GOOFIES

THE GOONIES (1985)
dir: Richard Donner

I have Goonies in my "Top 15 Movies People Born After 1970 Should Be Punched In the Face For If They Bring Up" list even though I didn't think it was so bad seeing it for the first time last week. It still stays on the list though. There are a couple films on it I actually like, maybe I just have PTSD about the 80s. I think the reason X-ers like it is because it's about kids going out and having an adventure on their own. All this talk about "you couldn't do that today" when people see something from last century like a racial slur or women treated badly gets annoying, (I know. I do it too. I just don't believe in the fear tactic they call "cancel culture") but the ultimate "you couldn't do that today"-ism is unsupervised children. The free-range children of my generation turned out okay, not being a parent myself I can't figure out what caused this current stranger danger.

GOOFIES
MAD #258, October 1985
w: Stan Hart
a: Jack Davis

Sean Astin is Mikey Walsh, leader of a group that calls themselves "The Goonies". He's an asthmatic. His friends are Data (Ke Huy Quan) who always has gadgets on him, Chunk (Jeff Cohen), the fat kid who eats a lot, and Mouth (Corey Feldman), the smart-ass multilinguist. The older kids are Mikey's brother Brandon (Josh Brolin), and girlfriend Andi (Kerri Green). Missing is Andi's tomboyish best friend Stef (Martha Plimpton). I think the guy on the end is producer Steven Spielberg.

The movie begins with a bank robbery that Chunk is the only one to witness. The parody plays up his Judaism, though I don't recall any mention of it in the film. At the Walsh household, all the Goonies convene depressed that it's their last day together, because the development they all live in is about to be foreclosed on and torn down by new developers. They look at the Walsh family's collection of antiques in the attic.

They discover a treasure map. Brandon tells them it's just a legend, and they tie him up while they go look for it. The parody leaves out the scene where Brandon and Mikey's mother comes back home, frees him, and he goes after them. This is the part they don't use:

Andi goes to apologize for Troy's behavior. [unused footage out...] They see on the treasure map that it's hidden underground, but they have to go through a dilapidated old restaurant to get to it. The restaurant is actually a hideout for the bank robbers from the beginning, and the criminals put on the charade of being a real restaurant when the kids enter, with Mama Fratelli (Anne Ramsey), matriarch of the crime gang, acting as the waitress. When she leaves after "taking their order", the kids poke around.

Chunk is caught while trying to tell the police what he sees and is and about to be killed by Mama Fratelli and her two sons (Joe Pantaliano, Robert Davi) but they spare him, and lock him in the basement with their third son, a brain damaged, deformed guy named Sloth (John Matuszak). The kids, after going under the house, bypass all sorts of booby traps.

Eventually, the Goonies reach the pirate ship on the map, and are almost defeated by the Fratelli family, but Chunk and Sloth swoop in at the last minute, emulating Errol Flynn like they just saw on TV when they were locked in the basement. Everyone resurfaces on land and the parents are all there, happy to be reunited with the children, then the developers show up to foreclose on the house, but the families don't have to go because of the gems found on the hidden ship, which is now seen sailing away in the distance. And the teenagers make out.

This was the German edition, which used the movie on their cover.

GOODFELONS

GOODFELLAS (1990)
dir: Martin Scorsese

As far back as I can remember, I wanted to post parodies of movies and TV shows on the internet.

See what I did there?

No, but seriously, here's this...
GOODFELONS
Cracked #261, March 1991
w: Vic Bianco (Lou Silverstone)
a: Walter Brogan

Based on the book Wiseguy, by Henry Hill, a first-person account of life in the Mafia.

Right before the credits, the three main characters, Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), Jimmy Conway (Robert DeNiro), and Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) are burying a body before the story begins with Henry joining the mob. He starts out working at the store across the street, and then gets into trouble at home when his parents find out he isn't going to school.

Henry's father beats him as punishment, so he tells his boss Paulie (Paul Sorvino). Paulie says he'll "take care of it" (what he always says before violently fixing things) and gets his men to threaten the post office to never deliver letters from school to Henry's house again. Henry meets Jimmy, who hijacks trucks. He's also a loan shark, and we see him threatening wig shop owner Morris (Chuck Low). Tommy's the joker (by their standards) but also a loose cannon.

The parody combines two scenes--the one where Tommy fakes out Henry, and the one where he shoots a waiter (Michael Imperioli). Not sure if this was on purpose or by accident. Billy Batts, a gangster who's just been released from prison, gives Tommy a hard time, and gets killed for it. Billy was a 'made man', the highest echelon in the mob, so they have to bury the body. Now it goes back to the prologue. Before they bury the body, they stop by Tommy's mother (Catherine Scorsese)'s house to pick up a shovel, lying about why they're there. Henry goes out on a double date with Tommy and that's where he meets his future wife Karen (Lorraine Bracco)

I think that's supposed to be Martin Scorsese in the window of Tommy's mother's house. That's Henny Youngman at the club.

