dir: John Ford
THE OLD GRAY LINE
MAD #223, June 1981
w: Lou Silverstone
a: Angelo Torres
This very loosely borrows from The Long Grey Line, with Marty Maher (Tyrone Power) telling his story to President Eisenhower. How he started as an Irish immigrant, and rose through the ranks at West Point Military Academy over the years, raising future generations of cadets with his wife Mary (Maureen O'Hara). The premise of this parody is something MAD did often, showing an example of a movie genre from the past and updating it as if it were modern.
The military academy movie is updated to reflect the standards of 1981 and how military academies have changed over the years and in real life have cheating and sex scandals, and become more accepting of their diversity. This version has caricatures of Jack Nicholson, James Caan, and Cybill Shepherd (or is it Candace Bergen?). James Stewart and Lee Marvin would have been cadets in an old military movie, here they are the commanding officers. Dustin Hoffman also makes a cameo as one of the cadets in the splash.
In the bottom left of the first page, one of the cadets is Ronald Reagan, which must be a reference to Brother Rat. Given that, I figure that the guy next to him holding the newspaper is Eddie Albert, from the same film. I don't know about the guy in the foreground, though; it would make sense if it were Wayne Morris, star of Brother Rat, but it doesn't quite look like him.
ReplyDeleteOn page 2, in panel 5, one of the football players is Reagan again, this time in reference to his most famous role, as George Gipp in Knute Rockne, All American. Also, this may be a stretch, but I think Torres may have drawn the general as a reference to Al Jaffee's short-lived Mad strip, Hawks & Doves.
In the splash of The New Gray Line, one of the cadets is Steve McQueen, with the butterfly emblem referring to Papillon.
I also think this might have been inventory. Nicholson and Caan were still popular in the early 80s but they were in their forties and wouldn't be new cadets.
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