It's been a fairly long ride, but it looks like tomorrow my son and I will wrap up Season 4 of Monty Python. We only watch one episode an evening and lately on weekends I usually substitute a movie. While I agree that Season 4 isn't as good as the first three seasons (not simply because Cleese had departed), the Michael Ellis and Mr. Neutron episodes aren't bad. In an interview in the bonus features, I did see a short clip from the last episode (a sketch about the most disgusting family in England), and it looked like The Young Ones was a direct rip off! It really is astonishing how influential this show was.
It generally holds up well, though for sure a couple of skits with blackface or Eric Idle dressed up like a Native American would have been better off on the cutting room floor when they started reissuing the series. And some of the topical references don't make much sense anymore. I have enough context from watching TV in late 70s and 80s to remember the BBC and network tv more generally that the Pythons were spoofing, but my son doesn't really have that background. He still enjoys watching them though.
About midway through our march through the episodes, I broke down and bought this on Blu-Ray through Network, which then meant shopping around for a modified Blu-Ray player that would play Regions A and B. The quality is much better, esp. for Gilliam's animations, though some of the restorations are so slight that it is hard to see much of a difference. The single most interesting bonus feature is an industrial film that the Pythons made for Birds Eye Peas. It's essentially a full length show (20+ minutes) all about frozen peas. How odd. The one area where I prefer the older DVDs is better chapter breaks, making it much, much easier to skip to specific sketches. That's not enough reason to hold onto the DVDs, but it is a bit frustrating, as it couldn't have been that hard to add them in on the Blu-Rays.
I definitely grew up with the Pythons (watching it as a teenager either on PBS or A&E) and then during my undergrad years MTV played two episodes back to back in the evening. I certainly had thought I had seen all the episodes, but after this drawn-out marathon, that's clearly not the case.
I don't think I had seen "Live from the Grill-O-Mat" (Season 2, Ep. 5) before, though it's possible I just forgot. I'm more confident that I had not seen "Royal Episode 13" before. I don't think I'd seen "A Book at Bedtime" (Season 3, Ep. 12) before either, and I'm almost certain that I haven't seen "Light Entertainment War" from Season 4 previously. In a couple of cases, these were particularly provocative episodes, which may have had something to do with it, or maybe I just kept missing them. Hard to say.
Anyway, I'm deciding whether we go back to Get Smart (we got about halfway through Season 3 before putting that on pause) or work our way through Blackadder. At he moment I am leaning toward Blackadder.
Edit (2/19): So we watched the last episode from Season 4 last night. I think Mr. Neutron might have been the better closer. Anyway, I forgot about the two German episodes. I'm not 100% sure I have watched either of them all the way through. I have The Life of Python at my fingertips, which includes the 2nd episode. I probably can track down Monty Python Live, which has the first one. So that might be something we watch next week.
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