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!
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Another of Sick's photo reviews of this thriller about a butterfly collector who decides to collect human specimens, one in particular.
At first I thought Bill Majeski was one of the many pseudonyms some of these writers use or someone in or just out of high school but he is in fact a veteran writer, mostly in theater and journalism, having written 50 Great Monologues For Student Actors and been a writer for Johnny Carson. What he was doing slumming at Sick, I'll never know.
Ever notice when pages like this are defaced, it's always the woman's privates?
KOOKOON: THE REHASH
#287, June 1989
w:Dick DeBartolo
a: Jack Davis
Sequel to the movie Cocoon (see previous post). Everybody that went ito the planet Antares earlier comes back to earth to rescue the life forms they didn't get to the first time around. About half the film is about the escapades of the humans seeing friends and family. The parody doesn't get into that much, since they only have four pages, putting their story arcs into the introductions in the splash panel. Probably just as well because when you're twelve you just want to see the science fiction stuff.
Missing from the parody is the plotline where they get their friend Bernie (Jack Gilford) to get over his dead wife and fix him up with the woman who runs the hotel they're all staying at (Elaine Stritch).
They all come back to see Bernie but don't tell him they're only there for a few days. Ben (Wilford Brimley) tells his grandson (Barrett Oliver) he's coming back through the TV even though the mother (Linda Harrison) doesn't believe him. Jack (Steve Guttenberg), who owns the boat, is now giving tours and selling knick-knacks, and helps the aliens when they return. His romance with Kitty (Tahnee Welch) continues. Meanwhile, Ben teaches his grandson how to hit a ball. One of the cocoons they're trying to rescue is taken by a local maritime institute for study, and they discover a body inside.
Alma (Jessica Tandy) passes the playground of a daycare center, and heals a bruised child with her alien powers, then does so well with all the children there she's offered and considers a job there. Young'uns give the old men a hard time so the men challenge them to a basketball game and win. Jack and Kitty go on a proper date and she loses control at the restaurant in a sequel to the alien sex scene from the previous movie.
Alma is hit by a car while while working at the daycare center and is unconscious in the hospital. Her husband Joe (Hume Cronyn) hasn't told her that his leukemia has gone into remission since he's become mortal again. Since he will die soon anyway, he gives his life through his healing power to save hers. They all sneak into the institute to get the body that was taken from them before they have to go back into space.
The staff knows something's going on but a sympathetic doctor (Courteney Cox) lets them escape. Brian Dennehy's character shows up at the end.
In the parody, Ben his wife go back, though in the movie they stay behind so they can see their grandson grow. Art and Bess (Gwen Verdon) go back because she has become pregnant and they want their child to live forever like them.
KOOKOON
MAD #260, January 1986
w: Arnie Kogen
a: Mort Drucker
At a rest home in St. Petersburg, FL, three residents are constantly sneaking into a nearby abandoned mansion to use their swimming pool. Meanwhile, Jack (Steve Guttenberg) rents a fishing boat to tourists in town and some rich strangers (Brian Dennehy, Tahnee Welch) pay him to use it so they can fish some rocks out of the ocean.
They've also rented the house with the pool and are using it to store the stones. The old folks go to the pool and see the stones and just go about their business swimming. The pool makes them feel more alive than they have been in a long time. They all get horny. Meanwhile, back at the boat, Jack is fixing something and watches the woman strip through a hole (?).
While Jack is spying on the woman he sees her peel her skin off. The aliens admit to him that they're from the planet Antarea and the pods they've been taking from the ocean are their people that they've come to return them to their planet.
The three men (Hume Cronyn, Don Ameche, Wilford Brimley), who trespass, let a fourth friend Bernie (Jack Gilford) in on their secret. He's hesitant to actually go into the pool and sees the Antareans coming with more pods. Since the residents can't hide and the Antareans can't keep secret what they're doing, they let the residents use the pool on the condition they continue not to tell anyone else about the pool and don't touch the rocks.
