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.
Updated daily. There's posts besides this one archived in the sidebar on the right, you clods!
if you're at a laptop or desktop, right-click and open link on pages and they'll be clearer and legible in a new window.
ZERRO, THE GAY BLADE
MAD #231, June 1981
w: Stan Hart
a: Mort Drucker
Zorro has existed since early last century from pulps to Saturday matinees to early television. He was a swashbuckler in Mexico famous for marking his victims with a Z with his sword. A movie was made with George Hamilton in which he had to choose between either passing the torch to his son or his brother, who he also played. George Hamilton had previously been in the Dracula spoof Love at First Bite.
The following was from MAD's Academy Awards Show
ED ZORROW CALLS ON MORRO
This Magazine Is Crazy #6, September 1958
a: Tony Couch?
Zorro was an early segment on TV's Disneyland. This comic parodies Person to Person, an interview show hosted by newscaster Edward R. Murrow.
All TV shows and movies mentioned in this post have also been parodied and are featured here.
THE WRONG LIONS
MAD #41, September 1958
a: Mort Drucker
A movie about World War II based on a book by Irwin Shaw, with Marlon Brando as Christian Dietsl, Dean Martin as Michael Whiteacre, and Montgomery Clift as Noah Ackerman.
BIG BIG EARTH
MAD #39, May 1958
w: Bob & Ray and Tom Koch
a: Mort Drucker
When MAD started under the editorship of Al Feldstein, they used a lot of the work of comedians at the time, reprinting material or having them write new stuff. Bob and Ray were among them. Bob's probably most known now as Chris Elliott's father, but for decades was half of a comedy team with a career than spanned from a radio show to an appearance on Saturday Night Live. This piece is credited to Tom Koch, who was a writer for both them and for MAD. Many of the pieces by famous comedians were probably done by their writers. A lot of MAD's writer's also worked for TV. Mort Drucker was one of about a dozen of the artists hired for MAD and when he was given the assignment of the Bob and Ray sketches, they realized he was the best at caricature, so was used when they started doing more movie and TV parodies.
Wide Wide World was a documentary series hosted by Dave Garroway. The difference between this parody and that show is that the field reporter didn't interview the subjects.
Dave Huntley is a play on reporters Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. The Trade Mark figures in the globes are the Smith Brothers, mascots of a cough drop brand. Dave Garroway was also host of the Today Show, and would sign off by holding out his hand in from of the camera.
TO TELL THE TRUTH
CBS 1956-1968
SYND (1968-1976, 1980-1981)
NBC (1990-1991)
This game show had several hosts over the years. Its first was Bud Collyer. The show's concept was that three challengers would come on, each claiming to be the main character, and a group of panelists would ask questions to the challengers and through those questions find out which of the challengers was the real character.
From The Minute After That TV Show Is Over from MAD #85, March 1964, by Stan Hart and Mort Drucker.
From Adult TV Cartoons in MAD #63, June 1961, by Al Jaffee and Wally Wood.
From Combined TV Shows in #47, June 1959, by Paul Laikin and Mort Drucker, which combined it with The Line-Up.
From Russian TV Shows by Paul Laikin and John Severin in Cracked #19, April 1961
WHY TELL THE TRUTH
Humbug #6, January 1958
w: Harvey Kurtzman
a: Bill Elder
The first contestant is mobster Frank Costello and the third contestant is Charles Atlas.
The panelists are Polly Bergen, Ralph Bellamy, Dorothy Killgallen, and Hy Gardner. Dorothy Killgallen was also a panelist on What's My Line?, which often used the question “Is it bigger than a breadbox?”, which is why she is holding one. She was also on a show called Breakfast with Dick and Dorothy which took place at her home and occasionally featured her children. Hy Gardner looked similar to Sen. John McClellan, which is why John Kennedy is also in one panel.
Panelists on What's My Line had blindfolds.
MAD writer Dick DeBartolo was also a writer for To Tell the Truth which is also probably why MAD publisher William Gaines was once a panelist.
THE SIXTY FOUR THOUSAND DOLLAR QUESTION
CBS 1955-1958
THE $64,000 CRACKED-POT QUESTION
Cracked #1, February/March 1958
a: John Severin
The game, hosted by Hal March, was just contestants answering questions with the jackpot increasingly doubling until the prize got to $64,000. It was one of the major casualties of the fifties quiz show scandal.
THE SIXTY-FOUR MILLION DOLLAR ANSWER
Riot #4, February 1956
w: Stan Lee
a: John Severin
The IRS does carefully audit game show contestants to this day, even when they only win goods. In the last panel are Fess Parker and Jack Webb. John Severin had done a couple Tarzan parodies for MAD before this.
