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.
Real-life married couple Meredith Baxter and David Birney were Bridget Fitzgerald and Bernie Steinberg, the premise of the sitcom was whether or not a marriage between two religions could work and if their parents would approve.
Bernie's parents were played by Bibi Osterwald and Harold J. Stone. Uncle Moe was Ned Glass.
Bridget's parents were Audra Lindley and David Doyle. Robert Sampson was Father Michael.
Bill Elliott was Bernie's friend Otis.
This was one of those shows that networks would often put in the 8:30 slot between hit shows at 8 and 9 PM that wouldn't be watched otherwise. They used to do this with Seinfeld and Friends, and with Cosby and Cheers. Here it was All in the Family and Mary Tyler Moore.
UPDATE:
Back cover for Sick #94, June 1973. Huckleberry Fink was their Alfred E. Neuman clone.
Included just because of the footnote on the first page.
Bonus: Also a parody of teeth. Cracked was ahead of its time, in 1958 they had the nerve to take on teeth and show them for what they really are. Take that, teeth!
The other movies mentioned here also came out that year and they are Sayonara, Les Girls, Bonjour Tristesse,either The Proud and the Profane or The Pride and the Passion, I'm not sure what More Men is, My Gun Is Quick, A Hatful of Rain, Don't Go Near the Water, 12 Angry Men, Raintree County, The Joker Is Wild, A Farewell to Arms, Written on the Wind, The Story of Mankind, not sure if Frankenstein Meets Goldstein or Cochise, Son of Potcheese are supposed to be anything, Old Yeller, and Gunfight at the O. K. Corral. I've seen seven. How many have you seen?
Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guiness) is the leader of an American batallion in a Japanese POW camp in Burma during World War II. They meet Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa).
They are ordered to work on a bridge from Burma to Thailand but initially object since Geneva codes forbid manual labor of prisoners.
Another troop led by Maj. Shears (William Holden), Maj. Warden (Jack Hawkins), and Lt. Joyce (Geoffrey Horne) has been ordered to blow up the bridge.
From Scenes We Never Got to See by Albert Meglin and Wallace Wood in MAD #42, November 1958
THE BREAKFAST BUNCH
MAD #258, October 1985
w: Arnie Kogen
a: Mort Drucker
Time for me to go into my rant about how much I HATE John Hughes movies. I know, it was the first time a lot of teenagers regularly saw an honest portrayal of themselves, particularly teenage girls in the more “serious” ones. I should also remind everyone, it was an honest portrayal of white suburban privileged teenage kids. And as a child of the 80s, that whole Brat Pack mentality just brings back the whole “everything is awesome” Reagan-era world that (d)evolved into what we're living in today. The late Mike McPadden has called this wave “The Disneyfication of teenage films”, teenage sex comedies of the mid-eighties co-opted and made milder. They are the ones looked at nostalgically by people my age while funnier examples have been forgotten.
Here are the couple panels that were MAD's parody, though. They didn't do the usual five or six pages.
Panels here are taken from the article MAD's Academy Awards for Teenage Films. The captions here pretty much explain Ally Sheedy's role in this movie about high school kids with nothing in common bonding one day in Saturday afternoon detention. Also caricatured are co-stars Emilio Estevez and Molly Ringwald.
When the Ally Sheedy character is made over at the end, implying that it's better to look like everyone else than maintain your individuality, the conformity aspect only reinforces my problem with these movies and how they sum up the eighties as a whole. And furthermore...
...okay, I'll stop now.
Another award category was “Musical Numbers That Suddenly Appear Out of Nowhere”. Isn't that what all musical numbers are?
This was what they were parodying that my generation and millennials look at so fondly.
BRAND-XED
MAD #102, April 1966
w: Lou Silverstone
a: Mort Drucker
Short-lived western about Jason McCord (Chuck Connors), drummed out of the U.S. Cavalry for deserting his troops at Bitter Creek, a crime he did not commit, and forced to roam the West disgraced and never believed for his innocence. The premise was similar to The Fugitive, something they mention at the end of this.
THE BRAINY BUNCH
Cracked #89, November 1970
a: John Severin
Obscure sitcom barely remembered today about widowed wife Carol and her three daughters Marcia (Maureen McCormick), Jan (Eve Plumb), and Cindy (Susan Olsen), who re-marries Mike (Robert Reed), who's busy with three boys of his own: Greg (Barry Williams), Peter (Christopher Knight), and Bobby (Mike Lookinland). They knew they must somehow form a family, and that's the way they all became the Brady Bunch. The Brady Bunch.
The Cracked version portrays the family as living in chaos.
There was a housekeeper Alice (Ann B. Davis).
The mustache and teeth in the middle panel on the bottom were drawn in ballpoint pen by the original owner of the magazine.
Not sure who the father is supposed to be a caricature of. According to real-life Brady Bunch lore, Carol's original husband is the Professor from Gilligan's Island, which they decided was in the same universe because it had the same producer.
The new housekeeper is Juliet Mills from Nanny and the Professor.
From When All TV Must Grant Equal Time in MAD #158, April 1973 by Tom Koch and Angelo Torres. My Three Sons is kind of parodied here too.
Even though the show went off the air in 1974, the cast has been doomed to be the Bradys for the rest of their lives. There was The Brady Bunch Variety Hour, The Brady Brides, and several made-for-TV specials and movies. You always see Where Are They Now? stories about them. The answer: Same place they were when you saw them a few months ago.
