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 NEW ADVENTURES OF) WONDER WOMAN
1975-1979 ABC/CBS
WONDER BROAD
Goose #3, December 1976
artist and writer unknown
Like with the masthead, none of the staff of Goose is listed except for being credited as “A Bunch of Dirty Old Men”. The lettering looks like it may have been Tony Tallarico.
Wonder Woman was one of many TV shows GenXers like myself saw when placed in front of.what was then called “the electronic babysitter”. It was co-developed by Stanley Ralph Ross, who created the comics camp look for the Batman series the network was hoping to duplicate here. It was based on the comic that had existed since 1941. She and her alter ego of Diana Prince were played by Lynda Carter, who became one of TV's sex symbols of the 70s.
She had a magic lasso and was from Paradise Island, which she traveled to in her invisible plane. Her mother was Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons (played by Cloris Leachman, Carolyn Jones, and Beatrice Straight in different seasons. This could be either one of them, since it doesn't look like any of them)
BLUNDER WOMAN
Sick #122, August 1978
w: Arnold Drake
a: Jack Sparling
Chapter in a longer story called Plan X From Planet Nerd.
WOMAN WONDER
MAD #10, April 1954
w: Harvey Kurtzman
a: Bill Elder
This parody of the comic is ironically more faithful to the TV series than those other two parodies, despite being tenty-one years before the show, and before most people even had television.
Steve Trevor (Lyle Waggoner) is Diana Prince's boyfriend.
No comment about that last panel in re: how women were treated in the 50s (let alone the 70s or now even).
They attempted to sell this to television using a different approach. This pilot was written by MAD's Larry Siegel.
Movie that basically invented the 50s motorcycle rebel archetype. The Fonz is a heavily watered down version.
This parody spends two of its eight pages focusing on how the film opens with an open road before you see Johnny Strabler (Marlon Brando) coming in with his gang through Carbonville, CA.
Johnny and the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club (B.R.M.C.) cause trouble in Carbonville, and fights with a rival gang led by Chino (Lee Marvin) over a trophy he won. They were just passing through but feel the need to stay in town when one of them is injured in an accident. Harry Bleeker, chief of police, reluctantly puts up with them, but Johnny hates all authority.
Johnny is keen on the local diner's waitress Kathy (Mary Murphy) and offers her his motorcycle trophy but she politely rebuffs his advances. When the men all make moves on her as she's leaving work, Johnny rescues her.
Chino's actually in jail at this moment, but since his arrest was left out of the parody, they must have put him here so they'd be able to have a caricature of Lee Marvin somewhere.
They leave a lot out of the parody. In addition to Chino being jailed, the gangs break into local businesses, there's a vigilante mob that accidentally kills one of the bikers, and Kathy thinks Johnny's like the rest of them when he roughs her up, but she realizes he's geniuinely attracted to her. In many of the early MAD comic parodies, it was more about the rhythm of how the artist and writer did a story than the scene-by-scene farces they were later known for.
WHAT'S MY SHINE?
MAD #17, November 1954
w: Harvey Kurtzman
a: Jack Davis
Quick history lessons (groan!): Those old enough to remember fifties nostalgia (nostalgia for it, not the fifties themselves) think it was all Grease and Happy Days or Back to the Future. Those I've talked to that lived through the actual fifties remember it slightly differently, always in fear of being bombed at any moment, no diversity or conformity, and particularly the red scare.
White nationalists making up the majority of the Republican party may be bad, but it's not much worse than before. We've always had zealous bigots and disengenuous patriots in congress. What we didn't have is opinions influenced by 24-hour partisan news channels. The Trump of his time was Senator Joseph McCarthy, a demagogue of the sort previously mentioned, able to get away with his reign only because we didn't have fact-checking in real time. Hollywood and the Blacklist has been chronicled in many places, but the subcommittee also had its sites on accusing Communists (Reds) of infiltrating the military as well. There was also nothing like C-Span, there were just the three networks, so the Army-McCarthy hearings pre-empted regularly scheduled programming.
This MAD article was the first of many pre-cable articles to satirize talking heads using the premise that things like this should compete with the rest of TV to make it more exciting. In this case, What's My Line?, where the premise was that three or four blindfolded panelists asked questions to a guest about his or her occupation and were awarded points for correct answers. Here instead of host John Daly, it is moderated by Army-McCarthy special counsel Ray Jenkins.
The Subcommittee included Everett Dirksen (R-IL), Henry Dworshak (R-ID), Charles Potter (R-MI), John McClellan (D-AR), Stuart Symington (D-MI), Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA), and Joseph McCarthy (R-WI).
Robert Stevens was an Army Secretary that was a witness in the hearings and a photograph of him submitted by McCarthy was found to be doctored. Karl Mundt was chairman of the subcommittee.
McCarthy's lawyer was Roy Cohn is caricatured. He was also one of Trump's lawyers a generation later.
Private Schein was also a witness in the hearings. There was no equivalent to Lana Cheesecake in either the hearings or the quiz show, it was just a commentary on the optics of television.
WHAT'S MY CRIME?
Eh! #4, June 1954
a: Dick Ayers
From MAD's TV “Alfie” Awards by Larry Siegel and Mort Drucker in MAD #56, July 1960. The other panelists are Arlene Francis, Bennett Cerf, and Dorothy Kilgallen.
MAD VISITS THE WORLD'S GREATEST TV PANELIST
MAD #62, April 1961
w: Larry Siegel
a: Mort Drucker
The interviewer is Ed Murrow. MAD writer Dick DeBartolo was simultaneously a writer for Goodson-Todman and sometimes used a pen name writing parodies of shows they produced.
WHAT'S MY LINE?
Sick #9, November 1961
artist unknown
WHAT'S MY SALARY?
Sick #21, June 1963
artist unknown
The last panel has Fred Gwynne and Joe E. Ross from Car 54, Where Are You ? for some reason. Probably because they were popular then.
WAR IS HELL (1954)
MAD #14, August 1954
w: Harvey Kurtzman
a: Wallace Wood
from Movie...Ads!, about how the advertisement makes a movie look more exciting than it really it is, back before people relied on hype months in advance from talk and entertainment shows.
MR. AND MRS. SOUTH
Bughouse #3, July/August 1954
w & a: unknown
Franchise that started as a series of novels and a movie and radio show and eventually a TV show about Jerry and Pamela North (Richard Denning, Barbara Britton) a husband and wife detective team.
