A-Z GUIDE TO MOVIES AND TV SHOWS PARODIED BY MAD, CRACKED, CRAZY, ETC. UP TO 1996. THEY HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS. SPOILERS AND OTHER NON-SEQUITURS, TOO. SOMETIMES THESE THINGS HAVE WORDS OR SITUATIONS WE DON'T USE ANYMORE. YOU KNOW, 'CAUSE THEY'RE OLD.
Updated daily. There's posts besides this one archived in the sidebar on the right, you clods!
if you're at a laptop or desktop, right-click and open link on pages and they'll be clearer and legible in a new window.
Not to be confused with the Abbott and Costello movie Africa Screams
In this parody, everyone is called by the actors' names rather than the characters'.
Alcoholic Charlie Allnut (Humphrey Bogart) comes by on the African Queen do drop off supplies for Samuel and Rose Sayer (Robert Morley, Katherine Hepburn)
In the movie, the Germans have killed Samuel, though they left out this detail to sanitize the story. Even though this was before the Comics Code, things in the comics before the code are still extremely tame by today's standards.
Rose needs to go back home and the only way she can get there is by boat, and also past the Germans. She needs to board the Queen to get there.
The name “Lauren B. Calm” on the boat is a pun on Lauren Bacall, who was married to Bogart.
The Bromo-Seltzer train engine was a well-known ad campaign then
Having eluded the Germans, they are now in strange swampy waters. The boat has lost its power and they must tug it themselves.
While they travel through swampy waters, Charlie gets covered in leeches.
Here they're EC Fan-Addict Pins.
A storm comes, carrying them out to sea. They get back on course and can now find the German gunboat they intended to sink, though it requires blowing up the African Queen to do it.
Missing from the parody: In doing so, they lose each other. Charles is captured and taken aboard a German ship, and thinking he is alone, confesses to the crimes. As he is about to be hanged, Rose is also captured and confesses to the crimes. Before they're executed, they have the captain of the ship marry them. The German boat is sunken in warfare and Charles and Rose are adrift once again.
Panic was billed as “The only authorized imitation of MAD” because it used the same artists and had the same publisher, but that's where the difference ended. Humor was more in the wheelhouse of MAD editor Harvey Kurtzman than it was for Panic editor Al Feldstein, whose style of having comics written out and then illustrated worked for his science-fiction and horror titles, but not when he did humor.
Kurtzman broke down all his stories and wrote them in comic form before giving them to his artists, and you will see how each editor differed when his stories appear in the upcoming months. He had come from a humor background before coming to E. C. Comics and his approach was more rhythm-oriented, with each page meant to stand on its own.
Though Al Feldstein at Panic eventually became editor of MAD and made it better-known. He himself was not known to have much of a sense of humor, but over time was able to assemble the right team to help create the institution we know today.
No comments:
Post a Comment