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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SHMOE
MAD #144, July 1971
w: Larry Siegel
a: Mort Drucker
The character of Joe (Peter Boyle) doesn't show up until about a half hour into the movie. Joe's a working class right-wing World War II veteran living in Queens, a sort of more “serious” and sociopathic version of Archie Bunker. You see him at his machine shop shift.
It begins with Melissa Compton (Susan Sarandon), who's run away from home to live with her drug-dealing and using boyfriend Frank (Patrick McDermott).
Melissa's father Bill (Dennis Patrick) shows up at Melissa and Frank's apartment and kills him for brainwashing and seducing his little girl. Then we finally meet Joe on his drunken rant against everything the right saw wrong with America circa 1970 (“60% of all liberals are queers and that's a fact!”)
Bill ducks into the bar where Joe is carrying on and when he says he'd like to kill a hippie, Bill says “I just did.” Joe dismisses this as a joke, then sees how a hippie was killed the next day, puts two and two together, gets in contact with Bill, and blackmails Bill into being his friend. Joe and his wife have dinner with the Comptons (we get to that later in the parody), their backgrounds initially clash, but they bond over their hatred of hippies, and go out infiltrating the hippie scene so they can find Bill's daughter.
This is the dinner part. They write it out of order so they can do the punchline, and the movie satire being for kids can't use the getting laid at orgies (remember to pronounce that with a hard G) and killing hippies.
Joe shows Bill his gun collection they later use to kill the hippies. Here they use the punchline that he's really Spiro Agnew. Hard to imagine in the polarized country we live in now that Nixon and Agnew were once considered as far right as you could go. Like most people my age who began reading MAD post-Watergate and before 1980, we learned who he was from MAD's specials reprinting five-year old material.
Peter Boyle was offered the lead in The French Connection but turned it down because he was allergic to the gray paint he didn't want to be typecast as a psycho.
JOANEE LOVES CHOOCH
Crazy #92, December 1982
w: Stu Schwartzberg
a: Kent Gamble
Happy Days was such a hit in the seventies that producer Garry Marshall basically had carte blanche to produce anything he wanted for ABC. Some programs were hits such as Laverne and Shirley or Mork and Mindy, a lot were flops like Blansky's Beauties, Angie, Makin' It, Goodtime Girls, and this. Marshall claimed the show was banned in Korea because 'Chachi' was too close to their word for penis, but I'm going to call BS on that since the character had been around for years.
The premise was that Happy Days stars Joanie Cunningham (Erin Moran) and Chachi Arcola (Scott Baio) moved away from Milwaukee and started a band in Chicago. The show fast-forwards to 1963 (which I've insisted many times before is in the fifties no matter what anyone says) right before the British Invasion changed pop music. This parody has them going forward beyond then, even though they didn't actually do that.
The show made references that prophecized events of the future, like here how they reference Lee Harvey Oswald and the JFK assassination. Supporting characters were named Bingo and Annette, named for Ringo Starr and Annette Funicello.
Like most Happy Days spinoffs, they often had the Fonz come in to boost ratings. The cop here is supposed to be George Kennedy as The Blue Knight.
The characters of Joanie and Chachi actually did return to Happy Days after this show was canceled. Al Molinaro was another character from that show who went to this and boomeranged back. The quote from Richie in Vietnam is a reference to a quote from Muhammad Ali when he refused to sign up for the draft.
Kent Gamble probably couldn't draw Lennon assassin Mark David Chapman.
From More TV Moments We'll Never See in Bananas #61, circa 1983
THE FOOL OF THE NILE
MAD #263, June 1986
w: Dick DeBartolo
a: Mort Drucker
Sequel to Romancing the Stone, which was kind of Raiders of the Lost Ark meets Thin Man, or at least I imagine how that was pitched. Part of a group of films reviewed by Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel.
The other reels in the splash panel are plays on the titles Flashdance, Out of Africa, Spies Like Us, and Prizzi's Honor, The skunk was a character on their show in their segment Stinker of the Week. In the background is a portrait of William Gaines by Jack Davis that they used often.
While vacationing in France, Joan Wilder (Kathleen Turner) is trying to write her next novel and her boyfriend Jack Colton (Michael Douglas) wants to continue their vacation of pleasure. She meets Omar Khalifa (Spiros Focàs) who wants her to come to Africa with him to write about him. His name here is a pun on Omar Sharif, who he slightly resembles. A jealous Jack follows them and Ralph (Danny Devito) shows up demanding the stone from the previous movie. Jack is informed that Omar is really a brutal dictator, bent on taking over Africa, who has the jewel of the title. In Africa, while Joan is looking around finding dirt on Omar she crashes through the roof af Al-Julhara, a holy man being held captive, who she finds out is 'The Jewel of the Nile'.
In the background are Benchley, Drucker's newspaper strip character and Caspar Weinberger, Reagan's secretary of defense.
The Siskel and Ebert stand-ins pretty much summarize the rest of the plot.
Actors often wrote in a few issues later about their portrayals, this time the screenwriters did.
The foreign editions of MAD often featured movies on their covers that weren't on the covers of the domestic edition, like this Australian cover, though usually it's an original painting and not taken from one of their panels.
