MISSION: RIDICULOUS

MISSION:IMPOSSIBLE
1966-1973 CBS

MISSION: RIDICULOUS
MAD # 118, April 1968
w: Dick DeBartolo
a: Mort Drucker

This was a long-running TV series that was remade as a film franchise and then another TV series, about an espionage agency known as the Impossible Mission Force. Each week Jim Phelps (Peter Graves) would be given an assignment through an intercom disguised as a regular object which would then self-destruct.

The movie theater is showing Sandy Dennis in Up the Down Staircase which is parodied in that same issue of MAD.

Phelps' crew was Rollin (Martin Landau), Barney (Greg Morris), Cinammon (Barbara Bain), and Willy (Peter Lupus).

Usually casts member of a movie or TV show would write about their appearance in the magazine after the parody was done, here's one where cast members wrote in asking why they hadn't appeared yet, though it was probably also staged.

Martin Landau and Barbara Bain were a real-life husband and wife team that only appeared in TV shows that had colons in the title, later featured in Space:1999.

From A Treasury of Television Poetry and Prose by Tom Koch and Jack Davis, from MAD #152, July 1972.

The back cover of MAD #134 was also a brief Mission:Impossible parody, written by Chevy Chase, which we have in our Caddyshack entry.

MISSION:IMPLAUSIBLE
Cracked #80, October 1969
a: O.O. Severin (John Severin)

From Sneaky TV Cigarette Commercials in Cracked #91, March 1971. Cigarette advertisements were banned from television that year and this article was about how they could theoretically get around it.

From The Effect of the Energy Crisis on the Entertainment World in Cracked #119, September 1974, art by Severin.

From Wild! #1, January 1968

cover for TV Guide by Jack Davis.