BOTCH CASUALLY AND THE SOMEDUNCE KID

BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969)
dir: George Roy Hill

MAD #136, July 1970
w: Arnie Kogen
a: Mort Drucker

Cemented Redford and Newman as a team of sorts. They weren't in that many movies together but those they did were huge.

The Sundance Kid (Robert Redford) is playing cards and Butch Cassidy (Paul Newman) comes in.

A rival hood challenges them to a fight for head of the “Hole-in-the-Wall” Gang. He wants to use weapons and they want to use their wits.

(The Chicago Convention joke is a reference to the protests against the Vietnam war at the Democratic convention in 1968 and how their mayor tried to break it up)

They try to hold up an Union Pacific train but the engineer is under orders not to let them in the room with the safe. He admires their antics but has to obey the rules, so they blow the train up. In the parody, the owner of the train inside the safe with a mistress.

That night, Sundance has broken into the home of a woman (Katharine Ross) and orders her to take her clothes off at gunpoint. It's revealed she is really his girlfriend and they were role-playing. The next morning, she goes out for a bike ride with Butch. (Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head, though anachronistic, played in the background of this scene, and became a #1 hit).

('M' was a motion picture rating up until the mid-70s. Kate Smith was the go-to celebrity for 'fat lady' jokes for decades)

A vigilante posse is after them and they're outnumbered and cornered. Distracting the posse by having them jump off one of the two horses they're using so they're only one of them doesn't work. They have no choice but to jump off a cliff into the river, giving them the opportunity to scream “Oh, shiiiiit!”

On the lam, they flee to Bolivia, and take their girlfriend Etta with them. They go on a tour of the United States before departing South. In the montage, the three of the have their photo taken, which is the basis for the poster parodied on the cover. When the thrupple arrives in Bolivia, they find it more desolate then they thought. Butch and Sundance pick a career in what they know, robbing banks. Etta teaches them bank robbing phrases in Spanish.

Co-incidental that they reference Cool Hand Luke here, since a scene with the actor that says “What we have is a failure to communicate”, Strother Martin, they don't use in this parody. Having robbed every bank in the area, they decide to go straight and get a real job and Martin is their boss).

On their way back, they get held up by bandits and defeat them. Later, they stop in a restaurant. Somebody recognizes them and calls local law enforcement. Soon a large group descends on them, to what seems like them to be all of South America.

(The Martin Borman reference is based on the urban legend that Nazis, who were old enough to have still been alive at that point, had fled to Argentina. (In an ending similar to their parody of The Brotherhood [see sidebar], they are shot by a group of comedians. Pictured are Don Rickles, Danny Thomas, Richard Pryor, Bob Hope, and Woody Allen. I don't see them as “comical” in the same sense as those five. Maybe jovial, affable, possibly whimsical?)


BUTCH CAVITY AND THE SUNDRENCHED KID
Cracked #87, September 1970
a: John Severin

Ignores the card-playing and fight, and goes right to the train robbery.

I didn't know Brando turned down a role in this. Even these magazines are educational.

That's Cracked character Sagebrush seated at the other table.