WISHIN' FOR THE IMPOSSIBLE

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (1996)
dir: Brian DePalma

WISHIN' FOR THE IMPOSSIBLE
MAD #347, July 1996
w: Dick DeBartolo
a: Angelo Torres

This begins like the TV show it was based on with Impossible Mission Forces agent Jim Phelps (Jon Voight) looking at the dossier and listening to a recording telling him what his mission will entail before the dossier self-destructs. His latest mission, as told by his supervisor Eugene Ketteridge, is to stop Alexander Golitsyn, a rogue IMF agent, from selling a copy of the CIA's NOC list to an illegal arms dealer.

The kids are referring to Joe Buck, a role Voight played in Midnight Cowboy. He also starred in Deliverance, which is referred to on the envelope. On the wings is the apteryx, a bird used as a side gag for years in MAD, the joke being that in reality it is flightless.

The team is Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), Claire Phelps (Emmanuele Beart), Jack Harmon (Emilio Estevez), and Sarah Davies (Kristin Scott Thomas). They are to execute their mission at a party at the Russian embassy. Jack gives Ethan an explosive shaped like gum, which will be exposition for a later scene.

Everybody is killed off in the mission except Ethan, who gets a call from Ketteridge (Henry Czerny), who asks how things are going, and arranges to meet him at a local restaurant. Unbeknownst to them, their mission was part of different mission to ferret out a mole within the IMF working under the name 'Job 314'. Since Ethan is the only surviving member, Ketteridge suspects he is the one, and sets up Ethan's parents for crimes to get him to turn himself in. Ethan flees before he can be taken into custody by throwing the explosive gum at a fishtank in the restaurant (not shown here). In his sanctuary, Ethan searches for clues as to who 'Job 314' is, eventually realizing the name is from a verse in The Book of Job in the bible, which leads him to Max (Vanessa Redgrave), the arms dealer who bought the NOC list. He believes it to be bogus and arranges to get the real one for her in exchange for money to assemble a team.

The picture on Redgrave's desk is of Yassir Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which she was famous for sympathizing with.

Claire turns out to have been alive after all, having survived the car-bombing, tipped off in advance by her husband. Ethan sets up a new team on his own to clear his name. With the help of blacklisted IMF agents Stickell and Krieger (Ving Rhames, Jean Reno), they break into CIA's Langley headquarters disguised as firefighters and getting the actual NOC list. Jim Phelps shows up and turns out to still be alive, and says Ketteridge is the mole.

Ratso was Joe Buck's friend in Midnight Cowboy.

There is a big fight scene taking place in the Chunnel from London to Paris, involving Hunt being chased by Krieger in a helicopter down there and a rooftop fight on the TGV train, all to prevent the NOC (non-official cover) disc from being uploaded), which would reveal the mole, which is Phelps. Ethan uses the explosive gum again to lose the helicopter chasing him, and has secretly arranged for Ketterige to meet Max, putting the NOC list back in the hands of the CIA.

Cover for Mexican edition of MAD.

MISH MOSH: IMPLAUSIBLE
Cracked #310, September 1996
w: Lou Silverstone
a: Walter Brogan

The beginning of the movie shows the team finishing their previous mission as a set-up to what they do, similar to how the James Bond and Naked Gun movies begin (co-incidentally, there's Leslie Nielsen in the splash panel). Tom Cruise uses prosthetics in the prologue and Claire fakes death.

Spies and Saboteurs were Cracked's answer to MAD's marginals, here they're characters in the parody.

Fights on the rooftops of trains were not invented that decade, they've been around since the beginning of film. Coincidentally, one of the Mission:Impossible sequels was directed by John Woo, who did Broken Arrow.