NIGHTBEAT
1956-1960 ABC, SYNDICATED
Before Sixty Minutes, Mike Wallace did a bunch of his own interview shows with the alternating titles Night Beat and The Mike Wallace Imterviews, sponsored by Philip Morris cigarettes and known for its tough in-depth reporting.
MIKE MALICE INTERVIEWS MOTHER GOOSE
MAD #38, March 1958
w: Dave Berg
a: Mort Drucker
The joke here is, of course, that Wallace's hard-hitting interviews are always with the most prominent figures of the day, and this is with the most innocuous person you could think of, but as evidenced after this, many nursery rhymes were in fact the equivalent of issues like communism and poverty two hundred years earlier.
from Go West, Old Format in MAD #41, September 1958, by Albert Meglin and George Woodbridge.
MAX WALLISS INTERVIEWS JAYNE WOMANSFIELD
Cracked #1, February/March 1958
a: Russ Heath
Jayne Mansfield was a sex symbol of the fifties and sixties who many say was a parody of a sex symbol. Elsa Maxwell was a gossip columnist who looked nothing like her. She collaborated often with her husband, bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay.
A character from Harvey Kurtzman's Hey Look! makes an appearance in the lower left, and readers probably didn't know that even then.
Natalie Wood was mostly a child star at that point, Mae Busch did silents and was long dead, and Etta Kett was a comic strip character, and I don't know what they would have in common. Marjorie Main was a character actress around that time. Most known as Ma Kettle.
NITE-HEAT
Sick #2, October 1960
w: Dee Caruso & Bill Levine
a: unknown
A-Z GUIDE TO MOVIES AND TV SHOWS PARODIED BY MAD, CRACKED, CRAZY, ETC. UP TO 1996. THEY HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS. SPOILERS AND OTHER NON-SEQUITURS, TOO. SOMETIMES THESE THINGS HAVE WORDS OR SITUATIONS WE DON'T USE ANYMORE. YOU KNOW, 'CAUSE THEY'RE OLD.
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The "Go West, Old Format" bit from Mad parodies a notorious interview Wallace did with L.A. gangster Mickey Cohen. In it, Cohen attacked L.A. police chief William Parker as an “alcoholic, disgusting, sadistic degenerate". Parker retaliated by suing for defamation, naming Cohen, Wallace, ABC and Phillip Morris.
ReplyDelete> a notorious interview Wallace did with L.A. gangster Mickey Cohen
ReplyDeleteFurther trivia on the Cohen interview: John Daly of "What's My Line" was VP of ABC News. He had not wanted Mike Wallace's show on ABC but was overruled by Entertainment.
Mike Wallace was scheduled to appear as the mystery guest on "What's My Line" a week or so after the Cohen interview and resulting lawsuit. Daly said he would not appear if Wallace did and so Wallace was bumped.
> A character from Harvey Kurtzman's Hey Look! makes an appearance
ReplyDeleteI was wondering if that was a tweak in MAD's eye for Kurtzman leaving but he had left 1-2 years before this article.
Humbug didn't spoof the show, but they did give Mike Wallace one of their mock awards for it.
ReplyDeleteThe annotated Humbug collection mentions a parody of the show recorded by comedian Ronny Graham. It was called Night Heat, on an album called Take Five, which is up at the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/lp_take-five_ronny-graham/disc1/01.03.+Night+Heat!.mp3