A CROCK O' [BLIP] NOW

APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)
dir: Francis Ford Coppola

A CROCK O' [BLIP] NOW
MAD #215, June 1980
w: Larry Siegel
a: Mort Drucker

Based on the novel Hearts of Darkness, but basically about the whole Vietnam War.

And before people start blaming the messenger, you're perfectly entitled to find these to be racist caricatures, but we can't go back in time and make people “woke”.

Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) is a soldier whose mission is to kill Col. Kurtz (Marlon Brando), an officer who has gone rogue and started a cult in Cambodia.

The riots at the Democratic Convention were actually in 1968, not 1969.

The “Indian broad” reference is to how a few years earlier Brando refused the Best Actor Oscar for The Godfather and had activist Sacheen Littlefeather give a speech on his behalf about how Native Americans are mistreated in Hollywood. The picture of him is from his role in Mutiny on the Bounty.

Willard gets a ride with a navy boat on his mission and meets the Chief (Albert Hall), and the crew comprised of Chef (Frederic Forrest), Lance (Sam Bottoms), and Mr. Clean (Laurence Fishburne).

The MAD staff's ignorance of how drugs are used shows. I remember a Dave Berg comic showing someone shooting heroin into their veins without tying their arm off, casually the way someone would drink something on a bus. Another strip had someone in the background sniffing cocaine out of a spoon in a helping the size of a mouthful of cereal.

On the way they meet the sadistic Lt. Col. Bill Killgore (Robert Duvall), responsible for one of the most famous lines in the movie.
(Jane Fonda was considered by the far right to be a traitor when she was photographed with a North Vietnamese aircraft gun on her visit to the war zone.)

They come to a trading post and encounter a USO show with Playboy bunnies. This particular scene takes up more space in the parody than in the actual film. (I must remind everyone this was decades before #MeToo).


Brando was paid $3 million for being in the first ten minutes of Superman, which was the highest anyone had ever been paid to appear in a movie up to that point. Another one of the many references to his previous parts they make in this.

Lance's LSD-induced grenade launch attracts the attention of the Viet Cong.

Half the boat's crew is killed, but they get closer to Col. Kurtz's territory.

Willard gets to the heavily-guarded palace Kurtz has built for himself, and meets Kurtz's gatekeeper, who is an American photojournalist that never left (Dennis Hopper). Willard is shown around.

Kurtz plays mind games knowing he's going to be killed.

When Kurtz is killed in the movie, he says the other most famous line, “The horror... the horror”
The film is open-ended, but for parody's sake, he shaves his head bald and continues where Kurtz left off. (Earlier there's emphasis on how poetry is part of Kurtz's madness.)


A newspaper review was part of the article William Shakespeare, Movie Critic in MAD #224 in July 1981

The British version of MAD, since it came out twelve times a year instead of eight, often put movie parodies on the covers that weren't on the domestic version. Indian food is as ubiquitous in the UK as Chinese food is in the US.

APOCRYPHAL NOWLAND
Crazy #63, June 1980 w: Paul Kupperberg
a: Bob McLeod

Crazy's parody had Vietnam as some kind of amusement park.

The Dennis Hopper character isn't used in this and they have the Robert Duvall character show up at the end.


A CROCK OF IT NOW
Sick #132, April 1980
w & a: Adam V. Kane (Dave Manak)

Harrison Ford, one of the officers in the beginning, is caricatured ibn this, but not in the other parodies.

The same people who made Hardware Wars also did something called Porklips Now which I remember endlessly on pay cable when they used to show shorts between movies.

Before YouTube in the late eighties and early nineties, we passed along fourth generation copies of VCR tapes. One such tape was Apocalypse Pooh. It would probably constantly be on pay cable too if shorts were still a part of that type of thing then.

The creator, Todd Graham, also did a similar mash-up wish Blue Velvet audio and Peanuts visuals.