More than 40 years ago, in between making The Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life, one of the legendary Monty Python sketch comedy troupe decided he just wanted to make a film “from a kid’s point of view”.

Terry Gilliam rang Michael Palin and together they created the low-budget, critically acclaimed cult comedy Time Bandits in 1981, featuring cameos from them, and starring fellow Python John Cleese, and Sean Connery (who was reading scripts for James Bond in Never Say Never Again).

The kid who played the lead, Kevin Lotterby, was Craig Warnock, and the “heroes” of Gilliam’s dream project were six time-travelling dwarfs who enter his bedroom after hours and take him on a wild ride throughout history.

“I just knew that here’s a kid. He reads. His parents are awful. He
wants to escape to another place and then let’s hop around through various times,” Gilliam told the BBC in 2014.

“It came from this idea that here are the co-creators of the world,  God’s helpers, who got bored [and steal God’s map which reveals all the holes in time] and thought crime would be more interesting.

“Once you’re doing the crime, it’s how you escape into the past … and then incorporate lots of famous historical characters.”

In the first television adaptation of the Monty Python-flavoured part-fantasy, part-adventure comedy (courtesy of Apple TV+), there’s a new cast of ragtag thieves in the 2024 Time Bandits, series, and they’re not being playing by little people this time.

Friends’ alum Lisa Kudrow (Phoebe Buffay) is the comedic centre of gravity, and the ever-creative Taika Waititi (Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Thor: Love and Thunder) along with Jemaine Clement (Flight of the Conchords) and Iain Morris (The Inbetweeners) have reimagined storylines in 10 episodes.

“We were careful not to draw too much, too close, from the film, because then what’s the point?” Waititi told Screen Rant.

“You can just watch the original. So we wanted to make our own version and to add our own flavour to it and spin-off of it.”

Same … but different

Filmed entirely on location in Wellington, New Zealand, Time Bandits again has history buff Kevin as the young protagonist, played by Kal-El Tuck (Unseeing Evil).

The cast also includes Australian stand-up comedian Felicity Ward (who is also set to star in a home-grown version of The Office) and Rachel House (Heartbreak High).

Kudrow and her thieves head “on a journey to save Kevin’s parents, and the world”.

“The eccentric crew of bandits embark on epic adventures while evil forces threaten their conquests, and life as they know it,” the official Apple synopsis says.

Kevin walks through his wardrobe into another time in history. Photo: Apple TV+

Casting choices

Morris says he was terrified after watching the original as a kid, telling Variety their version is similar, but different.

“This set up with Kevin and the map and the portal and the gang of idiotic thieves, that’s very similar. But I think we go a bit deeper into the characters of the bands.

“And we go to more different places.”

He’s asked about not casting small stature actors, and whether that was to avoid potential offence – it being 2024 and not 1981.

“There are some little people in. But it’s a reimagining of the film.

“It’s a very diverse cast in lots of ways. We spent a lot of time thinking about that, and we thought about diversity and moving forward. And it’s something that we played with, hopefully successfully, throughout the story.

“We cast all sorts of people, from people who were incredibly tall to people who were very short.”

There’s time and space to introduce more historical figures than Robin Hood (Cleese), Napoleon (Ian Holm) and Agamemnon (Connery) from the original.

Morris says to expect to see West African king Mansa Musa, 1920s Harlem, even the time of the Neanderthals.

Meanwhile, early reviews say there are “still traces of Gilliam here, and the way he blended Pythonesque silliness with a rather Douglas Adams approach to sci-fi satire”, thanks to the “ironic” sensibilities of Waititi and his co-writers.

Time Bandits premieres on July 24, followed by two episodes every Wednesday until August 21