Credit ROFLRAZZI.COM Thanks to Loren Eaton for the link.



Steve Bradford, who I credited with yesterday’s link, had this link today. It’s a review of How To Train Your Dragon by Nathan D. Wilson, that draws a very, very different conclusion from mine:

But that’s not what was served up. Instead, dragons were bad. They raided the village stealing sheep. They burned it down constantly. They killed people. Lots of people. And here’s one of a few things that stunned me. Why did they do these evil things? Well, because they served The Dragon. The big one. The huge, ancient, evil one. And the story progresses not with one small boy (Hiccup) successfully communicating to his father (Stoick) that dragons were misunderstood, but with that boy crushing The Dragon’s head and . . . losing his foot in the process.

That message never even crossed my mind while I saw the movie. And frankly, I don’t think many other viewers took it that way either. But still, if that’s what Cressida Cowell, the author of the books the movie was based on, intended, I probably owe her an apology or something.

I often get things wrong.

Take, for no particular reason, Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Back when the program was new in this country, in the late ’70s, I was a huge fan. It was so outrageous, so silly, so simultaneously British and un-British, and done with such Anglian self-mockery, that I had to love it. People argued that it promoted an irrational, postmodern view of the world, but I didn’t believe. Sketches like my favorites, “The Cheese Shop” and “The Argument Clinic,” were in fact a critique of postmodernism (said I). If the postmoderns were correct, it seemed to me, then all of life would be like a Monty Python sketch, and the show wouldn’t be funny.

But over the years, as they moved into films, I changed my view. I loved Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The Life of Brian offended me in spots, and The Meaning of Life I took as a plain slap in the face. Watching the TV series, I might be offended, but the next minute they’d turn around and offend somebody I disagreed with. It was an equal opportunity fish-slapping zone. But their films grew more and more focused, focused on one thing—lampooning the idea that life had meaning; that there was a God in the universe.

Nowadays I can’t even bear to watch the old Monty Python shows. I feel a little betrayed by them, though my own credulity is really at fault. They baited me, and I took the bait (though I still can’t resist Fawlty Towers. That’s comedy, even if John Cleese would despise me if he knew me).

Of course, I may have entirely misunderstood the Pythons, just like (maybe) I misunderstood How to Train Your Dragon.

And now, a man with a tape recorder up his nose.