| Type | Corporation |
| Owner(s) | Terry Gilliam |
| Featured in | The Crimson Permanent Assurance Monty Python's The Meaning of Life |
The Very Big Corporation Of America was a large corporation featured in the 1983 short film The Crimson Permanent Assurance and the film Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.
Overview[]
History[]
A Very Big Monopoly[]
The company's board of directors
The Very Big Corporation Of America was a humongous enterprise that was determined to buy up everything possible, from businesses and properties to even wishing to define the Meaning of Life itself, determined to validate their take on Meaning and own it much like they have everything else in their world.
A Very Big Fall[]
The ruins of the once giant corporation
The Corporation eventually went too far in their acquisitions when they bought-out the small British insurance accountancy firm and began treating its employees like slaves, resulting in the Permanent Assurance Company rebelling against their younger corporate overlords by turning their office building into a makeshift concrete pirate ship. Now calling themselves the Crimson Permanent Assurance, the old guard used their heavily armed ship-building to attack Very Big's headquarters and confront its board of directors, clashing with them in an epic swashbuckling fight to the death, killing their corporate overlords, leaving their buildings in ruins, stripping them of all their assets and leaving their policies shattered.
The victorious heroes of the Crimson Permanent Assurance then sang a hearty pirate song as they sailed into the horizon, but before they could fully revel in their victory, they fell off the edge of the world and into the cosmos below.
Subsidiaries & Properties[]
The corporation owned various businesses prior to being stripped of them by the Crimson Permanent Assurance which are listed below:
- Acme Construction Company
- Payne, Bickers and Dogood Ltd.
- Stn. Pendons Ltd.
- V. Rich and Son
- Doneys (Florence)
- Mirage Land Co.
- Arctic Geo. Lab. Co.
- Liver Donors Inc.
- World Wide Wine Corp.
- Universal Amalgamations Ltd.
- Consolidated Steel Co.
- Micro Computer Inc.
- Moonscape Products Ltd.
- Rubber Goods Incorporated
- D.Odgey Enterprises Ltd.
- Money Factor Printers Ltd.
- Better Plastics Corps.
- D. Crepid Holdings
- Super Big Ltd.
- Space Propulsion Lab
- Interstellar Travel Corp.
- Dawking's Mining Co.
- Lange and Sons (International)
- Cooper's (Purveyors)
- Dickinson Kincain Association
- The All Enveloping Co. Ltd.
- O. Verpaid Associates Ltd.
- E. Normons and Sons
- A. Maze and Lee
- Huge Horace Mann and Yure Ltd.
- R. Devious Inc.
- Wakefeld and Daughter
- Vast Holdings (Europe) Ltd.
- Phil Thevich Consortium
- Fastness and Vast Co. Ltd
- Star Bright Merchandise Org.
- X. Tortion World Wide Ltd.
- Cartwright Tutorials
- Black and White Picture Co. Ltd.
- R. J. McArthur Parks Ltd.
- Walker, Walker and Jones Bros.
- Data Travel and Experiments
- And countless more.
Trivia[]
- Despite the many long lists of subsidiaries and conquered businesses that are displayed in the company's boardroom, each list just repeats the same businesses over and over again.
- In spite of being called The Very Big Corporation of "America" and the film itself featuring England as the home of the Crimson Permanent Assurance, their world as presented in Gilliam's short film is a far cry from the real world to say the least, as aside from being set on a flat space rock, the world appears to be mostly a vast barren desert with no ocean existing between "England" and "America", and Very Big's business district stands completely alone in the middle of nowhere rather than being a part of an actual city.
- In Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, an alternate ending to the The Crimson Permanent Assurance is shown where a skyscraper falls down upon the Crimson Permanent Assurance building before they can kill off the corporation's executives and destroy their enterprise. As this was mostly done for comedic purposes and to move the film along faster, it should not be considered the actual fate of the corporation.