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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DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE (1995)
dir: John McTiernan
DIE HARD WITH NO VARIANCE
MAD #340, October 1995
w:Dick DeBartolo
a: Drew Friedman
Third in the Die Hard series. This is the only movie parody Drew Friedman ever did for MAD, at least in my time frame.
An explosion happened at the Bonwit Teller department store in New York City, and Simon (Jeremy Irons), the German terrorist responsible calls the police and threatens to set off another bomb unless John McLane (Bruce Willis), a cop recently suspended, goes to Harlem in his underwear wearing a sandwich board that says 'I Hate N----s'. This is a convoluted plot device to get Willis and Samuel Jackson to meet but I think it was excuse for the filmmakers to see what they could get away with, since the 90s are well past the "it was another time" date.
John and the police are both confused as to why they have to do this, as am I, and why Simon chose him but go through with it anyway. Zeus (Samuel Jackson), a local shop owner, sees this and rescues John before he's killed by residents of the area. They escape and get John back to his precinct and now Zeus is forced to team up with McLane to solve this case in the movie reality where civilians can be drafted into police business. The case involves solving a bunch of riddles and lots of improbable explosions, gunfire, and car chases. This parody is about how derivative this is of other action movies. The plot will be summarized in further detail with the Cracked parody.
So far, there have been caricatures of Mel Gibson, Danny Glover, Eddie Murphy, Leslie Nielsen, Nick Nolte, Sean Connery, and Dennis Hopper.
A subway explodes, John and Zeus do the usual action trope where cops have the authority to take peoples' vehicles, after driving through the city and wrecking property they keep the criminals from getting away in a ship.
Caricatured are Keanu Reeves and Sylvester Stallone.
Stars of other action movies keep claiming that they're being ripped off but ultimately the original conventions come from Warner Brothers cartoons.
Drew Friedman has been a MAD regular for years. I had the pleasure of working with him at my first job with Topps lo these many years ago. I'm sure almost everyone here is familiar with his work which has appeared almost everywhere. A documentary of his life and work by Kevin Dougherty called Vermeer of the Borscht Belt is in the works.
TRIED HARD WITH VIOLENCE
Cracked #303, November 1995
w: Lou Silverstone
a: Walter Brogan
This also opens with the idea that this movie was taken from earlier action movies, including cartoons. Did Cracked have spies at MAD? It should have also had Alfred E. Neuman claiming Sylvester P. Smythe is a ripoff.
Simon requests John wear sign with a racial slur, he gets saved by Zeus yadda yaddda. One of the puzzles they must solve is to keep a bomb in a briefcase from going off in Central Park by placing four gallons of water on top of it. They have empty 3 and 5 gallon jugs and need to figure out how to get the bigger one to hold exactly four gallons.
The jars do not need to be full of urine like in the parody, but any excuse to be scatological. They now must get to Wall Street to stop another bomb from going off. The Germans also let the police know that a bomb will go off in a city school, but don't say which one.
Now John and Zeus are told to go to Yankee Stadium on their scavenger hunt throughout the city. It turns out this was all revenge for McClane killing Simon's brother in the first Die Hard. Meanwhile, the police call in every city worker to search every public school for bombs. McLane figures out there never were any bombs, it was all a decoy so Simon and his group of terrorists could break into the Federal Reserve and steal all their gold.
John and Zeus find the trucks that are used to haul the gold. John commandeers a truck to chase them down as they drive through the aqueducts under New York. The Germans try to flood the ducts to drown McLane but he rises above ground in time.
John and Zeus chase the Germans onto a boat they're escaping on but are captured and tied up on another boat where a bomb is set to go off. Somehow everyone ends up chasing each other in Canada by helicopter and when the terrorists are finally caught and killed, Zeus gives John a quarter to call his wife and reconcile with her.
DIE EVEN HARDER
MAD # 302, April 1991
w: Stan Hart
a: Mort Drucker
From article MAD's Video Reviews, a way for them to do several parodies at once.
The other critics in the theater are Gene Shalit and Leonard Maltin. The pin on Willis' sweater refers to Moonlighting co-star Cybill Shepherd, though they spelled her name wrong. The other action franchises in the last panel are Danny Glover and Mel Gibson of Lethal Weapon, Ralph Macchio of Karate Kid, and Sylvester Stallone of Rocky, though by now there have been more Die Hard films than any of those.
TRIED HARD 2: TRIED HARDER
Cracked # 259, December 1990
a: John Severin
Takes place a couple tears after the first film. John McClane (Bruce Willis) is at Dulles Airport in Washington, DC waiting to meet his wife Holly (Bonnie Bedelia) and is about to see a terrorist plot and chases them to the baggage area.
McClane kills one of the terrorists who he later finds out was reported missing in action years earlier. He tries to tell this to the chief of airport police Lorenzo (Dennis Franz), something big's about eo happen, but gets shut down completely.
The "something big" is that Col. Stuart (William Sadler) has taken control of the airport. Gen. Esperanza (Franco Nero) is about to be extradited into the United States but his men demand a plane to rescue him and get away in. To show they are serious, they have made a pilots on a random plane think they're further in the air than they actually are. McClane decides to run out onto the runway waving torches in the air so that plane will see where the ground really is, but it's too late. An anti-terrorist unit, led by Major Grant (John Amos), is dispatched to stop it all.
McClane tries to stop Esperanza's plane from landing, and when he enters, they escape and trap him there, filling it with grenades. He manages to eject himself before it explodes. Grant's troop invades a church that was the terrorist group's nearby base of operations.
Hudson Hawk was another action movie Willis was in that year.
It turns out Grant was on the side of the terrorists all along and they're about to make their escape with Esperanza. McClane Heads them off with the help of a reporter (Sheila McCarthy) whose chopper drops him off on the wing of the plane where they're trying to escape. He fights Grant and shoves him into a propeller.
He then fights another terrorist and loses, getting kicked off the wing before they take off. What they don't know is that all this time they've been leaking fuel and leaving a trail behind on the runway. After being knocked to the ground, McClane lights the trail of fuel, which causes the plane to explode. This now means all the other planes that had been circling the air for hours now have light on the runway to land, including the plane that had been keeping Holly from coming home.
MAD #289, September 1989
w: Stan Hart
a: Sam Viviano
Excerpt from MAD's Video Reviews
TRIED HARD
Cracked #259, December 1990
a: John Severin
Bruce Willis' character is named John McClane. He's on vacation in Los Angeles trying to get back home to New York in time for Christmas. The Century City building has been taken hostage and only he can save everyone.
Then there was Spy Hard, made after Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer replaced the Zucker Brothers and Jim Abrams as kings of the spoof movie and ran it into the ground. The problem with the former is they would parody specific scenes from popular movies from the past five years, instead of just the genre and conventions in general. Another problem is that by that time almost all spoof movies starred Leslie Nielsen, who had become a comedy actor when what initially made him funny was that he was not one and played everything completely straight.
