ANNIE GET YOUR SPACESUIT

ANNIE GET YOUR GUN (1950, 1957, 1967)
ANNIE GET YOUR SPACESUIT
Cracked #67, March 1968
w: Art Pottier
a: Lugoze (Luis Zegarra)

Annie Get Your Gun, originally a Broadway musical about Annie Oakley, had several incarnations for movie and TV with several different casts and directors. Maybe you even performed it in school. The Ethel Merman impression that anyone does of her singing There's No Business Like Show Business comes from this. Cracked updated it to be about the U. S. Space Race.

She is played here by ZsaZsa Gabor, who wasn't in any stage or film versions.

(Adam Clayton Powell was a Congressman in the 50s and 60s. On the wall are pictures of Dean Martin, Audrey Hepburn, Bette Davis, and Bob Hope).


Annie auditions for a part of an astronaut.

(The astronauts are caricatures of Walter Schirra, Scott Carpenter, and Alan Shepard. Some of the other beauty contestants are Lynda Bird Johnson, Luci Baines Johnson, Phyllis Diller, Lucille Ball, Shirley Temple Black, Judy Garland, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis.)

The rocket takes off and she realizes what it's like in outer space.
In Russia, premier Krushchev tells his men they have to have their flight as well. He goes up himself. He sees ZsaZsa in the U. S. capsule and challenges her.

His holding a shoe in the middle right panel is a reference to a speech he once made in which he banged a shoe on a table).

Krushchev's spaceship breaks down, so they decide to join forces and go to the moon.

The moon people ask why they landed there and they have no explanation.

Luis Zegarra a/k/a Lugoze was a political cartoonist in Chile in addition to Cracked regular, his talent for caricature is probably his reason for drawing this.

The caricatures I identify are 1) Lyndon Johnson 2) Charles DeGaulle 3) Harold Wilson 4) John Lindsay 5) Leonid Brezhnev 6) Mao Zedong [then Tse-Tung] 7) Fidel Castro 8) Hubert Humphrey 9) Richard Nixon 10) Martin Luther King, Jr. Anyone who identifies the others will be rewarded. Rewarded with the fact that you are endowed with knowledge.

Update:
MANNIE GET YOUR GHOUL
MAD #85, March 1964
w: Frank Jacobs
a: Jack Rickard

Can't believe I forgot this one. Probably the same reason I initially forgot the Cracked version. It's really a parody of a Broadway musical. It was made into a movie, so that's why I'm including it. It doesn't really follow the plot, just the song lyrics.

. People have told me when they read MAD as a kid, they often skipped the musical parodies because they parodied songs they didn't know. While I say that's silly since knowing a melody is not required to read words, I still include YouTube clips of them. They're included above.

The faces are all caricatures of monsters and movie stars of yesteryear (it was of yesteryear then too). The lower right is an in-joke, Frank Jacobs in drag from a Lady Clairol ad parody a few issues earlier.

Mannie is MAD publisher William Gaines.

Howard Keel was an actor in Annie Get Your Gun. The tiki mug supposed is to resemble Alfred Hitchcock.

“Ravel Kit” is a play on Revell, a company that made many of the monster models.

Shelley Buryman is a play on Shelley Berman even though he's a caricature of Vincent Price.

Glenn Ghoul is a play on Glenn Gould even though he's a caricature of Peter Lorre.