Karen is impressed Henry is a rich guy with connections that knows everyone, but isn't exactly sure what he does.

Henry and Karen eventually get married and she becomes part of the mob families. There's an unwritten rule that all the guys have a wife and a mistress. Karen doesn't approve and tries to kill Henry. Paulie intervenes, telling Henry to go back to his wife, and he'll "take care of it" while Henry and Jimmy go down to Miami to get money from a client who owes a gambling debt. They threaten to feed him to the lions.

The man who owed the debt had a sister with the FBI, who squealed and sent them to prison, and they continue a gangster life in prison. Henry's wife visits him in prison and finds out his mistress has been visiting too. After release, he and Jimmy pull off the biggest cocaine heist in history on their own. Jimmy gets mad that everyone involved is spending money on fancy cars and clothes when they should be laying low so they're not caught.

Tommy's about to become a 'made' man, an honor which can only be given to someone 100% Italian, but is whacked right before then because of having killed a made man earlier. But the party's over as dead bodies continue to be found and people are being arrested left and right.

Henry gets increasingly paranoid as he sees feds in helicopters circling his house, and when he gets caught, agrees to be a federal witness in exchange for turning everyone else in.

Mr. Show did a bit about GoodFellas that was more a parody of how movies are heavily edited for TV, back when movies were shown on commercial TV.

Now it's late, so I'm going to sleep, like a schnook.

THE GOODBUY GIRL

THE GOODBYE GIRL (1977)
dir: Herbert Ross

THE GOODBUY GIRL
Sick #122, August 1978
w & a: Dave Manak

Elliot Garfield (Richard Dreyfuss) comes to New York to what he thinks will be a vacant apartment, but the person he sublet it from walked out on his wife Paula McFadden (Marsha Mason) and daughter Lucy (Quinn Cummings) and they're still there. He legally has the rights to the apartment and they agree to share it.

Elliott is an actor, Paula is making a comeback as a theater dancer now that she has to support herself. She hasn't done it in a while and needs to get back in shape. Elliott's director for Richard III, Mark (Paul Benedict) wants him to play the role as a mincing, lisping, gay stereotype.

Paula and Lucy go to see Elliott on the opening night of the play, and compliment him to spare his feelings, even though they hated it. He comes home drunk after seeing the reviews than universally pan his performance, and the show has closed on opening night. Paula's too out of shape to be a dancer, but gets a job as a car show model.

Elliott goes to see Paula at the car show and embarrasses her, but makes up for it claiming to be a rich man to her bosses. He gets a job as a doorman at a strip club and gets punched out trying to break up a fight. Later, he seduces her and she comes home from work one day and is surprised by him having a romantic dinner on the roof.

Lucy, who liked Elliott throughout the movie, hates him now that he and her mother are romantically involved, because she doesn't want to get hurt again. He's with a new theater company now and the director Oliver Fry (Nicol Williamson) offers him a part in a film. He tells the news to Paula and she's afraid another actor has left her, but at the last minute he returns and asks her to come with him.

HOO-BOY, COLUMBUS

GOODBYE, COLUMBUS (1969)
dir:Larry Peerce

MAD#131, December 1969
w: Arnie Kogen
a: Mort Drucker

The movie has that title because of the brother playing footage of old basketball games from his days at Ohio State.

It starts at a country club with Neil Klugman (Richard Benjamin) visiting a country club with a guest pass from his cousin. There he meets Brenda Patimkin (Ali McGraw) who asks him to hold her glasses while she goes swimming, despite the fact that she doesn't wear them throughout the rest of the movie.

After dinner with his family in the Bronx, Neil asks Brenda out, then drives to Westchester County to meet her after she's had a tennis game. She's rich and embarrassed my her nose job, but they begin dating.

He and She was Benjamin's short-lived sitcom the previous year. By "short-lived", with three networks in 1969, a TV show had more than 25 programs a season and 30 million viewers was considered low in the ratings.

Neil meets Brenda's family over dinner at her home. They're very rich. It consists of the mother (Nan Martin), the little sister, the father Ben (Jack Klugman, only a co-incidence he has the same last name), and brother Ron (Michael Meyers). Brenda's a college student and Neil works at the library.

