Recently, Dangerous Minds posted a 1970 interview with Monty Python animator Terry Gilliam, in which he explained how he did a famous piece of animation. A hand repeatedly tries to pull a fig leaf from the crotch of Michelangelo’s David and finally succeeds, to reveal underneath it a talking head that says, “We’re not going to allow this kind of filth on screen.” A giant “Censored” stamp comes down and the animation ends. The bit is seen in the Python TV series and also in the film And Now for Something Completely Different.

In 1978, I was co-editor of our high school’s literary magazine, and we decided to participate in the school’s fine arts festival that spring by showing a movie. In those pre-videocassette days, you’d rent a movie on 16MM—there used to be companies that provided them—and show it for a couple of bucks a ticket. With Python-mania at its height in 1978 and several Python fanatics on the staff of the magazine, a showing of And Now for Something Completely Different was perfect. So we rented it, publicized it heavily, and planned to show it on a Thursday and Friday night in the high school lecture hall.

The Thursday night showing was not particularly well attended, as we guessed it would not be. Friday was going to be the big night. Five minutes before Thursday night showtime, however, a whole family showed up—Mom, Dad, their high-school-aged son, and three much-younger siblings. We were not sure what they were doing there, but we collected their $2 a head and rolled the film for the two dozen people who had showed up.

And Now for Something Completely Different is an anthology of bits from the first two series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. One of the first sketches involves a phrasebook that mistranslates mundane Hungarian phrases into sexually suggestive English. Another sketch involving a marriage counselor ends with the counselor and the wife undressing behind a screen before a romantic tryst. This is followed a few minutes later by the fig leaf animation.

On this particular night, the fig leaf animation was followed by the family in the audience noisily getting out of their seats and marching up the aisle and out of the hall. The father demanded of the staff member at the ticket table, in Biblical tones, “Who is responsible for this abomination?”

That night, I knew nothing about the brouhaha, or if I did, I ignored it. The next morning, however, I arrived at school to hear myself being summoned by the public address system to the magazine advisor’s classroom. “It has hit the fan,” he said. “That family at the movie last night complained to the school board, and we have to show the movie to the board at 8:00 this morning.” As it turned out, we had to show it to one member of the school board, a woman I had known for several years because her daughter was a classmate. Perhaps that previous personal relationship saved the magazine—and our advisor—from as much trouble as we could have been in. We were not permitted to show the film on Friday night, but that was the last I heard of the controversy.

It turned out that the family who had left outraged the previous night had come to the Monty Python movie under the impression that it was in fact about a circus, with clowns and acrobats and suchlike. They did not own a TV set, having gotten rid of it years before to keep televised filth out of their very religious home. “Why is their backward attitude our problem?” I asked our advisor. Under the circumstances, he did well not to smack me upside the head in response.

If something similar happened today, the family would have gone to the media in addition to the school board, and the resulting shitstorm would have been epic—a Fox News profile of the religious family that was assaulted by pornography with the approval of the public school they support with their tax dollars. We were lucky to be living in simpler times.