RANDAN
Humbug #11, October 1958
w: Harvey Kurtzman
a: Bill Elder
One of many movies Toho released in Japan in the fifties predicting the worst case scenarios of the effects of radiation. Shigeru (Kenji Sahara), a safety engineer, is sent down to investigate a death in a coalmine and is attacked by a giant dragonfly and trapped in the mine.
Later, Shigeru is found in a daze and a giant bird-creature is attacking the city. As Shigeru is recovering in the hospital and his girlfriend visits him, she shows the eggs her pet bird has lain, which are the same as the giant eggs he saw in the collapsed mine, and scientists figure out these are the same dormant eggs Rodan hatched from.
If there's anything anyone remembers about Old Yeller, it's the ending, where a beloved dog has to be killed by the family because it was rabid. The ending has been parodied a few times.
THE CHICKEN KILLER
Cracked #30, July 1963
w: Jay Lynch
a: Bill Ward
Lynch will be remembered for his legacy as one of the undergrond pioneers, a contemporary of Crumb and Spiegelman, but as a teenager he started with Cracked and Sick. He theorized that they had nothing but the camera-ready page which they had worn out by taking the glued page on and off boards so many times from reprinting it again and again, they had no choice but to redraw it. Here it is again as the back cover for Cracked #168, May 1980, redrawn by Howard Nostrand.
Humbug did their version as well.
OLD YALLER
Humbug #10, June 1958
w: Larry Siegel
a: Will Elder
Kids in the Hall did more than one version of just the ending.
Before Sixty Minutes, Mike Wallace did a bunch of his own interview shows with the alternating titles Night Beat and The Mike Wallace Imterviews, sponsored by Philip Morris cigarettes and known for its tough in-depth reporting.
MIKE MALICE INTERVIEWS MOTHER GOOSE
MAD #38, March 1958
w: Dave Berg
a: Mort Drucker
The joke here is, of course, that Wallace's hard-hitting interviews are always with the most prominent figures of the day, and this is with the most innocuous person you could think of, but as evidenced after this, many nursery rhymes were in fact the equivalent of issues like communism and poverty two hundred years earlier.
from Go West, Old Format in MAD #41, September 1958, by Albert Meglin and George Woodbridge.
Jayne Mansfield was a sex symbol of the fifties and sixties who many say was a parody of a sex symbol. Elsa Maxwell was a gossip columnist who looked nothing like her. She collaborated often with her husband, bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay.
A character from Harvey Kurtzman's Hey Look! makes an appearance in the lower left, and readers probably didn't know that even then.
Natalie Wood was mostly a child star at that point, Mae Busch did silents and was long dead, and Etta Kett was a comic strip character, and I don't know what they would have in common. Marjorie Main was a character actress around that time. Most known as Ma Kettle.
NITE-HEAT
Sick #2, October 1960
w: Dee Caruso & Bill Levine
a: unknown
LA PARISIENNE (UNE PARISIENNE) (1957)
dir: Michel Boisrond
These are just a few bits of different things. I chose La Parisienne as the overall movie title since that's the film that establishes Brigitte Bardot's persona as “French girl clad only in a towel”. None of the films she was in are particularly dirty, they just were considered that when they were released compared to the pre-ratings motion picture code. They were shown at 'art houses'.
The first is the cover of Cracked #10, August 1959, by Will Elder. There was a time when Harvey Kurtzman left MAD and artists could either be on Team Gaines or Team Kurtzman. When Kurtzman's magazines all failed, his artists weren't welcome back at MAD (at least for the time being) and got work at its competitors, such as with this cover.
This was the inside front cover of the issue, supposed to be the other side of the building.
And here's the story titled in this blog entry.
Cracked #5, October 1958
a: McCartney (Bill Ward)
Bill Ward was a pin-up artist for magazines from the same publisher as Cracked, so he became their glamour girl artist. Note that the T has been manually changed to an E. They probably changed it so the pronunciation would be understood. Back then they would have had to have a typographer in a union write out all the dialog instead of right here like I'm doing now and it would have been very expensive to fix.
inside front cover to MAD #43, December 1958, illustrated by Kelly Freas. Parody of American Express Travellers' Cheques.
from Scenes We Never Got to See in MAD #42, November 1958, by Albert Meglin and Wallace Wood
Here's the trailer in French for those who understand the language. (I took four years in high school and I don't remember much myself).
