JULIUS CAESAR!

JULIUS CAESAR (1953)
dir: Joseph L. Mankiewicz

JULIUS CAESAR!
MAD #17, November 1954
w: Harvey Kurtzman
a: Wallace Wood

“There were so many imitations. The imitations were coming out of the woodwork. I've got an attic filled with MAD imitations, Blecch, Ecch, Ptui, Ergh, Blaugh, Blurp...”
--Harvey Kurtzman
Comics Journal interview, 1981

More of a parody of parodies than the movie itself, how when MAD first came out in 1952 and became a runaway success eventually, every other publisher jumped on the bandwagon trying to duplicate that success, and it was ubiquitous enough of a target for them.

The movie was an adaptation of Shakespeare's play, with Louis Calhern as Caesar. James Mason was Brutus.

These are caricatures of actual existing U.S. Senators.

Marlon Brando played Marc Anthony in Julius Caesar. Martin Kane was sponsored by the American Tobacco Company. The Sherlock Holmes portrait is based on Bill Elder's drawing of him in many MAD parodies.

“Dom Da Domm Domm” comes from the horns used in the Dragnet theme.

Kurtzman was no stranger to doing take-offs of take-offs, before MAD, he did this in his strip for Lana #2 in 1948.

Bijou Funnies, an underground comic of the 60s and 70s, did a whole issue that was a parody of Kurtzman's MAD in 1973, with the back cover a parody of the opening page from this story, written by Jay Lynch and drawn by Ralph Reese, who had been an assistant to Wood.