Jack, and Kitty from the boat get romantically involved. She shows him how Antareans make love. The male residents, with their new found youth, have a night on the town with their wives.
Word gets out about the pool and everybody at the rest home breaks in and uses it. Some of them pick up one of the pods, killing the life form inside, and therefore the whole race. The entire mission is now all for naught.
From the movie not in the parody: Bernie's wife dies and he goes to the pool to try to revive her. It's too late. The three home residents feel bad about what they did and see what they can do to save the mission. If they put all the pods back into the ocean, they can save all the unhatched beings which can be rescued another time. The Antareans are thankful for this and invite thirty of the residents to come back with them.
Ben tells his grandson what will happen who spills the beans to his mother. She's concerned and calls the police who call the coast guard. The Antareans and senior citizens escape into the spaceship before anything can be done and Jack is compensated amply for use of his boat.
This movie wasn't worthy of the cover in the United States but they decided to use it for the Mexican edition.
They did in Great Britain too.
Stray thoughts: Wilford Brimley was only 50 when he did this. I'm the same age. Last year I had a zit on the back of my neck. He was 44 when he did China Syndrome. He must have been one of those guys that was born old.
In the parody, Steve Guttenberg makes a joke about the female passenger being “built like Raquel Welch”. Not sure if the joke was referring to the actress being Raquel Welch's daughter or if it was just a coincidence.
Am I the only one that thought it was weird that Steve Guttenberg was peeping on Tahnee Welch? I'm not virtue signaling or anything, things in fiction don't offend me, but it just seems weird that a guy in his twenties or thirties spying on women taking their clothes off is passed off as something normal that anyone would do. Maybe it was the only thing they could think of to advance the plot?
I've said before that artists in other magazines copy from Mort Drucker caricatures instead of using their own photo reference. But I think even Drucker sometimes got his caricatures from other caricatures too. His portrayal of Hume Cronyn looks more like Al Hirschfeld's style than his own. Since Cronyn was primarily a theater actor it's possible he didn't have any photo reference at all.
CROCK TALE
MAD #285, March 1989
w: Dick DeBartolo
a: Angelo Torres
Brian (Tom Cruise) takes a job bartending as a last resort and ends up working in a TGIFridays type bar. He's taken under the wing of an older veteran Doug (Bryan Brown) and though he can't handle the job on the first day, he becomes a whiz on the second through the miracle of Hollywood. His uncle (Ron Dean) also runs a bar and doesn't have much faith in him.
By day, Brian is a student at business school. The professor (Paul Benedict) poo-poohs his dream of someday owning his own bar and flunks him for mouthing off. He and Doug become a team at work and start working at a high-end prison-themed club, where Brian wows the crowd with his spontaneous poetry. He meets a young woman (Gina Gershon) and beds her, then he brags of his sexual escapades to Doug, who woos her away.
Three years later, he's tending bar in Jamaica, and meets Jordan Mooney (Elisabeth Shue) after saving her friend from an accident. They have a date, and later while working he runs into Doug again, who's now married. But still being “bros” they make a bet that Brian can score with someone at the bar.
Brian goes back to New York with his bar pickup because she's rich and has promised to help him start his business, but after a few months, he realizes he's just her arm candy. At a gallery opening with her, he gets drunk and gets in a fight with the artist. He dumps her and goes to the restaurant where Jordan works. She isn't too happy to see him after being ditched in Jamaica. She reveals she's pregnant. He wants more than ever to be a part of her life but she just wants him to go away.
(The other customers at the diner are Pat Morita and Ralph Macchio, who had co-starred with Ms. Shue in The Karate Kid.)
She moves back in with her parents at Park Avenue, he tries to chase her down there, and they try to pay him off. He goes to Doug who passes out. Doug's wife (Kelly Lynch) makes a pass at Brian and he turns her down because she's married and Brian's in love. The next day Brian gets Doug's suicide note in the mail telling him to follow his dreams. He runs back to Jordan, telling her he's a changed man and wants to start a family despite the objections of Jordan's father. He finally fulfills his dream of running his own bar.
