In 1971 Monty Python's Flying Circus had enjoyed two reasonably successful (if sometimes controversial) seasons on UK television, but had failed to win an audience in the US. The head of Playboy UK thought he had a solution, however: put together a 90 minute film comprising some of the best-received segments of the show, to be screened in cinemas.
And thus And Now For Something Completely Different (the name being taken from a commonly used line in the show) came to be made. Rather than simply combining existing footage of the skits (probably due to issues with the BBC) they were re-shot on a shoestring budget; so shoestring in fact that they sometimes had to be re-written to remove effects that were included in the original TV broadcasts!
Consisting of roughly 30 short live action sketches and roughly half as many animated sequences, And Now For Something Completely Different is ironically therefore 100% familiar material. I'm not sure how the sketches were selected - certainly there are some famous segments omitted, such as the Ministry of Silly Walks and The Spanish Inquisition - but you certainly can't complain that they aren't packing in a bunch of material!
As what is essentially an extended episode of a sketch-comedy TV show, there's no real narrative to speak of here (though several of the sketches do blend into each other or have quirky call-backs to earlier content); whether you will enjoy it or not therefore comes down to how funny you find the Python team's sense of the absurd. Also, to a lesser extent, how willing you are to overlook the cultural assumptions of fifty year old jokes; there is for instance an obvious assumption in some of the sketches that homosexuality is intrinsically funny.
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