BARNACLE GROANS

BARNABY JONES
1973-1980 NBC

BARNACLE GROANS
MAD # 175, June 1975
w: Tom Koch
a: Angelo Torres

The premise was that Barnaby (Buddy Ebsen) was a retired detective, but after his son took over the business and was murdered he came back out of retirement and re-opened the agency with daughter-in-law Betty (Lee Merriweather). He talked in a drawl like his previous character Jed Clampett of The Beverly Hillbillies.

In this parody, they investigate the missing brother of Miss Overshaw in the unfriendly town of Dullsville.

Barnaby spoke with home-spun wisdom.

In case you didn't get it, he was old. And he was a teetotaler. And everybody in the town is mean.

And again, he's old.

After being chased onto the rooftops, he jumps across but doesn't make it. They pull him off the ledge but then try to finish him off.

Hubie Overshaw wasn't missing. He was killed because he was old. The town of Dullsville is so mean because they hate old people for making their taxes so high.

Barnaby is finally told he doesn't have to work. He can just collect social security. You see, he's old.


In the later seasons, they added his nephew Jedidiah (Mark Shera) so Buddy Ebsen would have less work, but MAD gave him his own series in the article TV Spinoffs Yet to Come in #206, April 1979, by Tom Koch and Harry North, Esq.