SIX MONKEYS: An Introduction.
I grew up with only a couple friends who had VCRs. So the opportunity to watch a movie you liked whenever you wanted to was starting to happen while I was in elementary school, but was still rare. When I was in middle school, Tim Burton’s Batman came out, and — like most movies at the time — when it was released on video it was priced at just under $90. In my opinion, Batman was one of the films that helped transform expectations of how much a video should cost: it was constantly on sale for around $25, every time with a caveat that this was the lowest price evs! and it would quickly rocket back up to full retail price, so buy it now; no, really, NOW. (This doesn’t quite mesh with searching online copies of Sears Wishbooks, which list most videos as going for about $20, but that might be because of holiday season sales or they’re no longer first-release? Memory and truth don’t always match up…) I do think it jump-started both the trend of consumers paying better attention to release-week deals in advertizing fliers, but also helped create an general unwillingness to pay more than a quarter-hundo for a videocassette. Which then became a floor that dropped even more.
But (I maintain for the purposes of this post) for some time, it was financially difficult to have a large home-video collection, and so people only tended to have splashed out for something that was incredibly precious. So when childhood friend Geoff had a copy of Time Bandits, even though I hadn’t heard of it before, I knew it was something special. We subsequently watched it together, in whole or in pieces, many times.
This led to watching Baron Munchausen when it came out, which then — and this might surprise some long-time listeners — led to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I still have a distinct memory of a curved close-up shot of Eric Idle as Brother Maynard reading the carved Aramaic final testament on the walls of the cave lair of the Black Beast of Arrrrgh and realizing, “Oh, hey, that’s the fast guy with the weighted leg irons!” After a couple hours of watching closely and laughing uproariously, I only recognized him because Gilliam (perhaps?) filmed him in the same tight shot also used later during Munchausen‘s fantastical running sequences.
Gilliam as filmmaker became one of my early pretentious fandoms, and 12 Monkeys was the first of his films I was able to see theatrically screened. So, as we approach the thirtieth anniversary of its release, I thought I’d revisit it and the films leading up to it, and see how these particular half-dozen monkeys stand up to scrutiny. Gilliam has taken some stick in recent years for falling on the wrong side of the divide of Members Of Monty Python Who Know How Not To Offend The Youth On Social Media. Cleese remains the once and future offensiveness king of the four surviving members, but jolly, cheeky Gilliam has not been able to successfully convey his jolly, cheeky vibe very well in micro-blogged soundbites and snapshots. So he has been… not cancelled, but summarily dismissed as Old And Out-of-Touch. I myself am too old to be able to see clearly whether his old work would resonate with The Youth, but I remain interested in giving it a chance to stand or fall under the withering, Anubis-like gaze of critical re-evaluation. It only seems appropriate to see whether a time travel movie about saving the planet after a pandemic might continue to actually work in the future. So, here we go:
Blogalongagilliam 2025:
Dec. 1: Jabberwocky (1977)
Dec. 8: Time Bandits (1981)
Dec. 15: Brazil (1985)
Dec. 22: The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988)
Dec. 29: The Fisher King (1991)
Jan. 5: 12 Monkeys (1995)
Jan. 12: BONUS! 12 Monkeys Season 1 (2015)
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