JUNE UPDATE 1: A HARD DAY'S HELP

A HARD DAY'S NIGHT (1964)
dir: Richard Lester

When they say “Off-Beatle”, they really mean it. None of them look like the actual Beatles. They took everybody by surprise when they came to America and revived what was assumed a dead genre outside of cities, and I guess Jack Davis and the staff of Sick thought the Beatles would be just a passing fad and by 1966 nobody would remember them. Boy, were they wrong.

MOVIE SPOOF: A HARD DAY'S NIGHT
Sick #33, December 1964
w: Paul Laikin

It's funny they say “staff writer” as if to imply there's a bunch of people who work in an office together when it was just a cubicle where one person probably put several magazines together.

Jake Ehrlich=celebrity fixer/lawyer. Xavier Cugat=Cuban bandleader. C. Aubrey Smith=British cricket player. Jean Hersholt=silent matinee idol. Percy Kilbride and Maria Ouspenskaya=character actors who were old. Shelley Berman=more known now for Curb Your Enthusiasm was once popular stand-up comic.

Frankie Darro=child actor

Tommy Manville=socialite with 13 marriages

Willie Sutton=bank robber. The movies mentioned were known for being inconsequential.

MAD had many references to the Beatles over the years. This was a poster they had as an insert in MAD Super Special #25 in 1978, eight years after they broke up. Did the MAD staff think they were a new thing?

Most of the jokes about them were about their hair. This was a parody of the Breck shampoo ads that had paintings of famous models from the 30s to the 60s. The back cover of MAD #90 in October 1964.

Frank Frazetta only did a few jobs for them and they wanted him to be a regular but they could never work a deal about keeping the original art (contributors were able to just send digital files towards the end). Had he become one of the “usual gang of idiots” he might not have been known for his fantasy art.

Other jokes about the Beatles were just about their name.

More articles from the issue of Sick I showed the cover for at the beginning of this post.

The centerspread for this issue reads more like something you'd read in a fan magazine than something you'd see in a humor magazine.

Back cover for that issue.

Probably a coincidence they were bald for the cover of Help!

Probably also a coincidence the Beatles' next movie was called Help!

National Lampoon did a whole issue dedicated to The Beatles.

The grandfather wasn't actually reading Sick in the movie like above, but they very well couldn't use the photo of their manager with the competition.