MAD #94, April 1965
w: Frank Jacobs
a: Mort Drucker
At this time, only Dr. No, From Russia with Love, and Goldfinger were the only James Bond novels to have been adapted to film but were enough of a screen franchise (and at that time, pretty much the only post-television one).
All starred Sean Connery, here ably caricatured by Mort Drucker.
The songs here are all from Oklahoma!, which by then was more than twenty years old (the movie ten) but still well-known enough then that the plot and lyrics would be recognizable enough to the average MAD reader. Almost all of MAD's song parodies were written by Frank Jacobs. There was a landmark class action copyright suit in the sixties based on MAD's song parodies in which a court ruled that a composer does not own the right to a rhyme scheme or memory of a song, something they exploited well into the 90s.
Drucker is usually used as MAD's caricaturist, but M and Miss Moneypenney aren't drawn to look like Bernard Lee or Lois Maxwell at all.
Feel free to label others in the comments below so I can feel stupid for knowing something all along but didn't think of it until someone else pointed it out.
MAD's main imitator Cracked, in addition to doing plenty of James Bond movie parodies themselves (which we'll get to later) did some Bond articles as well, and their main artist John Severin often signed his work O. O. Severin. Here are a couple examples of 007 parodies from #50 (March 1966) and #56 (November 1966).
Sick #32, November 1964
w: Dee Caruso
a: Angelo Torres
Sick also jumped on the bandwagon when James Bond hype was relatively young with their interview with Ian Fleming.
Among the famous Brits at the end of the Mad spoof, the guy with the pipe (behind Churchill) is Bertrand Russell.
ReplyDeleteThe woman with Richard Burton is Elizabeth Taylor, then his wife. Not a Brit, but I guess she was too famous to leave out. The giveaway is the tiny little mole on her cheek.
Oh, and as for Mike Hammer, I think Drucker drew him as his creator, Mickey Spillane.
DeleteGot another one for the last panel: the old lady on the right is actress Margaret Rutherford.
DeleteAnd one more: the man behind Rutherford and Harold Wilson is Noel Coward.
DeleteI got what I think is the last one, and is it ever obscure now. The tall bearded gent between Sellers and Wilson is Commander Edward Whitehead, well known at the time for an ad campaign for Schweppes Tonic Water. He was a real-life precursor to Dos Equis' 'Most Interesting Man in the World'.
DeleteI always thought the Little Annie Fanny strips that had the most bite were the early ones spoofing James Bond, where Annie cajoles Bond into giving up his license to kill, and he immediately becomes impotent.
ReplyDeleteIn 1962, a couple of Harvard Lampoon editors, Michael Frith and Christopher Cerf, wrote a novella-length Bond parody called Alligator. They say that Fleming hated it so much, he not only quashed its further publication, but also put a provision in his will preventing them from ever touching Bond again. I wonder if he was equally rankled by the many, many Bond spoofs that would follow.