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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BLUNDER SIEGE
MAD #319, June 1993
w: Stan Hart
a: Angelo Torres
The USS Missouri is being decommissioned from the navy and there is a going away party organized for the captain by Commander Krill (Gary Busey). Krill's flown in the entertainment, which includes rocker Bill Strannix (Tommy Lee Jones) and a Playmate named Jordan Tate (Erika Eleniak). Krill has had his own caterers flown in and doesn't approve of anything being prepared by the ship's cook Casey Ryback (Steven Seagal) and has locked Ryback in the kitchen's meat locker while the party goes underway.
The sailor talking to Popeye in the bottom first panel is Humphrey Bogart in The Caine Mutiny.
At the party, where Krill is part of the show in drag, all the men suddenly take over the ship and order all the sailors off. Strannix was using his rock act as a cover for being a renegade sailor and the other supposed entertainers were really mercenary soldiers all along. Ryback gets the private that was guarding the meat locker to let him out. Jordan Tate, who didn't know she was caught up in this, is found alone in a room . At the Pentagon, They realize something was going on.
Ryback is actually a demoted Navy SEAL in the past and now must defeat Strannix with the help of Tate. Strannix has taken over the ship because he's a disillusioned naval officer. He plans to blow up Honolulu and the military has sent teams to stop him. Ryback has taken it upon himself to take back control of the ship.
Ross Perot was a third-party Presidential candidate in 1992 who financed his campaign himself. Around this time Kathie Lee Gifford was doing commercials for Carnival cruises using “If My Friends Could See Me Now” from Sweet Charity as its jingle.
People joked around then that action stars like Seagal, Van Damme, and Stallone were getting flabby and past their prime.
UNDER SLUDGE
Cracked #279, March 1993
w: Lou Silverstone
a: Walter Brogan
MAD LOOKS AT A TYPICAL KIDDIE TV SHOW
MAD #93, March 1965
w: Larry Siegel
a: Mort Drucker
From the 50s to the 90s, just about every independent and UHF channel had their own kiddie TV show, whether nationally syndicated like Howdy Doody and Soupy Sales, or locally, the type of show SCTV's Count Floyd or Simpsons' Krusty the Klown are parodies of. It was often a host in front of a live audience of children, built-in commercials, and some cartoons or shorts. Ask any baby boomer and they'll fondly remember growing up with one of these shows. They still exist today in some form on Nickelodeon.
MAD's version has the host caricatured as Phil Silvers.
In the trench is most likely senator Barry Goldwater, possibly Everett Dirksen. Parodies of kiddie shows usually ended with the host as a more cynical angry adult. On SCTV, the original premise was that they were a low-budget UHF channel in a local community, and the man who did their kiddie show was their anchorman as well.
THE MAJOR MOOSE SHOW
Cracked #126, August 1975
a: John Severin
This Cracked article used the same premise, and also had the host wearing the same pants as Uncle Nutzy.
The dartboard is Bob Keeshan a/k/a Captain Kangaroo.
Retelling of The Odyssey focusing on the fantasy-adventure aspects, with Kirk Douglas in the title role.
The movie starred Silvana Mangano playing both Penelope and Circe, Rosanna Podesta as Nausicaa, and Umberto Silvestri as Polyphemus the Cyclops.
While Ulysses is out on his adventures, Penelope has potential suitors. She holds them off by telling them she first wants to finish her tapestry, but she unweaves it every night to stall. Telemachus (Franco Interlenghi), the son of Ulysses and Penelope, is sick of the suitors' behavior and decides to search for his father.
TWIT-STERS
MAD #349, September 1996
w: Arnie Kogen
a: Paul Coker, Jr.
In Twister, Bill (Bill Paxton) is a former tornado tracker who used to work with his ex-wife Jo (Helen Hunt), and has come to their site to get her to sign divorce papers so he can marry his fiancee Melissa (Jami Gertz), and they're stuck tracking the next tornado with Jo.
Note how many of MAD's mascots are caught up in the storm in this spread, including the apteryx getting its feathers blown off.
The beginning shows Jo experiencing a tornado as a child, which takes away her father and starts her lifelong obsession with them. Cut to the present of Bill on the current site where he used to work. He's retired and started a new job as a weatherman and his crew is glad to see him. He's only there to get Jo to sign divorce papers. Jo's finished Dorothy, a machine they've invented that will get into the heart of the tornado and be able to warn civilians in time. Jonas Miller (Cary Elwes) is a rival meteorologist with a similar prototype he's showing the press.
Melissa was curious about Bill's past exploring tornadoes on the ground but realizes how dangerous it is, and also realizes still a spark between Bill and Jo. She's constantly being interrupted by patients calling her as they drive through tornadoes.
