CBS 1954-1973
LIZZIE
MAD #59, December 1960
w: Larry Siegel
a: Mort Drucker
Long-running program about super-intelligent collie and the adventures of her owner and his family. The cast and settings changed but at this point it was Timmy Martin (Jon Provost), foster child of Paul and Ruth Martin (Hugh Reilly, June Lockhart).
Stan Lee did a Lassie parody in Riot #5. It was called Laddie, with art by Joe Maneely.
ReplyDeleteAnd Harvey Kurtzman did one many years later, in a 1990 collection of Mad-style stories he did called Strange Adventures. His was called Sassy, Come Home, with art by Rick Geary.
I've still got that book someplace. Denis Kitchen brought it out proudly proclaiming that the old magic was back, and I wish I could say I agreed. Nonetheless, it had a fantastic array of artists, and it was nice to see them pay Kurtzman tribute.
Argh - it wasn't Denis Kitchen, it was Byron Preiss.
DeleteLassie's one of those things like Lone Ranger or Tarzan that's as much something in the air as it is a property. I included this because it was of the actual TV show. I'll look at those other things to see if I should include them in a future update.
ReplyDeleteI have STRANGE ADVENTURES somewhere, hadn't thought of mining it for parodies. I don't have NUTS. I took Kurtzman's SVA class when that came out. He wasn't doing too well in his final days.
I think everything in Strange Adventures was pretty generic. Although, oddly, I just found out that he was going to parody a particular film, but scrapped the story. The book's graphic designer, Alex Jay, blogged about the making of it, and included the first page of a parody of The Maltese Falcon that Kurtzman worked on with Sarah Downs:
Deletehttp://alphabettenthletter.blogspot.com/2013/03/under-cover-harvey-kurtzmans-strange.html
He also mentioned that Jack Davis and Richard Corben were asked to contribute, but couldn't find time, which is a shame.
I could tell Kurtzman wasn't doing well from the one story in the book that he inked himself. I always wondered why he did that; he was usually so fussy, especially about his own artwork.