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.
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Tuesday, March 2, 2021
BROKE N' NARROW
BROKEN ARROW (1996)
dir: John Woo
BROKE N' NARROW
MAD #347, July 1996
w: Dick DeBartolo
a: Mort Drucker
Vic (John Travolta) and Riley (Christian Slater), officers in the army, are having a friendly boxing match and Vic always wins with the “rope-a-dope”, tricking his opponent into thinking he's on his last legs only to get up again. This is a metaphor and exposition for the plot of the movie. The two of them are sent out on a mission and while out there, Vic ejects Riley and later jettisons himself and two nuclear missiles from the warplane.
Riley wakes up in the middle of the desert and nearly placed under arrest by Terry (Samantha Mathis), a park ranger. He figures out Vic's plan—to hold the nuclear weapons from their plane for ransom or sell them to Pritchett (Bob Gunton) and Kelly (Howie Long) on the black market. This creaties a “broken arrow” situation, what the military calls it when they have missing missiles. Riley and Terry team up to stop Vic from running away with the missiles.
After taking out Vic's men, they flee with one of the missiles. Riley thinks he has disarmed it, making it permanently a dud, but Vic has re-programmed it remotely. The only way to save anyone is to let it go off 2000 feet below the ground in an abandoned copper mine nearby. Vic knows where they are and they're trapped in the mine. The only way out is a tunnel to the river.
The bomb goes off underground with them safely out in time, but it creates shockwaves interfering with everything electronic in the vicinity. They discover a train Vic has hired to transport the other missile.
After a big fight between the three of them on the train, Riley is able to use some of the tricks he's learned from years of boxing with Vic to defeat him. They reveal such improbable action (a trademark of the action films director John Woo had done for years in Hong Kong) has been possible all along because they're cartoon characters.
BROKEN EARDRUMS
Cracked #309, August 1996
w: Lou Silverstone
a: Walter Brogan
Cracked also makes note of the cartoon similarity early on. As well as the comparison that was always made between Christian Slater and Jack Nicholson. “Heeere's Johnny” is Nicholson's most famous line from The Shining which is a quote from when Johnny Carson was introduced on The Tonight Show and I've always wondered if kids seeing the former know about the latter. Also caricatured are Don King, Sylvester Stallone and Mike Tyson.
In the third panel, Travolta is quoting his famous line from Pulp Fiction.
The cartoon character in the last two panels is the dodo from Porky in Wackyland.
The other person on the screen is Horshack from Travolta's Welcome Back, Kotter days.
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