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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MAD #211, December 1979
w: Dick DeBartolo
a: Mort Drucker
Kimberly Wells (Jane Fonda) is a reporter for a local news show in Los Angeles. She does fluff like singing telegrams.
The first page has William Holden and Faye Dunaway from Network which will be listed in due time.
One of Kimberly's pieces has her covering the nuclear power plant. She's given a tour by Bill Gibson (James Hampton).
The control room is below them which they're not allowed to film for security reasons. There are sudden vibrations in the ground and an alarm goes off. The control room assures them it is nothing. There doesn't seem to be the usual protocol and the cameraman Richard Adams (Michael Douglas) is secretly filming without anyone noticing.
Back in the newsroom, Kimberly assures them there was an accident and they have a story that needs to be the lead. The heads of the station tell her it would be irresponsible to air it without the facts. At the plant, they have done an investigation and found nothing wrong, letting Jack Godell (Jack Lemmon) and Ted Spindler (Wilford Brimley) off the hook. The station, because the story they have the information on doesn't have the facts, has it locked in a vault to avoid a potential lawsuit, but Richard has stolen it and Kimberly must get it back. She goes to a bar to meet him and runs into Godell. Everyone at the plant is there celebrating that the investigation is over.
Kimberly goes to an anti-nuke demonstration hoping to get the film but when she gets there he has two experts with him who saw the film and told him what happened is dangerous. If the radiation had leaked into the earth it would go all the way through the earth (to the other side, China, thus the name of the movie).
(Missing from parody: they know Adams has the film. His assistant rushes to bring it to the meeting and they run him off the road).
Meanwhile, Godell rushes to the power plant. He wants to go on the air with an exclusive about how everyone is covering up the accident, chases everyone away at gunpoint, takes control of the plant and asks Kimberly to interview him. The executives stall him while they have a SWAT team break in and arrest him.
They come in and shoot him before they can reveal the information. He's dismissed by the executives as some disgruntled employee even though his co-workers know otherwise and Kimberly knows the truth.
A movie ad was used in William Shakespeare... Movie Critic in MAD #224, July 1981.
Crazy took their shot too.
THE CHINA SIN-DUMB
Crazy #56, November 1979
w & a: Murad Gumen
This movie premiered at almost the same time as a similar real-life nuclear meltdown at the Three-Mile Island plant near Harrisburg, PA, which led to a rise in nationwide anti-nuclear sentiment, as well as a higher profile for this movie.
Jack Lemmon dressing in drag in the top panel doesn't seem to have anything to do with the movie or this story other than to make a reference to his role in Some Like It Hot.
And just this month when the error of Asian stereotypes in the media is brought to our attention, it has to rear its ugly head.
Sick had The Chopstick Syndrome.
THE CHOPSTICK SYNDROME
Sick #129, October 1979
w & a: Dave Manak
Richard's assistant Hector (Daniel Valdez) isn't mentioned in the other two parodies.
Saturday Night Live did a sketch called The Pepsi Syndrome, where somebody spilling a a can of Pepsi in the control room at a power plant resulted in President Carter (Dan Aykroyd) and the cleaning lady (Garrett Morris) growing 50 feet tall and falling in love.
THE BLECH HOLE
Crazy #65, August 1980
w: Paul Kupperberg
a: Bob McLeod & Klaus Janson
Captain Dan Holland (Robert Forster), Lt. Pizer (Joseph Bottoms), Dr. Durant (Anthony Perkins), Dr. Kate MacRae (Yvette Mimieux) are the crew of the starship Palomino, and about to return to Earth when they discover a black hole.
Also on the monitor, the robot VINCENT (Roddy McDowall) discovers the spaceship Cygnus, long-thought lost, which had Kate's father in the crew.
The crew minus Lt. Pizer, and including embedded journalist Harry Booth (Ernest Borgnine) investigates the Cygnus.
Everyone on the Cygnus was presumed dead, but they find commander Dr. Reinhardt (Maximillian Schell). The Palomino crew is skeptical of Reinhardt's theory that the Cygnus can fly through the black hole and are suspicious of that ship's faceless drones.
