Gilliam would agree-- or he'd just slap me.
You'll notice something different about this particular set of titles-- there's a real lack of motion. While we were following falling babies and bird men in the prior title sequences, and thus moving through a variety of landscapes, Gilliam seems to have said "Fuck

all that" to creating new backgrounds for gags that last a few seconds. This particular bit is over, but baby, we're not going anywhere.
A giant head rises from beneath the wall, a phoenix rising from the gooey ashes of the crushed man in the car. It's a photographed head, with a newsie cap, darkened eyes and a thick, wide, black moustache that stretches back toward the ears. The New Man glares at us with an apathetic hostility, like a dancing chicken in one of

those glass cages, resigned to perform but not happy about it. Once we see his big party trick, we'll understand why. But first we need a volunteer from the heavens. A giant hand (mate to the giant foot?) reaches down and grasps the New Man by his temples-- and pulls. It turns out that this man has the stretchiest teeth on earth! His facial proportions remain the same, but his teeth elongate, clenched yet stretched upwards until half the frame is filled with his teeth. This isn't the first fun with teeth Gilliam-- we all remember his dancing

teeth from the previous season. Stretchy teeth is a logical next step. I don't think Gilliam ever got to widening teeth, so if there are any ambitious animators out there who wan to take the baton from the master, here's your chance.
As if to rally the audience to stirring ovations, a tiny man in a green suit and giant red bowtie leaps out from the wings, flourishing towards the incredible stretchy teeth. But as it turns out, there's more to the trick. The teeth are not only stretchy, they're  

retractable, and they slide back into theinvisible gums, leaving a vast empty maw filled with dark energy... and a bomb, a Warner Brothers cartoon bomb, round, with a lit fuse, and the word "Bomb" written on it. How nice of the stenographers to alert us! The bomb rises up on a wooden platform, lifted presumably by the New Man's trained tonsils, and suddenly this trick is looking pretty astonishing. Stretchy teeth was just the beginning. This man can also light a bomb wedged in his own esophagus, lift it up on a platform, and...

yes... blow himself up with said bomb.Now that takes talent! I haven't seen anything that impressive on Dancing with the Stars, and believe me, I've longed for the exploding celebrity on that show. Something else I'd like to point out, just in case you don't know yet what a true professional Gilliam is... Notice that the small man flourishing towards the mouth now has a shadow cast by the explosion. Remember, this was in the era before computers did all that for you. Though it's a quick (really quick, like a second) effect,

and though Gilliam clearly isn't shooting for ultra-realism, he thinks enough of us and his explosion to add to the effect with a sudden shadow on the barker, just before the explosion engulfs him as well.
A brick wall interrupt the proceedings. Perhaps we have run up against the same impediment that the long nosed and chinned car man ran up against earlier, and a fist is preparing to sock us. But no, Gilliam has other plans, as the music suggests-- we've reached the end of another set of titles, and all that remains is the coda of the

show's name. In what must be exclusive to the reality of animators, a blue sea slides in from the right across the bottom of the brick wall, wiping out the lower two rows. A beautiful sunset slides down from up above, like they do, blotting out the remainder of the brick wall. Before we can even register the scene, like a flat rolled down a stage wall, we get some scenery slid in from the left, two palms trees arcing one towards the other, creating a natural frame, like the leaf clusters in the Cannes Film Festival Awards. Secret longing,

perhaps, or just symmetry?  Then, tossed in as though flung over some alphabet lugger's shoulder, come the stacked letters that form the title "Monty Python's Flying Circus". They land perfectly placed between the two trees, blocking our view of the sunset, filling the frame.
But we know there's a squish coming, and it's no fun to just squish a bunch of letters that nobody cares about. We need hopes, dreams, aspirations, in order for the squish to be really cruel, and really

funny. Gilliam obliges. From beneath the letters, a Strong Man emerges, his arms outstretched, carrying the letters like an ant or an Atlas. He's bearded, big bellied, seemingly naked-- and he's smiling. Not one to bitch about the load he carries, he smiles with pride over his accomplishment, or with accommodation towards us, the audience, giving us yet another bit of value for the show. Maybe this is his stab at stardom. Maybe he wants us to think this is easy.
But we know there's a squish coming...

These title don't represent his best narrative work-- there's no through line, no brilliant observational humor like the cardinal on wheels chasing the nude lady from season 1-- just a series of strange visual gags, some of them too simple to credit. But visually, it represents some of Gilliam's strongest work, from the elaborate pipes to the many characters created and penned by the animator himself. And unlike the previous series, he redid the entire sequence, from opening bell to closing squish. Just another reminder that there has never been a show quite like Monty Python's Flying Circus, and there probably never will be again.

Next Week; The Cycling Tour!