After Monty Python, Eric Idle continued the sketch comedy television with Rutland Weekend Television, which featured “The Seventh Python,” Neil Innes. Best known beyond The Rutles as an amazing absurd satirist, Innes brought a musical legitimacy that Idle, with impressive musical credentials of his own, likely couldn’t match. Also, Innes did a dead-on John Lennon.
Hardly the first mock-documentary, this is one of the first – if not THE first musical-themed film in the genre. A pretty literal parallel of the actual history of The Beatles, The Rutles is impressive, if only for its attention to detail. The songs are, in many cases, dead-ringers for actual Beatles songs (which apparently caused a legal problem or two), and the story an absurd twist and comment on Beatlemania – an obsession that, no matter how you feel about The Beatles, is easily seen as one of the strangest phenomena to ever ripple through pop culture.
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One of the great satires of all time. I am – most decidedly – a Rutlemaniac!
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Tom Degan