MORE E. T. (part 2)

E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL(1982)
dir:Steven Spielberg

Continuing where I left off yesterday, here are a few more examples of E.T.-sploitation.

IF EaTing HAD BEEN FOUND BY ARNULD
Cracked #195, July 1983
a: John Severin

In the 70s and 80s Cracked was known for milking trends as much as they could and combining them with other trends, like their mash-up of E.T. and Diff'rent Strokes.

Note the nod to Gene Colan, one of Severin's contemporaries, written on this pole.

A famous campaign for the American Express card had celebrities endorsing it telling the audience that wherever they carry it people know who they are.

It's not my fault they thought all black people had afros and play basketball. It was the 80s.

"What you talkin' about, Willis?" was Arnold's big catch phrase.

The other shows are 60 Minutes, Dallas, Archie Bunker's Place, Knight Rider, and One Day at a Time.

There was a recent discussion of how messed up Diff'rent Strokes and sitcoms like it were on Facebook, where my friend Robin Bougie said, "People love to shit on them and regard them as worthless, and the cultural equivalent to garbage or junk food, but sitcoms have unlikely value in that they are an intriguing cultural barometer of the time and place that they were made--very much like talk shows in that respect. If you want to truly learn about a society, go through their garbage. Look at the everyday 'throw away' entertainment, not in the art galleries and museums." I agree and I'd go a step further and say it includes things like Cracked.

From If Michael Jackson Starred In... in Cracked #207, October 1984, also drawn by John Severin.

In the movie, E.T. said "Ouch!" emulating Elliot's reaction to cutting himself.

The back cover of MAD #238, April 1983, is supposed to be a commentary on how expensive the video-game is, but since this issue came out around Christmas, and MAD was owned by Warner Communications which also owned Atari, I think this was really a plug.

Any merchandising with E.T. was considered pure gold, so Atari figured they'd get into the game as well and the E.T. video game became a huge flop. The unsold copies were rumored to be buried somewhere, documentaries were made about it, and it possibly killed the company.

From Movie Sequels We'll Soon Be Seeing in Bananas #59, circa 1982, by Jovial Bob Stine and Sam Viviano.

Yeah, I know, I keep posting from when National Lampoon was well past its prime. That's when they started parodying movies, though. Ironic they started saying "The Humor Magazine For Adults" on its cover right after they started appealing to teenagers. Even boomers think life started when they were born, and people my age only know National Lampoon from the 80s, when every other issue had a theme of 'Back to School Summer Sex' and there was always a T & A pictorial. If you want to know what the magazine was like when it started, check out the book Drunk, Stoned, Brilliant, Dead. Sure, some of it's dated and bro-ish, and there was always the white privilege attitude of "we can be racist and misogynist because we're really on the right side". It would definitely outrage the woke Twitter-verse but it wasn't always the magazine 13-year-old boys snuck into school and passed around to look at naked girls.

Which brings us to the December 1982 issue, which contained a few pages devoted to our movie of the day.

Here's the super-racist S.D. written by Sean Kelly and drawn by Cracked artist Howard Nostrand. Kelly was one of the first Lampoon writers, and as an editor after most of the original staff left, he tried not to let it devolve into an R-rated MAD but had to accept orders from his publishers to dumb things down. When he said in an interview "if I didn't write for them, I wouldn't read it", he was fired, and like much of the original staff that's still alive, doesn't even mention working there on his resume.

They cashed in on E.T. one more time with their August 1983 cover.

UPDATE:
Cover to Mexican edition of MAD.