THE BRADY BUNCH MOVIE (1995)
dir: Betty Thomas
THE BARFY BUNCH
Cracked #300, August 1995
w: Tony Frank (Lou Silverstone)
a: John Severin (incorrectly credited)
And if this weren't all enough, there was The Brady Bunch Movie in 1995 which cashed in on the nostalgia of the show while also mocking it. The premise was the family stayed as they were in the seventies while the rest of the world changed with the times. The movie was recast with Shelley Long (Carol), Christine Taylor (Marsha), Christopher Daniel Barnes (Greg), Paul Sutera (Peter), Gary Cole (Mike), Jennifer Elise Cox (Jan), Olivia Hack (Cindy), Jesse Lee Soffer (Bobby), and Henriette Mantel (Alice).
Jan is jealous of Marcia's popularity and hair and hears inner voices.
Their neighbor Mr. Dittmeyer (Michael McKean) is a real estate developer who keeps trying to buy the Bradys' property, since they're the last holdouts on the block keeping him from building a mall. They find they owe thousands in property taxes and the children go off to school where they're made fun of behind they're backs for being anachronistic.
(Oops, forgot to “colorize” the page below. You'll live.) One of the movie's campy in-jokes is that Marcia doesn't realize her best friend Noreen (Alanna Urbach) is a lesbian.
At home, Cindy overhears the parents owe taxes and the kids all decide to raise money doing chores in the neighborhood.
The plot of Marcia breaking her nose comes from the TV show.
Mike is an architect and thinks he can get a bonus at work selling designs for his houses. They're all turned down by investors for being from another era until he has some success with some clients from Japan.
Mr. Dittmeyer doesn't want the Bradys to come up with the money so he convinces the clients Mr. Brady is a bigot and gets them to pull out. The kids didn't make enough money doing chores so they enter a talent competition, except for Jan, who runs away and walks around the city hoping people will think she's cool. It's not mentioned in the parody, but it's established that she's nearsighted, which gets her in trouble.
Cindy tells the parents that Jan has run away. (The father's advice is always double-talk aphorisms that make no sense) The family finds her though their CB, where they locate a truck driver that rescued her. The truck driver is played by Ann B. Davis, who played Alice on the original show.
The kids win the talent show and come up with the money, which the Bradys use to buy back their home.
In another nod to the TV show, the original actress Florence Henderson plays the grandmother. The skeleton is a joke about how the original father was long dead when this movie was made.
A lot of the movie has sexual overtones and innuendo like Greg and Marcia almost sleeping together, the neighbor trying to seduce Peter, and Alice the maid and her butcher boyfriend making meat references. It's still innocent enough for a PG-13 rating.
But if hardcore pornography's your thing, there's this.
UPDATE:From The Final Episodes of Soured Sitcoms in Cracked #232, November 1987
SHACK-IN'S WORLD
Sick #75, May 1970
w: Fred Wolfe (Paul Laikin)
a: Jack Sparling
Weekly TV show about what went on behind the scenes at Century Studios. The owner of the studio, John Bracken, was never shown, sort of like Charlie of Charlie's Angels. This story really has nothing to do with the show except that lead character Dennis Cole (Davey Evans, here called “Jeremy Sweat” [?]) is caricatured.
THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL (1978)
dir: Franklin J. Schaffner
THE BORES FROM BRAZIL
Crazy #51, June 1979
w: Michael Shapiro (Paul Laikin?)
a: Walter Brogan
A secret meeting of Nazis led by Josef Mengele (Gregory Peck) is being spied on by someone who believes he has damning information he's about to give famous Nazi hunter Ezra Lieberman (Laurence Olivier).
1
The man (Steve Guttenberg) is found out, killed while telling of the evidence over the phone, and a previously skeptical Lieberman decides to investigate. He tells his sister (Lilli Palmer) he lives with that he's going to do so.
One of the people he interviews is played by Anne Meara, who was married to Jerry Stiller in real life. That's him caricatured in the middle right panel.
Former Nazi prison guard Freida Maloney (Uta Hagen) gives him much needed information in prison. While investigating the case, he asks Dr. Bruckner (Bruno Ganz) about why all the boys (the “boys” of the title) all look the same, and he's told they're clones of Hitler.
In the punchline, we get the usual joke in the seventies of the false equivalency between the Holocaust and Watergate. Though San Clemente was only the city where the post-Presidency home was. It would be like saying Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz were The Boys from Palm Beach.
The whole movie's on YouTube (or at least was when I posted this) in case you want to see the whole thing.
The concept of cloning was on everyone's mind at the time, so it's only natural MAD would do an article called Clones from the Past (MAD #204, January 1979) and just a coincidence this was a part of it.
THE HOLLYWOODIZATION OF SOPHEEYA LURING
Cracked #4, September 1958
a: Bill Ward (signed “McCartney”)
Sort of a cheat, this isn't exactly a parody of that movie, just an article lampooning its star Sophia Loren around the same time. Bill Ward was also a pin-up artist and gag caroonist for the other magazines Cracked's parent company published, so he often illustrated articles like this for them.
From Scenes We Never Got to See by Albert Meglin and Wallace Wood in MAD #42, November 1958
