SPLASHDANCE

SPLASH (1984)
dir: Ron Howard

The issue of MAD this was in also spoofed Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom that month.

MAD #250, October 1984
w: Arnie Kogen
a: Mort Drucker

Allen Bauer (Tom Hanks) runs a fruit distribution business with his brother Freddie (John Candy). Another typical chaotic day at work handling drivers and customers.

This film was one of the first releases of Touchstone Pictures, one of the many subsidiaries in Disney's “new look”. It's a completely innocuous movie, but the fact that it showed rear nudity was the furthest they had gone up to then. Anyway, it's the reason for the cartoon characters at the bottom of the splash panel (no pun intended).

Freddie is Allen's perverted brother and partner, bragging about a letter he had printed in Penthouse Forum and later at a wedding he's contriving ways to look up womens' dresses just like the earlier flashback (not shown). Allen is depressed that he just broke up with his girlfriend, and his brother tries to fix him up.

Allen decides to get away from it all by going to Cape Cod for the weekend. While there he tries to get directions and asks Dr. Walter Kornbluth (Eugene Levy), a condescendeing, hostile scientist convinced a mermaid exists, to help him across the ocean. He eventually finds someone to help him, falls out of the boat and drowns, and is rescued by a naked woman (Daryl Hannah).

The naked woman turns out to be the mermaid. When Allen drowned, his wallet fell out, which she found his address in. She goes to New York to find him and surfaces on Liberty Island where she's arrested for indecent exposure. All she has is his wallet and she can't talk, so the police call Allen and he bails her out. He takes her home, and they do nothing but have sex all night. He has to go to work and leaves her alone. She learns English from TV, and that clothes come from Bloomingdale's, which she finds her way to. When Allen returns home, he finds out from his doorman that the woman has gone there.

She's mastered how to speak and read the English language by watching the TVs at Bloomingdale's all day, though much of it is advertising hyperbole. After a night on the town, she decides her name is 'Madison' after seeing a street sign. Madison is always trying to hide the fact that she's a mermaid from Allen despite the clues being there. Doctor Kornbluth has found out where Madison is and is bent on exposing her but keeps bungling his attempts and getting injured.

Madison agrees to marry Allen but keep putting off telling him something about herself. When Kornbluth finally exposes her as a mermaid, Allen realizes what she's been hiding, and other scientists seize her for observation. Kornbluth has a change of heart and with the aid of the Bauer Brothers, helps her get back home to the sea. Allen says goodbye to her but once they're cornered goes in to live with her.

This was the cover to the Mexican edition. I can't tell what's going on either, though it looks like their Scarfaceparody was also in that issue.

SPLAT!
Maniac #1, c. 1984
w: Jovial Bob Stine
a: Sam Viviano

MAD didn't use the prologue of the movie where Allen fell overboard on a trip twenty years earlier and met Madison when they were kids.

Charlie was the mascot for Star-Kist tuna modeled after Phil Silvers.

SPLATT!
Muppet #3, Fall 1984
w: Jay Itzkowitz
a: J. McIntosh