Seems like a weird choice of parody, which I guess is why they have celebrities talk about it rather than do a linear story with it. Here's a panel with Rona Barrett, Henry Kissinger, Gloria Steinem, and Jimmy Carter talking about it.
Navin Johnson (Steve Martin) starts out raised by a black family, and realizing he's different, goes out on his own, works at a garage for Harry Hartounian (Jackie Mason), and invents a device to keep one of his customer(Bill Macy)'s glasses from slipping off.
Navin gets a job at an amusement park, loses his virginity to motorcycle daredevil Patty Bernstein (Caitlin Adams) and then settles down with Marie Kimball (Bernadette Peters).
Then Navin strikes it rich when it turns out the man from the garage is a businessman who has patented his “opti-grab” glasses and is sharing royalties with him.
The marriage by a voodoo priest was only a short gag that was about a second of the movie, maybe they were trying to make it into something racist. If they wanted to do that there were other opportunities, like the neighborhood racists later in the film. Carl Reiner as himself plays the guy who leads a class action suit against Navin, causing him to lose it all.
THE JAZZYSLUMS
MAD #191, June 1977
w:Stan Hart
a: Angelo Torres
Started with All in the Family where they started as the neighbors, then spun off into their own show which lasted even longer. The Jeffersons started as a working class family in Queens but on their own show moved into a high-rise apartment in Manhattan. The patriarch was George Jefferson (Sherman Hemsley) and his wife was Louise (Isabel Sanford). Rounding out the cast were George's mother (Zara Cully), his English neighbor Harry Bentley (Paul Benedict), maid Florence (Marla Gibbs), neighbors Tom and Helen Willis (Franklin Cover, Roxie Roker), son Lionel (Damon Evans), Lionel's wife Jenny (Berlinda Tolbert) who was also the Willis' daughter, and the doorman Ralph (Ned Wertimer).
George owned a chain of dry-cleaning stores. When he was on All in the Family, he fed into Archie Bunker's worst fear of black men. Not that George didn't have a bit of prejudice himself, he wasn't very happy with the fact that the Willis' were a mixed race or that his son was seeing their daughter.
J. J.'s father on Good Times was killed off.
Dr. J. a/k/a Julius Erving was a basketball player
From TV Disclaimers We'd Like to See by Lou Silverstone and Jack Davis in MAD #180, January 1976. The married couple are Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.
From Obituaries for TV Show Characters in MAD #194, October 1977, by Frank Jacobs.
THE JABBERSONS
Cracked #185, March 1982
a: Samuel B. Whitehead
Mike Evans, who played Lionel originally on All in the Family, came back later in this series.
I don't think the writer of this piece knew Gary Coleman was once a character on The Jeffersons.
THE JITTERSONS
Crazy #88, July 1982
w: Murad Gumen
a: Kent Gamble
George would call his wife “Weezy”
A recurring bit was that Harry had a bad back and needed to have it walked on, which George was always eager to do since if gave him the chance to walk on a white man.
Because Jenny was the daughter of a mixed race couple, George would refer to her as a “zebra”.
I think that's supposed to be Greg Morris (Mission:Impossible) between Richard Pryor and an I Spy-era Bill Cosby, and the others are Isaac Hayes, Jimmie Walker, Redd Foxx, Ernest Lee Thomas (What's Happening), and Kene Holliday (Carter Country).
From The Final Segments of Popular TV Series by Paul Laikin and John Reiner in Crazy #47, February 1979
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With the successes of the first two movies, the first one then being the highest-grossing movie of all time behind Star Wars and later E. T., and Jaws 2 being the highest grossing sequel at that point, it was inevitable there'd be a third one. None of the people from the first two were involved, it didn't even take place in the same location for that matter, and was shot in 3-D to cash in on the 3-D revival that was being used then, most notably for “threequels” (Friday the 13th Part 3-D, Amityville 3-D).
This is similar to Cracked's Godfather, Part 2 parody of a few years earlier, which parodies the idea of movies having sequels more than the actual plot, and uses the same number.
THE MAKING OF JAWZ #23
Cracked #198, October 1983
a: John Severin
Nanny Dickering was the reporter for the magazine. Originally she looked like however the artist who drew her depicted her, then when pin-up artist Bill Ward drew her looking all dolled up like all his women, that's how she looked thereafter.
This version used an old Sheriff Brody (Roy Scheider) even though the franchise moved on from the character by then.
They just reprinted their Godfather mash-up from a few years earlier.
An older Mayor Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) is used as well.
SICK TAKES YOU ON THE SET OF JAWS 3
Sick Special #1, 1980
a: Bill Burke
Jaws 3 was originally meant to be a comedy and titled Jaws 3, People 0, produced by National Lampoon, written by John Hughes, and directed by Joe Dante, about a real shark attack on the set of a Jaws sequel. After Animal House became the biggest comedy of all time, Universal thought this would be a sure thing, but apparently didn't want to risk it and pulled the plug. Sometimes you can find the script online, but the studio often finds it and gets it taken down. Judging from the next two movies National Lampoon made (one closed after a week, the other went direct-to-video three years later with twenty minutes cut), who knows if it would have been any good?
Another Land-Shark sketch from Saturday Night Live.