Jo and her team of stoners and slackers go to visit her Aunt Meg (Lois Smith), an artist that's always glad to see them and feed them,. Over meals everyone discusses the most powerful tornadoes they've ever seen. Jo's made several Dorothy prototypes that keep breaking. A tornado eventually destroys Aunt Meg's house and injures her.
They comment how the movie could be improved with Wizard of Oz dialogue though the movie does reference it by calling their machine “Dorothy”
Meg's sculpture is left standing and looking they realize something similar to it could work as a makeshift Dorothy prototype which ends up working. Melissa can't relate to Bill's return to his former adrenalin-based lifestyle and leaves him, and Bill reconciles with Jo.
The parody continues with the Wizard of Oz parallel and has Helen Hunt waking up in her sitcom Mad About You with co-stars Paul Reiser, Anne Ramsay, Leila Kenzie, and John Pankow.
Twinge is actually a noun and not a verb, as in “I have a small twinge in my arm”, maybe they meant it as a combination of 'Twins' and 'cringe'. Much of this parody looks rushed, in parts that will be evident in a minute.
MAD #288, July 1989
w: Stan Hart
a: Mort Drucker
Twins is about two twins separated at birth as the result of a medical experiment to create the perfect human being by having a woman inseminated by six men. The perfect specimen was Julius (Arnold Schwarzenegger), who was raised on a desert island another imperfect brother, Vincent (Danny DeVito) was a result of all the leftover DNA. The movie is about Julius finding Vincemt and their going on an adventure to find their real mother.
Many of MAD's movie parodies often begin with the audience in a theater on watching it at home and making comments about it. Here the splash panel is a drawing taken from the poster and the comments are all off-camera captions, suggesting Drucker didn't have time to draw anything else.
The parody is more about the actors' personalities and being twins but doesn't get into the plot about how Vincent owes a gambling debt and loan sharks are after him as well as a gangster after a device Vincent has in his possession. There's another plot where Julius has never been with a woman before and Vincent teaches him to cut loose. MAD gets their names mixed up too.
Vincent is a philandering letch who has a girlfriend, Linda, that's not used in this parody. Her friends tell her not to trust him. She has a sister, Marnie (Kelly Preston) who hates Vincent but meets Julius and develops a crush on him.
Julius goes to Los Angeles and seeks out Vincent at the orphanage where he was raised. They tell Julius how bad Vincent was, how he's probably in prison, he is for ignoring traffic tickets, and Julius finds him and bails him out. Vincent won't believe he's Julius' twin brother and keeps trying to ditch him. Julius keeps finding him by twin telepathy. Vincent gets tips from a the owner of a parking garage (David Caruso) that's a front for a chop shop and steals cars from them.
Also not in the parody: Vincent finds something in one of the cars he steals and finds out it's worth five million dollars. He has to go to Houston to get it. Julius finds out their biological mother is in New Mexico which is on their way but needs to take a shower first. Vincent sees this as an opportunity to abandon Vincent but just as he's about to leave he's visited by Linda and Marnie with a cake for his birthday. In New Mexico they go to the office of Dr. Mitchell Traven (Nehemiah Persoff), the doctor in charge of the experiment, to find their mother, but denies having anything to do with it until it makes Julius angry. All this time the loan sharks and a ganaster competing for the device are in pursuit of him. This road trip is about a third of the movie.
On the road, while the men and women are staying in separate hotel rooms, Vincent leaves and Marnie comes in, taking Julius' virginity. They have found out their mother, Mary Ann Benedict (Bonnie Bartlett), at an artists' colony. She was a famous artist who founded the colony but denies who she is because she assumes they are trying to scam her, saying Mary Ann is long dead.
Also not in the parody 2: Vincent becomes disillusioned he no longer has a mother and abandons everyone in the desert, driving to Houston to get his money. He finds out it's a fuel combustion engine and gets his money. The people giving him the money are there to steal it and abandon him but he doesn't care. The gangster that was after him tracks him down as does Julius, they outsmart the gangster, and Julius convinces Vincent to do the right thing and the the engine to its proper owner.
They use the reward to start a legitimate corporation. The mother sees this in the newspaper, realizes they were honest people, and reconnects with them.
TOILET ZONE
Cracked #236, July 1988
w: Steve Skeates
a: Bob Fingerman
Twilight Zone is an anthology show that's been rebooted several times, each episode with a self-contained story that starts out as a realistic event that gets incresingly disturbing with a twist ending, and is often fantasy or horror based.
The parody has host Rod Serling ending up in the 80s with President Ronald Reagan and the casts of Leave it to Beaver, I Dream of Jeannie, Sgt. Bilko, I Love Lucy, and The Partridge Family, half of which came after the fifties and were already in color.
Saturday Night Live did a similar bit with Ricky Nelson repeatedly repeateadly going to the wrong home, ending up in reruns of other shows, and then finding he's in The Twilight Zone. They also had a recurring bit during one of their "lost" seasons called Limits of the Imagination.
