THE EMILIZATION OF AMERICA

THE AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY (1965)
dir: Arthur Hiller
THE EMILIZATION OF AMERICA
Sick #43, March 1966

AN AMERICAN WEREWOOF IN LONDON

AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON (1981)
dir: John Landis

AN AMERICAN WEREWOOF IN LONDON
Crazy #84, March 1982
w: Paul Kupperberg
a: Bob Camp

David Kessler (David Naughton) and his friend Jack (Griffin Dunne) are two Americans backpacking in London and when they stop by a pub are warned of a local werewolf that attacks at night.

One of the customers is Rik Mayall, from The Young Ones and Black Adder.

When they leave, it attacks them, killing Jack and wounding David.

The locals kill the wolf, and David wakes up in the hospital wondering what happened. The last thing he remembers is a hallucination and only Nurse Price (Jenny Agutter) believes him.

He keeps being visited by Jack when nobody's around, who warns him he'll transform during the next full moon.

The nurse takes him in and they become romantically involved.

She goes to work and he changes as was warned would happen.

He goes out into town and attacks.The parody leaves out that he attacks twice, and before he attacks again, he tries to turn himself in and doctors try to help him.


After the second time, there is a bloody shootout where he and his victims are killed by authorities.

In the parody, his victims get turned into Peppers, a reference to an ad campaign David Naughton was famous for while doing this movie.

AMERICAN CONFETTI

AMERICAN GRAFFITI (1973)
dir: George Lucas

MAD #166, April 1974
w: Larry Siegel
a: Mort Drucker

MAD figured since one of their regular artists did the poster for the movie, they should have him do their parody of the movie as well. (Additional Mort Drucker art is also in the trailer).

American Graffiti also inspired Happy Days as a series. Even though the pilot had been made a year earlier and was used as an episode of Love, American Style, the fact that American Graffiti was a hit, this also starred Ron Howard and took place in the fifties (the fifties ended in 1964 as far as I'm concerned), was reason to bring it back as a regular series.

I'm always thinking about how the time between when this movie took place and when it came out is only eleven years. It would be like if they made a movie about 2009 and considered it a long time ago. Maybe this pandemic is the equivalent to the Kennedy assassination in terms of everything blurring the line beyond recognition before and after.

MAD seemed mystified by the nostalgia boom. They even made fun of it in 1970 with an article called Those Wonderful Sixties. They didn't realize nostalgia for the sixties would eventually be taken seriously. Come to think of it, I never thought I'd meet people in their twenties and thirties who told me they grew up on my comics as kids in the nineties.

But I digress...

We open with the cast in front of Mel's Drive-In the night before Curt (Richard Dreyfuss) goes away to college, explaining the multiple plotlines of the movie. Curt is sort of a stand-in for director George Lucas and the many nights he and his friends spent on typical nights as teenagers.

First the movie takes place in a typical small town (Chula Vista, to be exact), then in Los Angeles. Which one is it?

Steve (Ron Howard) and his girlfriend Lori (Cindy Williams) keep breaking up and getting back together throughout the movie before he goes off to college and then changes his mind.

In the usual fit of boredom, the teenagers go cruising up and down the main street.

Another thing MAD seemed mystified by was this new rock and roll thing. While the general public too initially thought it was just a passing fad exclusively for youth that wouldn't last any more than a year or two, MAD was condescending towards it well until the mid-eighties. They did song parodies in almost every issue, but hardly any songs any twelve-year-old would know.

Picking up chicks is part of the male teenage ritual. John (Paul LeMat) invites anyone in the next car over who wants to ride with him to come in when they stop and gets stuck with a pre-teen (MacKenzie Phillips) and has to entertain her for the night.

Terry (Charles Martin Smith) meets a girl named Debbie (Candy Clark) while cruising up and down the boulevard.

Steve and Lori go to the school dance

Debbie agrees to continue cruising with Terry if he buys her booze.

John takes the girl back home. Funny how MAD was prudish in a lot on their articles (a Midnight Cowboy parody they did doesn't even mention prostitution) but rape jokes were a-OK. Such was humor from an all-male middle-age staff in the seventies.

In addition to being condescending about rock and roll, MAD often made jokes about how being high meant a person literally flew like a bird.

In the storyline throughout about Curt obsessed with a woman he sees in a T-Bird (Suzanne Somers). He finds the radio station where DJ Wolfman Jack (called Werewolf Wally here) is and gets him to dedicate a song to her. Instead of him flying off to college and saying goodbye to his family and friends, they do this punchline.


This is how it really went.

AMERICAN CAR-DAFFY
Cracked #121, November 1974
a: Sururi Gumen

Cracked didn't bother mocking the characters' names.

Missing from the MAD parody is a plotline where Curt is kidnapped by a gang of delinquents but earns their respect when he helps them pull a prank.

A reference here is made to disc jockeys taking payola, a practice common in the fifties and sixties.

Also not used in the MAD parody is John drag racing Bob Falfa (Harrison Ford), who challenged him earlier, after taking the underage girl home.
Fabian was never in any movies with Frankie and Annette together but they all did youth films so same difference.


Crazy didn't do a parody of the actual movie, but did a twist on the Drucker poster satirizing the Watergate scandal that was also occurring that year in #6 in August 1974.

