Now for Something Completely Retro

‘I just got off the phone with the Spam people,” announces Terry Lewis, co-chair of the British Academy of Film & Television. He gleefully ticks off the triumphs. “They’ve been incredibly positive. They’re sending us 3,000 Spam recipe cards and refrigerator magnets, and 400 ‘Great Taste of Spam’ recipe books, and we’ve got 400 cases of Spam arriving. Of course the Spam always has a trademark symbol next to it, so it just couldn’t be more perfect.”

This can only mean two things: Another great war is imminent in Europe, or it’s a significant Monty Python anniversary year.

Happily--or preferable to a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, anyhow--it’s the latter, with the 25th anniversary of the first broadcast of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” on the BBC on Oct. 5, 1969 fast approaching. Though the influentially absurdist English comedy troupe hasn’t worked together since the “Monty Python’s the Meaning of Life” film was released 12 years ago, its popularity refuses to wane, and related projects continue to whet fans’ Spam-sated appetites.

Lewis is collecting the aforementioned foodstuff for a private party the academy is throwing this week at the British consul general’s home for several Pythons who are coming to town. The fete is expected to attract many of L.A.’s foremost comic luminaries. But if rank-and-file Python fans can’t attend that, there’ll still be plenty of other ways to celebrate in the coming weeks:

* Next weekend, Los Angeles is the site of the only official 25th-anniversary Python film festival, a five-day affair designed to exhaust any compleatist. “Monty Python: Lust for Glory”--the series is named after Eric Idle’s legendary jest that the filmic follow-up to “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” would be called “Jesus Christ: Lust for Glory”--lines up as easily the most comprehensive roundup of group and solo film and TV work ever assembled.

The whirlwind schedule (co-sponsored by the American Cinematheque) promises movie outtakes, rarely seen side projects, industrial films and pre-Python material that member Terry Jones says “even we haven’t seen in 25 or 30 years.” Besides Jones, Terry Gilliam and Eric Idle have committed to attend key screenings at the Directors Guild.

* Two key Python collaborators, at least, will also be coming to town this fall. Neil Innes, who co-wrote much of the troupe’s musical material, will be resurrecting the Beatles-spoofing side project the Rutles (sans Idle, but with a string section) as “Ron Nasty and the New Rutles” in a club show Thursday and Saturday at the Troubadour. And Carol Cleveland, the “seventh Python” (at least when the six fellows tired of doing drag), is scheduled to perform a one-woman show Oct. 13 at UCLA.

* On Tuesday, Virgin Records issues “The Instant Monty Python CD Collection,” a six-disc box covering nearly all the audio product ever put out by the troupe, including some sketches never previously released in this country.

* And perhaps most exciting of all is a beyond-the-state-of-the-art CD-ROM due later this month and called “Monty Python’s Complete Waste of Time,” which not only serves as a retrospective but also includes significant new writing and voice-over contributions from four of the five surviving members.

“It’s like seeing the show for the first time. You see these same things that you’ve always seen, but it’s like-- aghhhh! --completely different,” Jones says with a chuckle about the CD-ROM, whose hilarious and intricate design may astonish even the most cynical computer buffs. “I think we’re all stunned by it.”

If it seems as if Python is bigger in death--or just inactivity, for those hopeful for a reunion--than in life, it’s not just an optical illusion. Reruns of the 40 “Flying Circus” episodes, broadcast in the United States on PBS and ABC in the ‘70s, are a staple of cable’s Comedy Central nowadays, where a new generation of kids is memorizing the Parrot Sketch and such.

“I think the Pythons’ skewed view of the world is still appropriate today,” says Bob Ezrin, the record-producer-turned-multi-media-mogul whose company, 7th Level, is putting together the CD-ROM. “It takes on a whole segment of society or a whole era in history or a whole personality type.”

The British academy’s honcho Lewis--who produced the series of “Secret Policeman’s Ball” benefits in Britain in the ‘80s and is a longtime friend of all the members--thinks that that very timelessness and lack of topicality has gotten the troupe unfairly dismissed by some snobs in the United Kingdom. Hence, he figures, America is the perfect locale for the anniversary confab.

“The parallels with the Beatles are always there, and it extends to their being more cherished by their comedic peers here than at home in Britain,” Lewis maintains. “There, some people say, ‘Oh, it was absurdist humor, it was completely irrelevant, they didn’t attack the icons of the day.’ But they didn’t go for the ‘political’ gag. . . . They captured that anarchic spirit (of the late ‘60s). . . . That’s why the Pythons have felt at home in America, because their stuff is appreciated here.”

Jones tends to agree, remembering that the BBC was on the verge of “wiping” all the “Flying Circus” episodes as a matter of procedure after the show went off the air in 1974. He even made some crude video copies at the time to store in his basement, after being alerted by a BBC worker that the masters were about to be taped over. “Then they suddenly made the overseas sale, so it was thanks to you guys in the United States that Python wasn’t wiped and the shows weren’t just a memory in my cellar. I think it’s absolutely right that the only Python festival should be going on in Los Angeles.”

Much vault-digging has been going on throughout England to provide little- or never-seen material for the film festival and the CD-ROM.

Jones is delighted, for instance, that curator Lewis was able to track down what is likely the lone surviving copy of a 1969 TV special called “The Complete and Utter History of Britain,” co-starring and co-written by Michael Palin and Jones. It was presumed lost, but Lewis, making calls from his L.A. office to London Weekend Television, suddenly had the thought: What if the tape was mistakenly filed away somewhere under history , not comedy ? His hunch was right; the tape had been filed away for decades with film of royal pageants.

All the surviving Pythons contributed lists of solo works they wanted to have shown, with the exception of the often-contrary John Cleese, whose contribution to the festival was submitting the name of a project that he did not want shown (“The Strange Case of the End of Civilization as We Know It,” a misfired Sherlock Holmes parody shown on PBS in 1977).

For the CD-ROM, Ezrin and his collaborators were allowed access to Gilliam’s “dungeon,” where they sorted through the various pieces Gilliam used to cut out and paste together Python animations, finding bits to reassemble for the disc’s graphic interfaces. “That was such a tremendous honor,” says Ezrin (best known as producer of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”), “to be able to sift through the original pieces that were literally cut out from Victorian art books and historical texts and magazines of the ‘50s. He had--has--such a constructive eye. He’ll take two completely dull and lifeless images and in his brain combine them to make something that’s absolutely ridiculous that makes you laugh.”

Gilliam’s favorite part of the CD-ROM, according to Ezrin, is a game in which the player tries to maneuver a chicken with a man’s head into a gaping mouth on one side of the screen, without getting electrocuted by wires overhead or stabbed by jutting arrows underneath.

“It’s Gilliam’s favorite because it’s really grossly violent. See, we originally just had this antiseptic little thing that fell on the arrows and disappeared, and Gilliam said, ‘Come on . Let’s get some blood gushing here!’ ”

Of course, the ultimate hope of any Python fan is another movie, though that’s generally been given a snowball’s chance in hell.

“I don’t know, I was in hell last week, and it was snowing,” Ezrin responds. “I don’t think you can say there’s no chance. One of the things this (CD-ROM) title has done, if nothing else, is it’s gotten them talking and brought them together around a project of mutual interest.

“So who knows where this will lead us? A Python film, I think, would be phenomenal. There might be a problem filming Graham’s scenes (the late Graham Chapman, that is), but aside from that, it’d be great.”

Jones is more reserved about what sort of reunion the anniversary might spark: “Possibly the Pythons themselves might get together for lunch or something, I don’t know; we haven’t actually organized anything like that yet ourselves.”