Neil watches Brenda's sister Julie (Lorie Shelle) one day, playing ping-pong with her in their basement. He continues his romance with Brenda, her parents aren't sure he's right for her but agree she's just going through a phase. They leave a college party one night and the parody ignores that she skinny-dips in the pool. Neil's parents are always away and he moves in temporarily with the Patimkin family. They don't know he sneaks into Brenda's room and they have sex every night.

Ron recently graduated from college and works at his father's business. He gets married and there are all sorts of scenes at a Jewish wedding.

This parody has Dustin Hoffman from The Graduate at the wedding. Everybody suggests Brenda's next to be married and her father tells her she can have anything she wants, which is meant to imply that she can do better than Neil. When Neil goes to visit Brenda at Radcliffe and they rent a hotel room, she confesses her parents found her diaphragm at home and they break up. The parody has her marrying Philip Roth, who wrote the book Goodbye, Columbus was based on.

From Academy Awards for Adult Movies in the next issue written by Larry Siegel and also drawn by Mort Drucker. The host is Dustin Hoffman. The other nominees are Raquel Welch, though she was not in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (which as far as I know, had no nudity) and Vanessa Redgrave for The Loves of Isadora.

GOODBYE, COLUMBUS
Sick #71, November 1969
w: Bill Majeski

There was later a movie based on Portnoy's Complaint where Richard Benjamin plays essentially the same character, which is parodied in Deconstructing Harry.

GOOD TIME-SLOT

GOOD TIMES
1974-1979 CBS

GOOD TIME-SLOT
MAD #182, April 1976
w: Larry Siegel
a: Angelo Torres

Interesting that Larry Siegel, writer of this parody, wrote one episode of the actual show. Makes sense since he was a regular writer for The Carol Burnett Show and TV comedy shows.

Good Times was spun off from Maude, with the maid Florida Evans (Esther Rolle) from that show and her family life in the projects in Chicago, presumably Cabrini-Green. The show was created by Eric Monte, who had written a movie that year about his upbringing in that neighborhood in Cooley High and Michael Evans, the name of one of the characters on the show, so presumably this was autobiographical for both of them.

Florida's husband was James (John Amos).

   -Doesn't sound unique at all, but it's noted that the show was one of the first to portray a black family in a two-parent household.
   -John Amos had been a football player before becoming an actor.
   -Wilona (JaNet DuBois) was their neighbor. The daughter was Thelma (Bern Nadette Stanis)

Michael (Ralph Carter) was the youngest son Michael, a strident activist. James was a strict father who was always threatening to hit his sons with his belt. The oldest son J.J. (Jimmie Walker) was the vain teenage son and became the show's breakout star (more on that later).

"Dy-No-Mite" was J.J.'s big catchphrase.

The landlord in this parody is Redd Foxx, star of TV's Sanford and Son.

GOOD TYMES
Cracked #130, January 1976
a: John Severin

Like I said, Jimmie Walker became the star and "Dy-No-Mite" the big catchphrase.

J. J. often thought of some kind of get rich quick scheme to help out the family.

Another Fred Sanford appearance here.

The IRS agent is Don Rickles. $2.50 for a school lunch doesn't add up. Adjusted for inflation it would be $12.85 in today's money. When I was in school in the 80s, lunch was $1.10, which would be $2.80 in today's money, or .55 in 1975 dollars. That makes more sense.

GOOD TYMES
Cracked #150, May 1978
a: Howard Nostrand

This was Cracked's second parody of the show. They often parodied shows more than once when they went through cast changes. Esther Rolle temporarily left because the program focused too much on Jimmie Walker and his saying "Dy-No-Mite" all the time, and strayed from their original premise of a family trying to make ends meet. Wilona was the one to take care of the children in the parents' absence.

Janet Jackson was Penny, Wilona's adopted daughter. Johnny Brown was Bookman, superintendent of the building who started out as a supporting character but became a regular over time.

Thelma cooked for the family, jokes were often at her expense about the quality.

The salesman is Bill Cosby and the undercover cop is Robert Blake as Baretta. Both actor are still around and have stellar reputations.

From If Frankenstein's Monster Did Guest Appearances on TV, also by Nostrand, in the next issue.

GROSS TIMES
Crazy #10, April 1975
w: Stu Schwartzberg
a: Marie Severin

Sorry about the big-lip images. As I've said before, some of these magazines weren't always known for racial sensitivity.

GOOK TIMES
Crazy #16, March 1976
w: Len Herman
a: Marie Severin

J. J. was an aspiring painter. The painting from the credits was by him. The pronunciation of the word "ghetto" like in this was also a trait of his.

This was Saturday Night Live's version of the show.
UPDATE:

From Obituaries for TV Show Characters by Frank Jacobs in MAD #194, October 1977