Has nothing to do with any parody, but I remember when the commercial was on TV and they said their tagline my father would always say “Where were thee in '63?”

AMERICAN RADIATORS

AMERICAN GLADIATORS
(1989-1996) SYN

AMERICAN RADIATORS
MAD #315, December 1992
w: Dick DeBartolo & Andrew J. Schwartzberg
a: Al Jaffee

Every week Mike Adamle and Larry Csonka hosted a competition with professional and amateur athletes in various events.

Al Jaffee didn't normally do TV and movie parodies, but he may have been chosen because there's a “Snappy Answer” in this. Also his trademark puking.

They didn't parody any particular athletes or events here.

Often they'd show a clip of the athlete before becoming a Gladiator, then interview them after the event.

One of the events involved battling each other inside round metal cages.

They don't pretend the show's not an excuse to show T & A.

Finally, the Gladiators are given a challenge even they can't handle.


Al Jaffee recently retired at 99 and is currently the country's oldest living cartoonist. Let's hope he makes it to 100.
SPIES AND SABOTEURS HIT THE AMERICAN GLADIATORS
Cracked #277, December 1992
w & a: Michael Ricigliano

Spies and Saboteurs was Cracked's answer to MAD's Drawn Out Dramas, the cartoons Sergio Aragones did in the margins of every issue. This was that issue's centerspread.

AMERICAN GIGGLER

AMERICAN GIGOLO (1980)
dir: Paul Schrader

AMERICAN GIGGLER
Crazy #68, November 1980
w: Paul Kupperberg
a: Gary Hallgren

As a gigolo, in the parody Julian Kane (Richard Gere) is constantly surrounded by tailors and groomers.

One of Kane's clients early on is Mr. and Mrs. Rheiman (Tom Stewart, Patti Carr). He is paid by the husband to watch him have sex with the wife.

Though since it is a magazine read by kids they can't mention that his occupation is prostitution so within the parody, when they say he plays games for money, he plays board games.

The reason the house is full of sand and water is New York writers' way of mocking the idea of a beachfront house

He later cruises a hotel bar and sees a woman, Michelle (Lauren Hutton) sitting by herself and propositions her.

(“Dewey Defeats Truman” was a famous newspaper headline when the Chicago Tribune wrongly predicted the 1948 Presidential race). He's suspected in the murder of the couple he met earlier, and approached by a detective named Sunday (played in the movie by Hector Elizondo, but drawn here like Friday from Bill Elder's Dragnet parody from a few decades earlier. The “DOMM DA DOMM DOMM” is taken from that as well.)

Julian realizes he is being framed for the murder and seeks the solace of everyone including Michelle (her husband is a Senator. ABSCAM was a sting operation that brought down many politicians)

He finds that Mrs. Rheiman's money has been planted inside his car.

He goes to see his friend Leon, a pimp for male escort (Bill Duke, who looks nothing like this, but is drawn to look like a “pimp” stereotype) who he finds out is the one who framed him.

Julian murders Leon, and is arrested for that crime. Michelle comes to visit him in prison.

This is the only movie parody I know of to be drawn by Gary Hallgren, who a decade earlier had been one of the Air Pirates, a group of cartoonists sued by Walt Disney Productions for parodying, their characters, which is the small reference in the splash panel.

The problem with this particular parody is the “chicken fat”, the little sight gags all artists draw, here have jokes within the jokes which distracts from the story.

AMERICAN GRANDSTAND

AMERICAN BANDSTAND
(1956-1989) ABC
a/k/a THE DICK CLARK SHOW
American Bandstand started as a daily after-school show and then weekly on Saturday Mornings, first broadcast from Philadelphia and then from Los Angeles.

AMERICAN GRANDSTAND
Cracked #2, May 1958
a: John Severin

THE DICK LARK SHOW
Panic #3, November 1958
a: Angelo Torres

(not to be confused with EC's Panic)

He also had a show in prime-time show sponsored by Beech-Nut Gum.

SICK CLARK AROUND THE WORLD
Sick #16, December 1962 artist unknown

AMENDS

AMEN
(1986-1991) NBC

AMENDS
MAD #273, September 1987
w: Arnie Kogen
a: Angelo Torres

Deacon Frye (Sherman Helmsley) is minister of a church in Philadelphia who's a lawyer by day.

His congregation includes The Hetebrink sisters Amelia and Casietta (Roz Ryan, Barbara Montgomery), Reverend Gregory (Clifton Davis), and older voice and token dirty old man Rolly (Jester Hairston)

The church is having a meeting to discuss financial issues...

“On the whole, I'd rather be in Philadelphia” (where the show took place) were often the last words attributed to W. C. Fields.

Frye goes home to see his daughter Thelma (Anna Marie Horsford), who's always having some sort of male trouble.

I don't know why it's Arnold of Diff'rent Strokes and Webster stealing the Liberty Bell (another Philadelphia reference), though Sherman Hemsley's earlier series, The Jeffersons is where Gary Coleman got his start.

Frye has an idea to have an auction to raise money for the church and marry off Thelma. She will eventually marry Reverend Gregory, but not until a few years into the series.

That's Archie Bunker, one-time foe of Hemsley's character George Jefferson, in the last panel.