NOT QUITE UP TO SPEED

SPEED (1994)
dir: Jan Debont

NOT QUITE UP TO SPEED
MAD #332, December 1994
w: Dick DeBartolo
a: Angelo Torres

Pop quiz: You see the latest blogpost and have fifteen minutes to read it. What do you do?

Speed begins with Howard Payne (Dennis Hopper) having placed a bomb in an elevator, holding its passengers for a three million dollar ransom. Jack Traven (Keanu Reeves) and Harry Temple (Jeff Daniels) are able to temporarily keep the elevator from crashing to the ground and let the passengers out.

Sure, they laugh at Keanu Reeves' credibility as an action star now but a lot of actors got their start as stoners.

Howard flees, grabbing Harry. Jack shoots Harry in the leg to get Howard to release him. Howard runs away detonating the bomb, and it is assumed he has killed himself in the wreckage. Jack and Harry are rewarded and it is assumed the whole thing is over. The next morning, Jack sees a bus blow up on his way to work and gets a call from a payphone. Howard is still alive, is angrythey foiled his ransom plan, and now he has a new bomb threat.

Howard Payne has put a bomb on a city bus, and once the bus goes over 50 MPH, it sets off the bomb, and the bomb will explode if the bus goes under that speed. No passengers are allowed to leave the bus, or Howard will detonate the bomb. Jack is able to get on the bus and warn everybody of the situation. One passenger is in trouble with the law already and despite Jack telling him he's not in trouble, he still threatens to kill Jack. In the midst of attempting to disarm the guy, the driver (Hawthorne James) is shot. Annie (Sandra Bullock), a passenger, has to take control of the wheel and ironically, she's taking the bus because her license was revoked.

Jack, with the rest of the police force by his side, is able to get under the bus and find out what kind of bomb it is, so he can call his partner Harry, find out what kind it is, and hopefully diffuse it. On the street, where the bus is, there's the “baby carriage of peril” motif that originated in Battleship Potemkin, which gets hit but turns out to just be full of empty cans. The highway that's been cordoned off for the bus has a gap they have to jump. The chase is all televised this whole time, parallels the O.J. Simpson trial that was concurrently going on. If that was too subtle a joke, O.J. lawyer Robert Shapiro is caricatured in the last panel.

They find out Howard knows what's going on in the bus because he's placed a security camera there, the police have found a way to jam the frequency of the camera so he sees the same footage of the passengers in a loop, making it look like like they're still on the bus, enabling the police to get them all off and letting the bus stop by itself and explode while empty on an airport runway. At the station, they've tracked down Howard Payne but Harry is killed on the way to his house. Howard will get the ransom money dropped off in a garbage can in the city. A squad is waiting for him but he never shows up. Jack figures out Howard took the money from beneath and is somewhere underground.

Howard is upset the ransom money has been triggered with a dye pack (not shown) and has commandeered a subway, taking Annie hostage. He fights Jack on the roof of the subway but is decapitated by a railway signal. The runaway subway is on an unfinished track, and ends up bursting out into the street, throwing Jack and Annie off as they're embracing and thinking they're about to die, to the amazement of a crowd of onlookers.

In a TV show or movie, a character is often shown reading a comic book or an issue of MAD to show their low I.Q. An episode of Seinfeld showed George Costanza reading an issue of Cracked, specifically the one containing this Speed parody.

When this cover was drawn, did they think the movie was about a school bus or were they celebrating Back to School season? The Sweet Hereafter wouldn't be released for another three years.

PEED
Cracked #294, November 1994
w: Lou Silverstone
a: Walter Brogan

The MAD parody didn't use poilce lieutenant “Mac” McMahon (Joe Morton).

“Most excellent” in the second panel is a reference to Keanu Reeves' role in the Bill and Ted movies.

So's the flying phone booth on this page.

John Wayne Bobbitt was famous because his wife cut off his penis.