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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E. C.: THE EXTRA CELESTIAL
Muppet Magazine #1, January 1983
w: Dick DeBartolo
a: Bruce McNally
There were several issues of Muppet magazine in the eighties, and almost all of them had movie parodies with their characters playing the roles, unfortunately this is the only one I can find that has high enough resolution. The other parodies of E. T. I posted last year and their trailers can be found here and here. Any scans of pages from the magazine that I can use are welcome.
Kermit playing Elliott, Fozzie and Miss Piggy as the brother and mother. Elliott left a trail of Reese's Pieces to lure the alien out of the shed where it was hiding.
Elliot fakes sickness so he could stay home from school. Gonzo is E.T.
Elliot has some kind of telepathic link with E.T., so while he was in school and E.T. was home and got drunk, his intoxication was shared with Elliot. In the movie E.T. also co-incidentally learned to read by watching Sesame Street.
Blooper: the steering wheel is on the wrong side. The artist must be British.
THE ADDAMS FAMILY
THE ADDARNS FAMILY
Cracked Monster Party #16, April 1992
w: Lou Silverstone
a: Walter Brogan
Every generation has a different Addams Family. It started with the New Yorker cartoons in the 40s and 50s, then the 60s TV show, the 70s Saturday Morning cartoon, the 90s movie, the 10s CGI animation, and the upcoming streaming show, MAD and Cracked parodied the 90s movie, which can be seen here. This is a parody of the sixties TV show that Cracked did in the 90s
The TV show starred Jon Astin (Gomez), Carolyn Jones (Morticia), Jackie Coogan (Uncle Fester), Ted Cassidy (Lurch), Lisa Loring (Wednesday), Ken Weatherwax (Pugsley), and Marie Blake (Grandma). Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) of Silence of the Lambs had nothing to do with the show.
I already got enough in the other two E.T. posts here and here so here's more stuff.
HOW TO CARE FOR YOUR EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL
Bananas #61, c. 1983
w: Joe Arthur
a: Samuel B. Whitehead
E.Z. MEETS CLODZILLA
Cracked Monster Party #26, Winter 1994
a: Rob Orzechowski
Clinton was President then, but the President is portrayed as Bush I, so this must have been either inventory or a reprint.
Bush's family compound was in Maine. JFK and Marilyn Monroe had an affair. The telephone operator is Lily Tomlin's Ernestine character.
Bush was said to hate broccoli.
The Simpsons originally aired opposite The Cosby Show and tried to provoke an unofficial feud. The character of Dr. Hibbard was started as a parody of Dr. Huxtable.
E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL(1982)
dir:Steven Spielberg
Continuing where I left off yesterday, here are a few more examples of E.T.-sploitation.
IF EaTing HAD BEEN FOUND BY ARNULD
Cracked #195, July 1983
a: John Severin
In the 70s and 80s Cracked was known for milking trends as much as they could and combining them with other trends, like their mash-up of E.T. and Diff'rent Strokes.
Note the nod to Gene Colan, one of Severin's contemporaries, written on this pole.
A famous campaign for the American Express card had celebrities endorsing it telling the audience that wherever they carry it people know who they are.
It's not my fault they thought all black people had afros and play basketball. It was the 80s.
"What you talkin' about, Willis?" was Arnold's big catch phrase.
The other shows are 60 Minutes, Dallas, Archie Bunker's Place, Knight Rider, and One Day at a Time.
There was a recent discussion of how messed up Diff'rent Strokes and sitcoms like it were on Facebook, where my friend Robin Bougie said, "People love to shit on them and regard them as worthless, and the cultural equivalent to garbage or junk food, but sitcoms have unlikely value in that they are an intriguing cultural barometer of the time and place that they were made--very much like talk shows in that respect. If you want to truly learn about a society, go through their garbage. Look at the everyday 'throw away' entertainment, not in the art galleries and museums." I agree and I'd go a step further and say it includes things like Cracked.
From If Michael Jackson Starred In... in Cracked #207, October 1984, also drawn by John Severin.
In the movie, E.T. said "Ouch!" emulating Elliot's reaction to cutting himself.
The back cover of MAD #238, April 1983, is supposed to be a commentary on how expensive the video-game is, but since this issue came out around Christmas, and MAD was owned by Warner Communications which also owned Atari, I think this was really a plug.
Any merchandising with E.T. was considered pure gold, so Atari figured they'd get into the game as well and the E.T. video game became a huge flop. The unsold copies were rumored to be buried somewhere, documentaries were made about it, and it possibly killed the company.
From Movie Sequels We'll Soon Be Seeing in Bananas #59, circa 1982, by Jovial Bob Stine and Sam Viviano.
Yeah, I know, I keep posting from when National Lampoon was well past its prime. That's when they started parodying movies, though. Ironic they started saying "The Humor Magazine For Adults" on its cover right after they started appealing to teenagers. Even boomers think life started when they were born, and people my age only know National Lampoon from the 80s, when every other issue had a theme of 'Back to School Summer Sex' and there was always a T & A pictorial. If you want to know what the magazine was like when it started, check out the book Drunk, Stoned, Brilliant, Dead. Sure, some of it's dated and bro-ish, and there was always the white privilege attitude of "we can be racist and misogynist because we're really on the right side". It would definitely outrage the woke Twitter-verse but it wasn't always the magazine 13-year-old boys snuck into school and passed around to look at naked girls.
