To Norway, Home of Giants

This is an odd duck indeed, a travelogue about Norwegian customs that is trying to be a Cleese comedy. Mostly it works. I'm not sure who the intended audience was (I suspect airline passengers on their way to Norway) but the current office seems to be PBS pledge drive viewers (that's how I saw it a couple decades ago).

Being of Swedish descent, I'm a sucker for Scandinavian jokes, even ones that portray us as genial oafs. The film even starts off with a joking reference to Viking raids-- "It was from a port such as this that my many-times-great-great-grandfather pillaged and raped my many-times-great-great-grandmother and began the the line that came down to me."

Sure some of the jokes are dumb. What the heck, it's a travelogue!

I really wish someone would package up things like this film and Cleese's other industrial films. Heck, maybe throw in Cleese's radio spots for things like British beer ("warm sweet sticky stuff with bits of pond life floating in it!"), Callard and Bowser toffees ("Apparently I forgot to mention the name of the product in the last advertisement; the ad agency told me this is considered a bad thing."), and our local ritzy supermarket, V. Richards ("real imported cheese from real foreign countries; we us a map and everything!").