HOME A-GROAN 2: LOOT IN NEW YORK

HOME ALONE 2: LOST IN NEW YORK (1992)
dir: Chris Columbus

Two trailers were made, one of which placed more emphasis on the burglars being hurt.
HOME A-GROAN: LOOT IN NEW YORK
MAD #318, April 1993
w: Dick DeBartolo
a: Mort Drucker

The criminals (Joe Pesci, Daniel Stern) were not released from prison, they escaped, but no matter. Stern first appeared in Breaking Away and Pesci had been in My Cousin Vinny.

The second movie begins like the first with the McCallister family running around the night before their Christmas vacation the next morning, this time to Miami. The parents are making sure they don't forget Kevin (Macaulay Culkin) this time. Kevin is recording everything he sees, including this commercial for the Plaza Hotel. The same thing happens before where their alarm clock accidentally becomes unplugged and they have to rush to make their flight on time. This time they didn't leave Kevin at home but he gets behind at the airport going through his father's bag looking for fresh batteries for his tape recorder.

They leave out the part where Kevin gets on the wrong plane and ends up in New York. He has his father's bag and is able to check into the Plaza Hotel. The concierge (Tim Curry) and bellhop (Rob Schneider) are not caricatured, which makes me suspect the parody was done from a press kit rather than seeing the film. The concierge is suspicious that there doesn't seem to be an adult present and peeks in the room, which Kevin has rigged to make look like someone else is present, using an inflatable clown he was given earlier as a gift and a recording of his uncle singing in the shower. Kevin visits a toy store run by Mr. Duncan (Eddie Bracken, also not caricatured), who tells Kevin he donates his profits to charity every Christmas. As Kevin goes through the city, he runs into the escaped burglars.

At the hotel, they find Kevin has been using a stolen credit card, and as management chases him and he escapes, he runs into the burglars and they vow revenge on him and chase him through Central Park. In Florida [they don't show how it's raining the whole time], Kevin's parents (Catherine O'Hara, John Heard) track him down through the reported stolen credit card. In the city, he meets a homeless woman (Brenda Fricker) who attracts pigeons and tells him about how she once had a life.

The burglars rob the toy store, Kevin had eavesdropped on them earlier and known they were going to do it, and he lures them into chasing him into his uncle's house, which is vacant and being renovated. There he sets up the cartoon slapstick booby-traps that hurt the burglars like in the first movie. After he finally foils them and they're arrested again, he goes to Rockefeller Center where his mother finds him talking to the tree. In this, the whole family meets him there. The cop here is also caricatured as John Candy, who wasn't in the movie, though he was in the first one.

ZIT HAPPENS
Cracked #278, January 1993
w: Andy Simmons
a: Rurik Tyler

The Home Alone movies made Macaulay Culkin a big star while he was still a child. This shows what life would be like for him as a teenager.

HOMEBOY ALONE 2: LOOT IN NEW YORK
Cracked #280, May 1993
w: Lou Silverstone
a: Walter Brogan

Like yesterday, Cracked had more of the plot than the MAD parody.

MAD omitted how the night before the vacation, there was a Christmas pageant and his older brother Buzz (Devin Ratray) upstaged and mocked him while he sang, Kevin took a swing and got the blame for ruining everything. The genie from Aladdin is drawn in the background of one panel for some reason.

Donald Trump, owner of the Plaza Hotel, makes a cameo appearance when Kevin checks in (see video clip above). In New York, we already had his number thirty years ago which is why we knew not to vote for him. The kindly toy store owner gives Kevin two turtledove ornaments, telling him to if he gives one to a close friend it will bind them for life.

The concierge is wearing a bikini because of Tim Curry's role in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, as if a kid in 1992 would know that. I don't know why Dracula's in the park. I think the other guy is the old man from the first movie.

After Kevin outsmarts the burglars they run into the park where the homeless woman sics pigeons on them.

They make a comment here, too, about how this, like most sequels, is a rehash of the first one. Here they have a clip of the first one where the mother is rescued by John Candy. Back in the movie we're watching, the mother and son are reunited, and the family comes along later, and gets a free room at the Plaza Hotel. The toy store owner is overjoyed that Kevin brought the burglars to justice and the family wakes up to find a bunch of presents from him. Kevin sees turtledove ornaments on the tree and runs to the park to give one to the homeless woman.

   -The composer in the last row of panels is supposed to be John Williams, who wrote the score for this.
   -One of the other kids was Macaulay's younger brother Kieran, now grown up and the more famous of the Culkins.

WHO ELSE IS HOME ALONE?
Cracked #278, January 1993
w: Spark
a: Jim Bennett

Madonna was known earlier for appearing nude in movies. She was married to Sean Penn at the time and had earlier been romantically linked with Warren Beatty. Ice T. was most famous then for a rap song called "Cop Killer". Mike Tyson was still in prison for domestic violence.

THE SABOTEUR 'HOME ALONE' HOME PROTECTION SYSTEM
Cracked #278, January 1993
w & a: Michael Ricigliano

Spies and Saboteurs, Cracked's answers to Sergio Aragones' MAD Marginals, which you've seen in the margins of most Cracked parodies from the eighties on, sometimes had their own featured articles.

Saturday Night Live did this a couple years ago. It's still not the official thirtieth anniversary but what do you expect from writers just out of college? UPDATE:
Cover for German edition of MAD, I'm pretty sure this is for the sequel. They used Madonna on the cover a lot more in the foreign editions.