No it bloody isn’t: it’s Asterix and the Soothsayer with the Getafix-goes-gaga subplot from Big Fight grafted in! I don’t mind this as such: Soothsayer probably doesn’t have enough storyline to sustain a 70m animation, and the extra material involves plot devices shared by the two books. In Soothsayer, Getafix is absent because he’s attending the annual Druids’ conference at the Forest of the Carnutes; here he’s decked by that tosser Obelix’s menhir and temporarily loses his memory, allowing Getafix unintentionally to brew the foul vapours ‘predicted’ by Prolix. It works. But why call the film Asterix and the Big Fight? I reached the hour mark wondering how they were going to bring in all the tribal-chieftains-boxing-match malarkey within the last ten minutes. Obvious, really: They didn’t! There’s no Big Fight in it!
Given that this is a film of Asterix and the Soothsayer from a series that specialises in immolating great comic books, can we assume that all the factors that made its source such a great critique of modern-day charlatanist fortune-tellers are here sacrificed at the alter of the dark god Pratfall? We sure can....
Oddie’s nadir is an animated cartoon miscalled Asterix and the Big Fight.
The problem is that his range doesn’t extend much further than himself: he always plays himself to a greater or lesser degree and is indeed very good at playing that part. Oddie is not Asterix, though, and having Oddie’s characteristic near-manic vocalising coming from the soundtrack leads one to expect the midget-warrior at any moment to wield his black pudding and administer the Romans some serious Ecky Thump.
Obelix is the late Bernard Bresslaw, a character actor best known, and underused, as ‘Sid James’ dopey mate’ in the Carry On films. However, he’s perhaps at his best as the jealous innkeeper in Terry Gilliam’s Jabberwocky. In Big Fight he doesn’t go far wrong, but does tend to overstate Obelix’s thick-wittedness, making him a caricature.
Centurion Nebulus Nimbus (that's what this character's called in the book of Big Fight, anyway) is Brian Blessed, the famed Yorkshire mountaineer and bellower. The quality of his acting varies in inverse proportion to his shouting and to the quantity of his facial hair. He's at his beardless best as Augustus in I Claudius, where he hardly shouts at all - only two or three times in the whole serial - and his shouts, when they come, really count for something when highlighted by sustained periods of intense talking-at-a-reasonable-volume.
Conversely: I saw his Claudius in the RSC's 1985 production of Hamlet and it was still very much "Blessed - The Flash Gordon Days" because even from the gods I could see the foodstuffs accumulated in his shrubbery of a beard, and Blessed's incessent bawling caused minor tremors in Newcastle's Grey Street. (Incidently the male cast wore codpieces and Blessed’s positively elephantine one jiggled mimetically to his shouting, to hypnotic effect.)
In Big Fight, Blessed bellows for England and - whilst Nebulus Nimbus is clean-shaven in the ancient-Roman-manner - one suspects that the man behind the microphone has a garden’s worth of late-summer foliage hanging from his chin.
Cacofonix is Bill Oddie's fellow Goodie the effete Tim Brooke-Taylor. I'll discuss his contribution under Europlop.
Fish-longuer.
Oh, duck right off!
Scraping the bottom of the cauldron.
In the film of Asterix and the Big Fight the captured Infirmofpurpus grows a dragon's tail, immitates a pneumatic drill, runs around very fast with a ladle in his mouth, deconstructs into cubist forms, turns into a lion, grows very big, turns into lots of miniature versions of himself, is attacked by an earthworm, grows to his usual size and only then flies off; the whole is augmented with dialogue like 'Whhhhoaaaahhhheeeeeegh!' More equals less.
It's ... the whoopin', hollarin' Romanball!
It's all gone to plot!
In the film of Asterix and the Big Fight Prolix gets decked by a Menhir and runs around flapping his hands about.
At the close of the film of Asterix and the Big Fight Infirmofpurpus is still flying and is silhouetted by the moon in a cackhanded ET reference. (It's rarely a good idea to drop a comedic floater then compare it to a Spielberg film, with the possible exception of 1942.)
This sequence at least has the benefit - surely - of clearing any cinema auditorium in record time. If you go the video route, though, don't be surprised if your formerly-sturdy VCR vomits the VHS tape, and some inner-workings besides, onto the carpet in disgust.