COBRAT
Cracked #225, January 1987
w: Mort Todd
a: Bill Wray
Mario Cobretti a/k/a Cobra (Sylvester Stallone) is a member if the Zombie Squad of the police force, handling a hostage situation at a supermarket. His supervisors criticize him for not following proper police procedures.
The supermarket crime is connected to a group called The New World, which is terrorizing the city and goes after one woman, Ingrid (Brigitte Nielsen), who is now in the custody of police when attempts are made on her life
The police decide it is safer for Cobra and Ingrid to flee the city, they end up being chased by the New World, and they become romantically involved.
The first two panels are from MAD's The Wild One parody.
The arm-wrestling movie referenced here is No Holds Barred.
UPDATE:
Cover to the Mexican edition. MAD didn't parody this, at least in the U.S. Since many of the foreign editions parodied had all original material, including movies and TV shows we wouldn't be familiar with, it's possible they did American movies more popular over there. Anyone know?
GOLD MINING DAUGHTER
#219, December 1980
w: Arnie Kogen
a: Mort Drucker
The three-page parody opens with Loretta (Sissy Spacek) as a teenager in the impoverished mining town of Butcher Holler. Doolittle Lynn (Tommy Lee Jones), a young man just out of the army is betting the locals he can drive his Jeep up a hill. The father (Levon Helm) is poor but still manages to buy new shoes every year for his family. Loretta and Doolittle have been dating for a while and he asks to marry her one day. He has to get the blessing of her parents first.
They approve on the condition he never hit her. He gets a better job in Washington and they move there. When they settle down there, she does wife things, and keeps asking for the wedding ring they never got when they were too poor. He goes to a pawn shop to get one, but instead buys a guitar for her, which he tells her to learn to play on account of her singing voice.
He urges her to sing at a bar. It goes over well and they cut a record, which they send to stations all over the country. He becomes her manager.
THINGS YOU COULDN'T DO TODAY DEPT.MAD and a lot of comedians in the late 70s and early 80s constantly made jokes about how Dolly Parton had big breasts.
It lands her a slot on Grand Ole Opry. Being on there she gets to meet her idol Patsy Cline (Beverly D'Angelo) and tour with her.
When Patsy Cline has is injured and later dies in a tragic plane accident, Loretta Lynn becomes the queen of country music. She has a nervous breakdown but gets back up again.
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No actual lyrics of hers are parodied, just the general themes of country music.
The Colonel Homer episode The Simpsons is loosely based on this movie, and also has actress Beverly D'Angelo doing vocals as the country singer.
ROACH
MAD # 296, July 1990
w: Stan Hart
a: Angelo Torres
Sitcom about Hayden Fox (Craig T. Nelson), football coach for Minnesota State. In the first season, his daughter Kelly (Clare Carey) is also a student at the college, living with him and away from her mother. He disapproves of her boyfriend Stuart (Kris Kamm). The coach lives with his girlfriend Christine Armstrong (Shelley Fabares). Rounding out the main cast are his assistants Luther (Jerry Van Dyke) and Dauber (Bill Fagerbakke).
Christine was a local newsanchor like Mary Tyler Moore. Coach and Stuart are always at odds because Stuart is a sensitive theater student rather than an athlete.
Eventually Stewart and Kelly married. Jackie Mason was big around this time, I can't remember why. He had a one-man show called The World According to Me. He had his own short-lived sitcom called Chicken Soup and Coach was the lead-in for it.
KOOCH
Cracked #275, October 1992
w: Lance Contrucci
a: Walter Brogan
The speech balloons are weirdly placed here. By this time, Kelly and Stuart were divorced and she was dating.
