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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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.
ZAPPING
MAD #258, October 1985
w: Arnie Kogen
a: Mort Drucker
In Zapped!, Scott Baio and Willie Aames play two teenagers who obtain telekenetic powers that make them able to take off womens' clothes. From Academy Awards for Teenage Films. That's right, they call them “films” and not “movies”.
VALLEY CHICK
MAD #258, October 1985
w: Arnie Kogen
a: Mort Drucker
from MAD's Academy Awards for Teenage Films in the category of “Dopiest Story Lines in the History of Motion Pictures”, featuring Nicolas Cage and Deborah Foreman. Weird category considering it's based on Romeo and Juliet.
TVARZAN
MAD #112, July 1967
w: Dick DeBartolo
a: Mort Drucker
There was a TV series of Tarzan. Though it's had many incarnations over the past 100 years, including parody characters, and a movie of his origin. Here is but one version.
This one starred Ron Ely as Tarzan.
Jane wasn't used in the TV series.
A native is a caricature of Godfrey Cambridge.
Jai (Manuel Padilla Jr.) was an orphan who befriended and assisted Tarzan.
MAD parodied the Tarzan we're all familiar with over the years. Here are a few examples.
MAD #114, October 1967
MAD #158, April 1973
This is what critical race theory actually is.
MAD #167, June 1974
MAD #206, April 1979
There was a 1981 version starring Bo Derek, directed by John Derek. This is from The MAD Academy Awards Show in #231, by Stan Hart and Mort Drucker.
SECOND HAND PARTS
MAD #231, June 1981
w: Stan Hart
a: Mort Drucker
From MAD's Academy Awards Show in the category “Go Back to TV Where You Belong”. The trailer for the movie doesn't seem to be available. Or maybe it is beyond the first page. I didn't feel like looking.
It stars Robert Blake as a lone trucker who marries a widow and they go on a drunken spree and she gets custody of her kids.
S. O. P.
MAD #231, June 1982
w: Stan Hart
a: Mort Drucker
From MAD's Academy Awards Show.
The film was about a Hollywood director who tries to kill himself after making his first flop but buys it back so that he can make it a hit by editing it from a family film to make it pornographic, and make his wife Sally Miles (Julie Andrews), appear topless to save it. This was a selling point for the real movie as well, since Andrews, Blake Edwards' real wife, was mostly known for family fare.
RAUNCHY BUSINESS
MAD #246, April 1984
w: Stan Hart
a: Mort Drucker
From group of movies reviewed by Siskel and Ebert.
Back when there were dozens of teen movies every week and when Tom Cruise was still virtually unknown. This is about Joel Goodsen (Tom Cruise), a high school and future Princeton student who runs a prostitution ring while his parents are away on vacation.
Joel's best friend Miles (Curtis Armstrong) suggests he has fun while his parents are away and hires a prostitute for him.
The first prostitute turns out to be a guy in drag (Bruce Young), which he turns away. That was the joke because in the eighties, transphobia wasn't just a prejudice that would get you canceled, it was the norm. Later, he gets Lana (Rebecca DeMornay), who is just his type. Lana hides from her pimp Guido (Joe Pantaliano) and Joel lets her stay at his house while he's in school. That night, he finds she's let a friend stay there. He, Miles, and the girls are all chased by Guido, which results in Joel driving his father's car into the lake. He finds out he can't pay for it, so Lana suggests they bring in more prostiutes to have a party at his house, and during the party, a recruiter from Princeton shows up.
The next day after getting his father's car back, Joel comes home to find his house burglarized. Guido has taken everything from the house as payback for Joel and Lana stealing the women he “owns”. He's able to buy it all back and put it all back before his parents return home. Everything's exactly as it was,
except for a decorative egg. The Princeton recruiter was impressed by... something.
From Academy Awards for Teenage Movies in #258, October 1985, written by Arnie Kogen
REVENGE OF THE NERDBALLS
MAD #258, October 1985
w: Arnie Kogen
a: Mort Drucker
From Academy Awards for Teenage Movies.
Like most films of the genre, it doesn't age well. But of the dozens of films then where the nerds would be just like the jocks if they had the chance, install cameras in girls' dorms to spy on them, and trade up women like property as if exchanging a car for a better model, this is one of the more innocuous ones.
It involves Lewis and Gilbert (Robert Carradine, Anthony Edwards) enrolling in college and being picked on by the jocks and their girlfriends.
Its heart is in the right place defending nerds. We're all nerds. I'm a nerd. If you're reading this, you're the biggest nerd of all. But we're not 1984 nerds. Through modern eyes the non-consensual voyeurism is creepy, as is the rape scene mentioned ad infinitum everywhere else on the internet. In case you just got a computer, writers and bloggers have recalled there's a scene where a character gets back at a jock's girlfriend by pretending to be him wearing a mask and screwing her, then after impressing her with his technique takes off his mask and—surprise! It's really been a nerd all along!
Nobody thought anything of it then, but it wouldn't fly today and the people involved have renounced it, as they should. My take is that I don't like it either but it doesn't surprise me. If you watched 15 minutes of TV in the 80s (or flipped through an average issue of MAD) there'd be something unacceptable somewhere. This whole blog is dated taboos. What's weird to me is that wearing a mask means he isn't able to use his mouth, so his torso alone makes him this amazing sex machine.
PRIVATE SCHOOL a/k/a PRIVATE SCHOOL...FOR GIRLS (1983)
dir: Noel Black
I get these 'Private' movies mixed up all the time. They both came out around the same time and have the same screenwriter so maybe that's why. The parodies of them are only one panel each so I've put them under one post.
PRIMATE LESSONS
MAD #231, June 1982
w: Stan Hart
a: Mort Drucker
This one stars Sylvia Kristel as a maid who seduces a teenager. From The MAD Academy Awards Show.
PRIMATE SCHOOL
MAD #258, October 1985
w: Arnie Kogen
a: Mort Drucker
This one is about an all girls' school and boys trying to score with the students who go there and the boys trying to sneak into the school. From the category Peeking at Naked Girls in Academy Awards for Teenage Films.
POKEY'S
MAD #258, October 1985
w: Arnie Kogen
a: Mort Drucker
From Academy Awards for Teenage Films in the category of “Peeking at Naked Girls”.
Semi-autobiographical comedy set in the fifties about a group oversexed teenagers (Dan Monahan, Scott Colomby, Mark Herrier, Wyatt Knight) trying to get into a roadhouse called Porky's. One of its most memorable scenes is them looking in the girls' locker room at their school and getting caught by their gym teacher (Nancy Parsons). The movie wasn't very good and is long forgotten but since it captured nostalgia so well the director was hired for perennial classic A Christmas Story.
POKEY'S REVENGE
dir: James Komack
Also from Academy Awards for Teenage Films in the category of "Dopiest Storyline in the History of Motion Pictures" in that same issue.
The movie was successful enough that they had two sequels.
I did this comic about it in 1994. VH-1 did a 20th Anniversary show of the movie and asked me to be on because of this comic, but I didn't make the cut, I guess because I took a faux-intellectual approach and they wanted something where they could edit sound bytes of me saying “They showed boobs! It was awesome!”
COP ACADEMY
MAD #258, October 1985
w: Arnie Kogen
a: Mort Drucker
From Academy Awards for Teenage Films, category of “Single Most Disgusting Scene”.
Police Academy was a film franchise about misfits forced to become police officers which spawned six (!) sequels, a Saturday morning cartoon and a video game. As an aside, the movies were a favorite of Bill Clinton. The movies were the brainchild of comedy writers Neal Israel and Pat Proft, who also wrote Bachelor Party.