Which brings us to the December 1982 issue, which contained a few pages devoted to our movie of the day.
Here's the super-racist S.D. written by Sean Kelly and drawn by Cracked artist Howard Nostrand. Kelly was one of the first Lampoon writers, and as an editor after most of the original staff left, he tried not to let it devolve into an R-rated MAD but had to accept orders from his publishers to dumb things down. When he said in an interview "if I didn't write for them, I wouldn't read it", he was fired, and like much of the original staff that's still alive, doesn't even mention working there on his resume.
They cashed in on E.T. one more time with their August 1983 cover.
E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL (1982)
dir: Steven Spielberg
MAD #236, January 1983
w: Stan Hart
a: Jack Davis
So now I'll sum this up for the three people on earth that never saw this movie.
In a California suburb, some kids are having a party, and while Elliot is outside. He hears a noise in the shed, throws a ball into it, and it returns.
After Elliot (Henry Thomas) gets his family to investigate and they find nothing, he still believes something's out there and stays overnight. He leaves a trail of Reese's Pieces to lure E.T. into his room, then shows him around. E.T. starts mimicking his gestures. The next day, he stays home from school pretending to be sick by putting the thermometer under the light to look like he has a fever.
Elliot's brother Michael (Robert MacNaughton) and sister (Drew Barrymore) come home from school and he makes them swear before he shows them the alien. The mother (Dee Wallace) comes home and they hide it in the closet.
E.T. is left at home alone while Elliot returns to school. That day they're dissecting frogs and the teacher's showing the class how to anesthetize them first. E.T. finds beer in the refrigerator and gets drunk. Since he shares a psychic link with Elliot, Elliot gets drunk too and frees all the frogs. At home, there's an old movie on TV of a guy grabbing a girl and kissing her, so Elliot does that too. E.T. figures out where he is and how to communicate with his home planet, making a primitive phone out of different objects around the house. (Not shown: Gertie comes home, dresses up E.T. like she would a doll, and teaches it to talk), Elliot and Mike come home, find out E.T. wants to get back, and help it make a more detailed phone. Elliot cuts himself on a sawblade and E.T. heals it with his glowing finger.
Mike and Elliot come up with a plan on Halloween to take E.T. out into the woods so he can communicate with his home planet and return home. In order to smuggle him out of the house past their mother, they put a white sheet over him, and tell her it's Gertie dressed as a ghost. As they're walking E.T. outside, he sees people in costume and briefly thinks a kid dressed as Yoda may be one of him.
Elliot takes E.T. out into the woods on his bicycle. He can't make it so E.T. makes it fly out there. Elliot spends the night and the next morning E.T. is missing. The other kids find him and he is mistaken for dead.
The people who have been scouting the area throughout the movie are revealed to be government scientists have finally found the alien they've been looking for and take over the house to study the extra-terrestrial, as well as Elliot to make sure he hasn't been contaminated by it. The alien is assumed dead, but some dying flowers come back to life, so they know E.T. now has too. Now there's a chase as the scientists and police go after the kids as they rescue E.T. and bring him out into the woods to get back home. In this, it's the same spaceship Richard Dreyfuss left Earth on at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
This issue had Don Martin's take on the movies that were parodied in that issue.
My age is starting to show when I don't even know how people listen to music anymore. All I know is it's a digital file in some form, but what's most relevant to this is I know people don't use boom boxes anymore and someone born after 1990 might not know what one is. I don't mean to condescend, but sometimes it even surprises me what people born in 1970 don't know. And Don Martin didn't get boom boxes right either back when they were a thing, so there's plenty of finger pointing in both directions.
E.T. had a glowing stomach when he came back to life. I had this issue when it came out and I remember my father saying, "They gave a 'writer' credit for that?"
First Cracked cover with E.T.
One of the few times they used new material in one of their annuals.
EaTing
Giant Cracked #34, December 1982
a: John Severin
Elliot called his brother "penis breath"
The ERA was the Equal Rights Amendment, an attempt to guarantee both genders equality under the Constitution, never ratified.
Another reference to the Parkay commercials, which I posted in the Close Encounters parody, link on right.
Cracked #217, January 1986
w: George Gladir
a: Rick Altergott
E.T. mania had pretty much died down by 1985 but nobody ever said Cracked was hip.
American Express, 9 Lives, Pepsi, Bic
Honda, Michelob, AT & T
E. Z.
Crazy #93, February 1985
w: Paul Kupperberg
Love Canal was a housing development built in thr late 70s that turned out to be over a toxic waste dump.
Stay tuned for even even more E.T. parodies tomorrow.
UPDATE:
E.T.'S REPORT: MY EXPERIENCES ON EARTH
Cracked #192, January 1983
a: Don Orehek