CUTENESS
Cracked #304, December 1995
w: Lou Silverstone
a: John Severin
The story of the movie is told in voice over narration by Cher (Alicia Silverstone), who lives in Beverly Hills with her father (Dan Hedaya). Her stepbrother Josh (Paul Rudd) is a nerdy college student who hangs around on breaks.
Jane Austen's Emma is referenced because this movie is based on it.
The masseuse is one of the products of being rich.
The Cat in the Hat hat and the slang parodied here through footnotes are some of many dated things that are also a big part of the movie. The two clips below also show this can only be a product of the nineties.
Her best friend is Dionne (Stacey Dash). Cher usually uses her charms to get good grades but this doesn't work with Mr. Hall (Wallace Shawn) until she fixes him up with Miss Geist (Twink Caplan).
Cher feels good having made the teachers over and fixed them up, and it has also worked in her favor, so she decides it's her new goal in life, and sets her sights on new student Tai (Brittany Murphy).
The last row parodies the makeover from My Fair Lady/Pygmalion.
At a party, Tai likes Travis (Breckin Meyer), but he's a stoner and loser, and Cher wants to match Tai with popular kid Elton (Jeremy Sisto). Elton ends up driving Cher home, and when she rejects his advances (it wasn't called sexual harassment yet in the nineties), he ditches her in a parking lot and she gets mugged.
I don't remember a scene of her house being robbed when she gets home. Maybe it was on their screener and edited out for theatrical release and home view. It happens
When she goes back to school the next day, she meets a new student named Christian (Justin Walker), a rat-pack type, but when she tries to date him it turns out he's gay (LGBTQ people were called that in the nineties).
Cher fails her drivers' test, a made-over Tai has become more popular than her, and she finds herself falling for Josh. Now her new purpose in life is to help with charity.
The punchline has her being chased by a mob but the illustration would work better with her dressed like a vain rich person instead of wearing regular people clothes.
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977)
dir: Steven Spielberg
MAD #200, July 1978
w: Stan Hart
a: Mort Drucker
World War II planes mysteriously appear in the desert in Mexico and locals have said they've seen something, so a group of scientists headed by Dr. LaCombe (Francois Truffaut), who doesn't speak English and must be interpreted by Mr. Laughlin (Bob Balaban), comes down to investigate it.
At an airport in Indiana, a UFO is discovered on the radar at the control tower. In town Barry (Cary Guffey)'s electronic toys all go off by themselves and he's attracted by the bright lights he sees much to the dismay of his mother Jillian (Melinda Dillon).
Roy (Richard Dreyfuss) is called in at night to work at the power plant because of some outages. On his way there he encounters the UFOs and they burn half his face. The flying saucers that everyone's been seeing are following the road and being chased by police. Roy rushes home and wakes up his wife Ronnie (Teri Garr) and kids so they can go out and see what he saw.
The scientists are in India now because a crowd keeps chanting a five-note song they heard in the sky. At their lab they keep getting a readout of numbers on their computer and figure out that they're longitudinal co-ordinates. They steal a globe to find out where those coordinates are.
At the home of Jillian and her son, he is playing those same notes on his toy xylophone. The lights come and take over the house, and a spaceship takes him away.
At a town meeting, the government assures them there is nothing to worry about. Later, they conspire to keep the public away from Devil's Tower in Wyoming, where the longitudinal coordinates are, by telling them the area's contaminated.
Roy's obsession with the mound continues during the family's mashed potatoes dinner.(The “butter” joke is a reference to an ad campaign for Parkay margarine)
They've paid homage to this scene on The Simpsons.
His fascination with UFOs and the mysterious mound is taking its toll on his family, so he's decided to give it all up. But when he tears down the clay model of the mound he keeps building he sees it with the point off his obsession starts all over again. He digs up all the dirt on his lawn and throws it into his house, creating a scene on his block. This is the last straw for his wife, who walks out on him.