In the parody, the other side of the black hole is Disneyworld. Apt since The Black Hole was a Disney movie.
Crazy was published by Marvel, which is now part of Disney, so it comes full circle. Kind of like a black hole.
Missing from the parody is OLD BOB, voiced by Slim Pickens, an older prototype of the VINCENT robot.
There was also this ad in William Shakespeare...Movie Critic from MAD in # 224.
A CROCK O' [BLIP] NOW
MAD #215, June 1980
w: Larry Siegel
a: Mort Drucker
Based on the novel Hearts of Darkness, but basically about the whole Vietnam War.
And before people start blaming the messenger, you're perfectly entitled to find these to be racist caricatures, but we can't go back in time and make people “woke”.
Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) is a soldier whose mission is to kill Col. Kurtz (Marlon Brando), an officer who has gone rogue and started a cult in Cambodia.
The riots at the Democratic Convention were actually in 1968, not 1969.
The “Indian broad” reference is to how a few years earlier Brando refused the Best Actor Oscar for The Godfather and had activist Sacheen Littlefeather give a speech on his behalf about how Native Americans are mistreated in Hollywood. The picture of him is from his role in Mutiny on the Bounty.
Willard gets a ride with a navy boat on his mission and meets the Chief (Albert Hall), and the crew comprised of Chef (Frederic Forrest), Lance (Sam Bottoms), and Mr. Clean (Laurence Fishburne).
The MAD staff's ignorance of how drugs are used shows. I remember a Dave Berg comic showing someone shooting heroin into their veins without tying their arm off, casually the way someone would drink something on a bus. Another strip had someone in the background sniffing cocaine out of a spoon in a helping the size of a mouthful of cereal.
On the way they meet the sadistic Lt. Col. Bill Killgore (Robert Duvall), responsible for one of the most famous lines in the movie.
(Jane Fonda was considered by the far right to be a traitor when she was photographed with a North Vietnamese aircraft gun on her visit to the war zone.)
They come to a trading post and encounter a USO show with Playboy bunnies. This particular scene takes up more space in the parody than in the actual film. (I must remind everyone this was decades before #MeToo).
Brando was paid $3 million for being in the first ten minutes of Superman, which was the highest anyone had ever been paid to appear in a movie up to that point. Another one of the many references to his previous parts they make in this.
Lance's LSD-induced grenade launch attracts the attention of the Viet Cong.
Half the boat's crew is killed, but they get closer to Col. Kurtz's territory.
Willard gets to the heavily-guarded palace Kurtz has built for himself, and meets Kurtz's gatekeeper, who is an American photojournalist that never left (Dennis Hopper). Willard is shown around.
Kurtz plays mind games knowing he's going to be killed.
When Kurtz is killed in the movie, he says the other most famous line, “The horror... the horror”
The film is open-ended, but for parody's sake, he shaves his head bald and continues where Kurtz left off. (Earlier there's emphasis on how poetry is part of Kurtz's madness.)
A newspaper review was part of the article William Shakespeare, Movie Critic in MAD #224 in July 1981
The British version of MAD, since it came out twelve times a year instead of eight, often put movie parodies on the covers that weren't on the domestic version. Indian food is as ubiquitous in the UK as Chinese food is in the US.
APOCRYPHAL NOWLAND
Crazy #63, June 1980
w: Paul Kupperberg
a: Bob McLeod
Crazy's parody had Vietnam as some kind of amusement park.
The Dennis Hopper character isn't used in this and they have the Robert Duvall character show up at the end.
A CROCK OF IT NOW
Sick #132, April 1980
w & a: Adam V. Kane (Dave Manak)
Harrison Ford, one of the officers in the beginning, is caricatured ibn this, but not in the other parodies.
The same people who made Hardware Wars also did something called Porklips Now which I remember endlessly on pay cable when they used to show shorts between movies.
Before YouTube in the late eighties and early nineties, we passed along fourth generation copies of VCR tapes. One such tape was Apocalypse Pooh. It would probably constantly be on pay cable too if shorts were still a part of that type of thing then.
The creator, Todd Graham, also did a similar mash-up wish Blue Velvet audio and Peanuts visuals.
