REBECCA SUGAR
(Distant cousin of Rachel Stone-Abbott)
"Does Daniel remember
Monty Python by any chance?"
RACHEL STONE ABBOTT
(President, Chief executive officer; Hanna-Barbera)
"He's ate, slept and breathed Python since childhood. Isn't that right Danny Boy?"
DANIEL ABBOTT
(Animator and voice actor at Disney)
"Right. Except at the beginning, it was something I had to sneak past my parents.
I was eleven years old when
Flying Circus debuted on BBC One. I first heard of it from a few of my schoolmates during lunch break. It would usually run at 10:56 on Sunday nights when I was supposed to be in bed. There were nights I'd sneak out of my room and tip toe to the living room to watch. I had to make sure the volume on the telly was low enough where I could still hear the sound without waking up the whole flat.
My mum caught me only once. It was the night of the Dead Parrot sketch and right before it was over, next thing I hear is...
(Falsetto voice) 'Daniel, turn the telly off and go back to bed!'
...then a little later, The Lumberjack Song swept the schoolyard. You had to have been there to see the nuns and the vicar nervously doing the Sign of the Cross and murmur to themselves while we sang those lyrics at the top our lungs.
Holy Grail came a few years later when I moved from Soton to London and started my career at Richard Williams' old studio in Soho.
A few years went by until I moved to Atlanta and was surprised to see reruns of
Flying Circus playing late at night on the PBS affiliate over there.
While I was in Atlanta, Life of Brian came out the same year I worked on
The Hobbit for United Artists.
The Meaning of Life was the last movie I saw during my time in Atlanta. United Artists brought
Life of Brian over to the States, but then Universal was the distributor for
Meaning of Life. Little did I know when I first saw
Meaning of Life in the cinema, I would be laid off from UA and end up moving [to Hollywood] to work for Universal.
Since coming to Disney, I've been blessed to actually work with some of the Pythons, whether it was doing voices for a theme park attraction to a video game or a guest appearance on
House of Mouse or something. However, I did fill in for Graham Chapman on
The Hobbit way before that
."