Monty Python's Flying Circus - Set 2: Season 1 -

Michael Palin, haggard and exhausted under a scraggly beard and wild hair, crawls out of the ocean (or the forest or a side of a mountain) and croaks the now-infamous It's.... Suddenly, the Liberty Bell march pounds over the cut-out animation of Terry Gilliam. It's another episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus. No comedy has inspired such a fanatical following before or since, and the 45 episodes turned out by the group in their all-too-brief three and a half seasons have become classics. This set presents the final seven episodes of their inaugural season, a time of trial and error for the group as they perfected the elusive free-association structure that would define the wacky comedy. Connecting such all-time classics as the Lumberjack Song, the Dead Parrot sketch, and the epic Science Fiction sketch (featuring the tennis mad Blancmanges from outer space) are the ubiquitous letters to the BBC, Terry Gilliam's whimsical and ridiculous animated inserts, and John Cleese announcing, And now for something completely different with all the authority of a BBC announcer who suddenly finds his news desk hijacked by mobsters. The Pythons hit their first-season stride in the middle episodes, in which brilliant sketches and strange and wonderful linking gags come together with an absurd logic, but if the final episodes of the series flag compared to their comic peak, their brand of comic madness infects every episode with moments of pure lunatic magic. --Sean Axmaker ...