He sees what's he keeps having a vision of on the news. Jillian sees the same thing at home, and has been doing drawings of Devil's Tower this whole time. Both are drawn to Wyoming and run into each other there, going to it as everybody is evacuating. He's convinced they're being lied to and are taken away and separated before they can reach their destination.
Roy, Jillian, and a dozen others from around the country attracted to this location are to be flown back home by helicopter, but Roy and Jillian decide to make a break for it. (There's a third that comes with them and doesn't make it all the way. He's not used in this parody). They want to see what's going on despite the government's attempt to fly over them with crop dusters and knock them unconscious with poison gas.
From their vantage point, they see the UFO's mother ship land and communicate, and return everyone, including the missing WWII troop, and Barry, now reunited with his mother.
Roy Neary decides to go back with the aliens and finds out that life on other planets is no different from the suburban middle-class life he abandoned on Earth.
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE WORST KIND
Cracked #150, May 1978
a: Michael Severin (John Severin)
It's not used in the MAD parody that Barry when sees lights and hears sounds, he runs out of the house and Roy almost hits him while driving on his late-night power emergency.
It's also not mentioned that the UFOs break through toll booths on the thruway. There is also a gathering at night of townspeople who are meeting in hopes of seeing the UFO again and where Roy and Jillian reunite.
The other scientists just for the parody are Charles Bronson and Dustin Hoffman. But like in the film a bird is used to test whether or not there really is a gas leak.
Cracked would often parody movies and TV shows over and over, or sometimes combine them with other movies and TV shows that they also parodied over and over, like they did here.
(Co-incidentally, I did a book called Humor Can Be Funny in 1996. I hadn't seen these magazines since they came out, so if I plagiarized the title, I did so subliminally)
A CLOSE ENCOUNTER WITH THE STAR WARZ GANG
Cracked #152, August 1978
a: Howard Nostrand (really John Severin)
This continues where Close Encounters left off, with Roy boarding the Mothership and finding the Star Wars characters on it.
Also caricatured are Ricardo Montalban and Herve Villechaise from Fantasy Island, Roy Scheider in Jaws, the Fonz, and David Carradine in Kung Fu. Ricardo Montalban used to also do Chrysler commercials and his catchprase was that the seats were “real Corinthian leather”
And they cashed in on the movie a third time.
THE HAPPY DAZES' CLOSE ENCOUNTER OF THE THIRD KIND
Cracked #153, September 1978
a: John Severin
This time combining it with Happy Days
It begins with Ralph, Potsie, and Richie hanging out at the malt shop.
They meet the Fonz at Inspiration Point.
Then they see a flying saucer and run away.
CLEARLY ENCOUNTERED FOR THE THIRTIETH TIME
Crazy #38, May 1978
w & a: Murad Gumen
The movie has the locations of each scene on the screen, which was not used in either of the other parodies.
They also did a piece giving several other examples of close encounters.
MOROSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND
Sick #121, June 1978
w & a: Dave Manak
Funny how Cracked's version also ended with McDonald's being aboard the UFO.
UPDATE: GROSS ENCOUNTERS OF THE WORST KIND
Trash #2, June 1978
w: Don Wigal
a: unknown, or maybe just too embarrassed
I was looking for this for quite a while. Be careful what you wish for.
Star Wars and Star Trek are at least the same genre, I'm not sure what Oh God has to do with anything except it came out around the same time.
Jimmy Carter's brother had many business ventures and used the Carter name to cash in on them, and the beer label was the one they focused on, just like the fact hat Jimmy Carter once owned a peanut farm was the thing they associated with him. They were like Monty Python's Arthur “Two Sheds” Jackson bit in that respect.
Leonard Nimoy hosted the show In Search Of...
UPDATE 2:
cover for Pancada, Brazilian edition of Cracked
(“Pancada” is Portuguese for “knock” or “blow”, as in to the head)
This says the tagline “Se are not alone”
UPDATE 3:
A short they were showing all the time in the early days of Showtime and HBO, Closet Cases of the Nerd Kind
