50/50

20/20 (1978-present)
ABC


50/50 TAKES A LOOK AT SLEAZE BIOGRAPHERS
MAD #310, April 1992
w: Charlie Kadau and Joe Raiola
a: Mort Drucker


20/20 was ABC's investigative journalism magazine show, their answer to Sixty Minutes

Hugh Downs is interviewing Kitty Kelley, author of many celebrity tell-all biographies. The effigies of people like Frank Sinatra, Johnny Carson, and Jackie Onassis were subjects of her biographies. Lyle Stuart was publisher of some of these biographies and ironically was business manager of MAD early on.

The unethical reporting referred to here is Downs having once interviewed Buckwheat from the Little Rascals only to have it later revealed he was an impostor.

Also parodied in this are Diane Sawyer and Sam Donaldson.

The subject of Barbara Walters' interview is Albert Goldman, who had been sued for his biography of John Lennon.

50/50
CRACKED #239, October 1988
w: Peter Bagge
a: Bill Wray

It was inevitable that I'd end up covering people I know. I decided 1995 was a decent cutoff point for nostalgia. Most of the time period covered here I was still in a teenager or not even born. There's still a small overlap between when I started and then. Because of that, I'm bound to come across work by people I either worked with or know personally. I didn't know Peter Bagge or Bill Wray when this was done but did after they went on to bigger and better things. (One of those later things was MAD). There's also early work by Rick Altergott, Bob Fingerman, as well as one-time Cracked editor Mort Todd, all of whom were starting out when I was graduating high school, and that I crossed paths with later, though their work is a pebble in a pond compared to everything that will be covered here.

Downs and Walters (known for her lisping) are anchored at the home office here and introduce reporter Geraldo Rivera and ask him how he came upon his story. It evolved from his opening Al Capone's vault, a report he did two years earlier in real iife that ended up being nothing and made Rivera the laughingstock of TV journalism.

I don't know if something was supposed to go in those balloons or if that's part of the joke.

The interviewee here is Cher.

MAD did another 20/20 parody earlier, but since it was about several different movies that also had parodies in other magazines, it will be done in the future as posts about parodies of those movies.