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Are We the Baddies?
SKETCH-O-VISION
A VERY GOOD USE OF YOUR TIME.
The setup
The premise
Here’s the bit.
In a frontline trench as Soviet forces close in, an SS officer interrupts his comrade Hans with a nagging observation: the badges on their caps are skulls, and he wonders aloud what that implies about them. Later, while Hans plans how to hold the line, his friend keeps worrying at the question. Hans offers that the skulls might belong to their enemies and waves the doubts away as Allied propaganda, but his comrade compares the Allies' cheerful emblems with their own grim one, and the pair struggle to think of a worse symbol. Hans then begins noticing skull imagery all around the dugout, from an ashtray and a soldier's mug to a scarf being knitted, until the uncomfortable conclusion becomes impossible to avoid.
The funny people
Meet the cast. 3
Say it with us
Highly quotable.
Have you noticed that our caps have actually got little pictures of skulls on them?
Hans... are we the baddies?
I didn't say we weren't fun, but fun or not, pirates are still the baddies.
Behind the scenes
The people who made it.
David Kerr
Director
Gareth Edwards
Producer
A little extra
Notes from the archive.
Shown as a two-part runner in the first episode of That Mitchell and Webb Look; an earlier version of the sketch appeared on the duo's radio series That Mitchell and Webb Sound.
Script
Automatically generated script; wording may contain errors. Speaker labels are inferred.
- 00:00
Hans
Very well. They're coming. Now we'll see how these Russians deal with a crack SS division.
- 00:10
SS Officer #2
Er, Hans?
- 00:12
Hans
Have courage, my friend.
- 00:14
SS Officer #2
Yeah, er... Hans, I've just noticed something.
- 00:18
Hans
These communists are all cowards.
- 00:21
SS Officer #2
Have you looked at our caps recently?
- 00:26
Hans
Our caps?
- 00:27
SS Officer #2
The badges on our caps. Have you looked at them?
- 00:31
Hans
What? No. A bit.
- 00:35
SS Officer #2
They've got skulls on them. Have you noticed that our caps have actually got little pictures of skulls on them?
- 00:44
Hans
I don't...
- 00:46
SS Officer #2
Hans, are we the baddies?
- 00:51
Hans
Let's see. We should be able to hold them at this point here, at least for a few hours.
- 00:58
SS Officer #2
I mean, why skulls, though?
- 01:00
Hans
What?
- 01:02
SS Officer #2
Why skulls?
- 01:03
Hans
Well, maybe they're the skulls of our enemies.
- 01:07
SS Officer #2
Maybe. But is that how it comes across? I mean, it doesn't say next to the skull, you know, yeah, we killed him, but trust us, this guy was horrid.
- 01:16
Hans
Well, no, but...
- 01:18
SS Officer #2
I mean, what do skulls make you think of?
- 01:22
SS Officer #2
Death, cannibals, beheading, um...
- 01:26
Hans
Pirates?
- 01:27
Hans
Pirates are fun!
- 01:28
SS Officer #2
I didn't say we weren't fun, but fun or not, pirates are still the baddies. I just can't think of anything good about a skull.
- 01:36
Hans
What about pure Aryan skull shape?
- 01:39
SS Officer #2
Even that is more usually depicted with the skin still on. Whereas the Allies...
- 01:45
Hans
Oh, you haven't been listening to Allied propaganda. Of course they're going to say we're the bad guys.
- 01:49
SS Officer #2
But they didn't get to design our uniforms. And their symbols are all, you know, quite nice. Stars, stripes, lions, sickles.
- 01:58
Hans
What's so good about a sickle?
- 01:59
SS Officer #2
Well, nothing. and obviously if there's one thing we've learned in the last thousand miles of retreat is that russian agriculture is in dire need of mechanization but you've got to say it's better than a skull i mean i really can't think of anything worse as a symbol than a skull
- 02:15
Hans
a rat's anus
- 02:21
SS Officer #2
yeah and if we were fighting an army marching under the banner of a rat's anus i'd probably That would be a lot less worried hands.
- 02:40
Hans
OK. Okay, So... so...
The rabbit hole continues
One more couldn’t hurt.
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