Latest news with #Tolkien-inspired
Yahoo
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
New Zealand airport's iconic Lord of the Rings giant eagle sculptures to be removed
Wellington Airport in New Zealand will be removing their iconic Tolkien-inspired giant eagle sculptures on May 9. The sculptures were created in 2013 by Wētā Workshop, known for working on props for many movies, including Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies. The airport announced it will be collaborating with Wētā Workshop once again to replace the displays.
Telegraph
22-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Monty Python and the Holy Grail: the world's funniest film turns 50
Not that the film's influence was confined to the US. The list of writers, performers, directors and artists who took on, specifically, Holy Grail's mixture of surrealism, history and anachronistic comedy is long and impressive. It includes Terry Pratchett, who drew on Python's handling of the medieval world for his own vision of Tolkien-inspired comedy; Richard Curtis, the creator of Blackadder, and his collaborator Ben Elton, who continues to mine the historical comedy vein with his Shakespeare sitcom Upstart Crow; and Taika Waititi, who not only made the dark historical comedy Jojo Rabbit, but also superbly rebooted Gilliam's Time Bandits for Apple TV+ last year. And there is, of course, more than a trace of Holy Grail's DNA in the BBC's Horrible Histories, which took Terry Deary's books and turned them into the longest-running Python tribute ever screened. It's arguable that, more than anything else they did – more than the extremist comedy of The Meaning of Life's Mr Creosote, more than the Dead Parrot sketch so beloved by students everywhere, more than the stage shows and the LPs, more even than the controversial Life of Brian – Holy Grail represents the purest and best expression of Monty Python. Its loose narrative gives it an extraordinary freedom simply to be relentlessly funny. Its medieval fabulist setting means it can never date (it helps, too, perhaps, that it's the only Python project in which most of the female roles are actually played by women). And its history-based theme made it the template for so much of the Pythons' subsequent work, solo and otherwise, from Ripping Yarns to The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Even after half a century, its grip on the world's psyche shows little sign of loosening. Like a cross-cultural Easter egg, Holy Grail still crops up everywhere, in every medium. Perhaps the most famous recent reference occurs in the otherwise distinctly uncomical HBO megahit Game of Thrones, which not only featured scenes filmed at Holy Grail's Scottish Doune Castle location, but also a moment in which the Champion of Meereen taunts Daenerys Targaryen with the words, 'Your mother is a hamster and your father smells of elderberries.' There can surely be no better tribute to the lasting influence of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. David Quantick is the writer of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane Austen? starring Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, which will return to Radio 4 soon
