The Surprisingly Complicated History of Conan the Librarian

Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the seven hundred and ninety-sixth installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false.

As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends.

NOTE: If my Twitter page hits 5,000 followers, I'll do a bonus edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed that week. Great deal, right? So go follow my Twitter page, Brian_Cronin!

COMIC LEGEND:

Conan the Librarian was first parodied in Monty Python's Flying Circus.

STATUS:

False

IN HONOR OF CONAN THE BARBARIAN'S 50TH ANNIVERSARY IN COMICS, THIS INSTALLMENT (LIKE LAST ONE) WILL BE ALL CONAN LEGENDS!

A couple of almost tangential points at the start. The first is, I LOVE when you all send in suggestions for future legends. LOVE it. I'm really good at coming up with interesting topics to write about, but guess what? So are you folks! And if you all send in ideas, then that means even MORE cool ideas to write about! So please, keep sending them in. That said, some people (including good friends of mine) often just send their ideas to me through Twitter or Facebook messages. I'm not necessarily AGAINST that, as the ideas get to me and I eventually use them. The only issue is that there is no way for me to search through Facebook messages and not MUCH of a way to search through Facebook comments or tweets. If all you want is to get an idea across to me and you don't care about credit, then that's fine, but if you'd like me to credit you for your cool idea, please e-mail me at either brianc@cbr.com or cronb01@aol.com. That's a long way to get to the fact that I don't remember who suggested this one and I can't find it on a search, so it must have been a Facebook message. Again, THAT'S OKAY. I'm not upset with you if you message me ideas instead of e-mailing them. I just have no record of who sent it in, that's all.

EDITED TO ADD: It was my buddy, Zack Smith, who suggested this one. Thanks, Zack!

The next is to note that I love Wikipedia. I think it's amazing. What a great website. Today's legend is about a particularly iffy error in a Wikipedia article, but that's fair enough, errors happen. I've certainly made a few over the years. So yeah, Wikipedia rules.

Okay, today, we're discussing Conan the Librarian, one of the most unusually pervasive parody ideas I've come across.

Here's an interesting thing about parodies. For the most part, they only happen to a product that is popular enough to be known by a mainstream audience. They don't even have to have necessarily seen a movie or watched a TV show, but they typically are popular enough that you get the basic gist. As a result, then, Conan parodies typically did not exist back when the novels were popular or when the comic book became a big hit (well, in the comic book world, of course, there was Cerebus, but I mean mainstream parodies). However, when Conan got his own movie in 1982, THEN the parodies began.

You Can't Do That on Television was a popular Canadian kid-centric sketch show. Think Saturday Night Live for kids. After debuting on Canadian television, it also began airing on Nickelodeon in the United States, where it gained its greatest fame (especially the green slime that would be poured on people when they said "I Don't Know". That slime would become synonymous with Nickelodeon. One of the recurring bits is that each episode would open with the show ostensibly pre-empting some absurd television program (like a boxing match between Mister T and Punky Brewster). In a 1982 episode, the opening card was that "Conan the Librarian" was being preempted...

Around that same time, a college magazine did a "Conan the Barbarian" parody.

In 1986, an episode of the kids show, Reading Rainbow, did a Conan the Librarian parody...

In 1987, Mike Peters' comic strip, Mother Goose and Grimm did a Conan the Librarian joke that became VERY popular among librarians (I'm sure people still clip out notable newspaper strips, but boy, that practice used to be HUGE)....

Finally, in the Weird Al Yankovic movie, UHF (about a low budget TV station that starts to have success through its bizarre programming), there is a Conan the Librarian TV show...

However, on the Wikipedia article for "Conan the Librarian," there is a citation stating that the earliest usage of the parody idea was on Monty Python's Flying Circus, "Conan the Librarian appears in the comedy show Monty Python in a 1970s sketch featuring Michael Palin as a film director who specialises in non-violent films, such as Conan the Librarian and others." That "fact" has since been repeated all over the internet. The problem, of course, is that it is just based on someone's memories of a sketch that never actually existed. I went through the Monty Python episode guide and even asked the good folks at Cardinal Fang's Monty Python fan site, and they agreed with me that it never existed.

That said, one of the Conan the Librarians that we DID get was almost a lot more than expected (I'll get to that in the next part of this installment).

Thanks again to Cardinal Fang's Monty Python Fan Site! And thanks to whoever it was who suggested I write about this! Feel to write in to let me know who you are (and if you want to make future suggestions just over e-mail, that's fine, too).