TWENTIETH CENTURY
Sick #6, June 1961
a: Bob Powell
Twentieth Century was a series of specials narrated by Walter Cronkite about a different event that took place then. The Chicago Black Sox scandal was something that happened in 1919 where a baseball team fixed their games for some gamblers. “Shoeless” Joe Jackson was their ringleader.
CRACKED INTERVIEWS DICK CLOG, THE BLOOPER & PRACTICAL JOKE KING
Cracked #220, July 1986
w: Mort Todd
a: John Severin
Dick Clark co-hosted a show called TV's Bloopers and Practical Jokes, which was basically that, the practical jokes were kind of like Punk'd or Candid Camera, but played on celebrities. It also featured commercials, old and foreign, man in the street interviews, and home videos. Clark hosted a bunch of other shows throughout the seventies and eighties and American Bandstand around the same time. If you notice in the video above, the credits and interstitials were by MAD's Sergio Aragones.
Dick Clark also hosted the game show Pyramid. His co-host for this one was Ed McMahon, who in addition to Bloopers also did Star Search.
Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins was a movie from Dick Clark's production company. Even though he had his own production company, Bloopers was produced by Johnny Carson's.
Len Cella's Silly Cinemas was a series of short films three seconds long or so. Dick Clark also produced Puttin' on the Ritz, a short-lived lipp-sync show.
UN-TRUE SPIES
MAD #333, January 1995
w: Stan Hart
a: Tomas Bunk
In True Lies, Harry Trasker (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is a spy for Omega Sector but as a cover he tells his his wife Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis) that he's a computer salesman. He comes home late from another mission as usual.
Tonya Harding an Olympic skater in 1992. She had friends kneecap her rival Nancy Kerrigan. Tom Arnold had just ended his marriage to Roseanne. Suzanne Powter was a fly-by-night celebriy in the nineties with her “Stop the Insanity” infomercials recommending a healthy diet.
As part of Harry's mission, he is to steal the code of a billionaire at a party in Switzerland, who's funding a terrorist cause called the Crimson Jihad. His partners “Gib” Gibson (Tom Arnold) and Faisil (Grant Heslov) are waiting for him in a van outside. At the party he is seduced by another spy, Juno Skinner (Tia Carrere), posing as an art dealer, At home, when Gib comes to pick Harry up for the day presumably as a computer salesman, he secretly shows a gadget that's a pack of cigarettes with a camera inside connected to a pair of sunglasses. Harry puts them on and sees his daughter Dana (Eliza Dushku) stealing from his wallet but he can't do anything because he'll blow his cover.
Harry and Gib are given intel by their boss (Charlton Heston) for their latest mission. That night he chases Crimson Jihad leader Salim Aziz (Art Malik) through a hotel bathroom and throughout the hotel on a police horse while Salim rides a motorcycle, chasing him off a rooftop.
Harry comes home late again and tries to make up for it by visiting Helen at her job, but doesn't get past her cubicle when he overhears her talking to a guy named Simon. Putting two and two together, he realizes she's having an affair. He goes back to Gib moping about it, Gib agrees to track them down at their secret rendezvous. Simon (Bill Paxton) tells her that he's a spy, when he's really just a car salesman. He takes he to his trailer, they find her and kidnap her, and bring her to secret quarters with a double mirror and interrogate her with voice modulators. Harry and Gib, behind the mirror, tell her they'll grant her immunity if she'll agree to become a spy. Her mission is to dress as a prostitute and place a microphone in a suspect's hotel room, the endgame is for Harry to reveal himself to “teach her a lesson”. At the hotel, Helen makes herself look trashier before going to what she thinks is the suspect's room.
Helen beats Harry and almost runs away before he can reveal himself, but before either can leave they're both captured by the Crimson Jihad, and Harry has to confess who he really is before being injected by a truth serum. They're tied up and chased by the terrorists, Helen tries to shoot them, but panics and drops the machine gun, which falls down stairs setting off bullets which end up shooting them all. Helen is kidnapped by Juno and saved by Harry in a helicopter before the limo where she's being held hostage falls off a bridge.
It was believed by many, including Democrats, that Hillary Clinton was the real puppetmaster behind the Democratic party then. Thirty years later and some people think she still pulls the strings.
Harry steals a plane to save Dana, who is being held hostage. The movie never explains how the terrorists knew who she was. The nuclear bomb the Crimson Jihad was going to use to blow up the coast of Florida is presumably dumped into the ocean. They don't explain that either. The movie ends a year later where both Harry and Helen are spies and tango like the Addamses.
TRUE SPIES
Cracked #295, December 1994
a: Walter Brogan
Ford Pintos were recalled in the late 70s and early 80s because they exploded on impact. David Koresh was a cult leader who holed up in his compound in Waco before being found by the FBI
