The Crimson Permanent Assurance

The Crimson Permanent Assurance is a short film that appears before the 1983 Monty Python movie The Meaning of Life.

Originally conceived by Terry Gilliam as a 6-minute animated sequence in The Meaning of Life, The Crimson Permanent Assurance was later expanded as a live-action piece, to the point where it no longer fit into the framework of the feature film, and became a pre-movie short film in its own right.

Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.

In the film, a group of elderly office clerks who work for the Permanent Assurance Company, a staid British accountancy firm which has been taken over by The Very Big Corporation of America. When one of them is "sacked," the accountants rebel against their corporate masters, commandeer their building and turn it into a pirate ship, raiding business districts in numerous big cities before falling off the edge of the world.

The pirate raids are reprised briefly during the course of the feature film, The Meaning of Life, but a skyscraper is quickly dispatched to squash the rebellion.