The First 28 Years of Monty Python, Revised Edition - Softcover

Johnson, Kim "Howard"

4.06

640 ratings by Goodreads

9780312169336: The First 28 Years of Monty Python, Revised Edition

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312169337 ISBN 13: 9780312169336

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 1999

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The ultimate guide for Python fans is back, newly revised for the nineties. The years since the publication of the first edition have brought a great deal of change for the Python alumni-most notably most celebrated postgraduate successes: A Fish Called Wanda, The Fisher King, 12 Monkeys, and Disney's Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.

This revised edition also contains all of the original material (dead parrots, fish-slapping, silly walks, Knights Who Say Ni, etc.) that made the first edition such a success! The First 280 Years of Monty Python celebrates the group's career with exclusive interviews, rare photographs, and an episode guide detailing the original TV shows. It's a must-have item for any Python fan.

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Review:

Longtime Python fanatic Kim "Howard" Johnson's update of The First 200 Years of Monty Python retains at its core the nearly blow-by-blow account of each of the 45 classic episodes in which this British troupe blew gale-force fresh air into television comedy. But for this new volume the author has extensively reinterviewed the Pythons, as well as Carol Cleveland (the lone female performer--unless you count the guys in drag); expanded the material on individual members and their work before and after Monty Python's Flying Circus; and added a bibliography of their output in every medium (plus coverage of PythOnline).

Johnson first met John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, and the late Graham Chapman in 1978, when he published a Python fanzine, and he actually worked on their third film, Life of Brian. That 21-year relationship gives the book a jovial insider's tone making it a nice complement to David Morgan's more conventional oral history, Monty Python Speaks! Johnson conscientiously profiles every manifestation of Python's creative madness, but his first loves remain "The Spanish Inquisition," "Cheese Shop," "Dead Parrot," and all the other insanely inventive sketches that are as fresh and funny in reruns as they were 280 years ago. --Wendy Smith

From the Publisher:

"A wonderful, brilliant, incisive, transcendental, and mystical work, except for the bits about Terry Gilliam. And Eric Idle. And the rather uninteresting and unnecessary details about Michael Jones and Terry Palin. And perhaps it would have been even better had it gone on even less about Graham Chapman. The rest is superb." --John Cleese

"A book to make you laugh or cry (depending on whether you tear out the pages and tickle your feet with them or roll them up tightly into thin cylindrical rolls and poke yourself in the eye)." --Terry Jones

"There's really nothing an agnostic can't do if he really doesn't know whether he believes in anything or not." --Graham Chapman

"Al least now you have a chance to see what we've had to put up with all these years." --Eric Idle

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