Showing posts with label JOE. Show all posts
Showing posts with label JOE. Show all posts

Saturday, February 4, 2023

ONE DAME AT A TIME

ONE DAY AT A TIME
CBS 1975-1984

We have a royal flush here. A TV show that's been parodied by MAD, Cracked, Crazy, and Sick.

Long-running sitcom chronicling a single mother and her two teenage daughters that went through many changes over its nine years and was rebooted with a Latino cast, but we're only concertrating on its first two seasons.

ONE DAME AT A TIME
MAD #190, April 1977
w: Larry Siegel
a: Angelo Torres

Annie Romano (Bonnie Franklin) was raising Julie (Mackenzie Phillips) and Barbara (Valerie Bertinelli) in an apartment in Indianapolis.
Dwayne Schneider (Pat Harrington) is the handyman of the apartment building that shows up just because every sitcom needs someone like that.
ONE DATE AT A TIME
Cracked #142, July 1977
a: John Severin

Later they had the neighbor Ginny Wroblicki (Mary Louise Wilson).
Annie's ex-husband David (Richard Masur) occasionally appeared on the show.

ONE DAZE AT A TIME
Crazy #29, September 1977
w: Tom DeFalco
a: Kent Gamble

ONE DAME AT A TIME
Sick #121, June 1978
w: Joe Gill
a: Jack Sparling
While Cracked sometimes did parodies that were more like fan fiction, Sick's parodied were more often more like excuses to draw scantily-clad women. Another entry in the "did they even see the show?" department.

Saturday, April 30, 2022

SHMOE

JOE (1970)
dir: Jon Avildsen

SHMOE
MAD #144, July 1971
w: Larry Siegel
a: Mort Drucker

The character of Joe (Peter Boyle) doesn't show up until about a half hour into the movie. Joe's a working class right-wing World War II veteran living in Queens, a sort of more “serious” and sociopathic version of Archie Bunker. You see him at his machine shop shift.

It begins with Melissa Compton (Susan Sarandon), who's run away from home to live with her drug-dealing and using boyfriend Frank (Patrick McDermott).
Melissa's father Bill (Dennis Patrick) shows up at Melissa and Frank's apartment and kills him for brainwashing and seducing his little girl. Then we finally meet Joe on his drunken rant against everything the right saw wrong with America circa 1970 (“60% of all liberals are queers and that's a fact!”)

Bill ducks into the bar where Joe is carrying on and when he says he'd like to kill a hippie, Bill says “I just did.” Joe dismisses this as a joke, then sees how a hippie was killed the next day, puts two and two together, gets in contact with Bill, and blackmails Bill into being his friend. Joe and his wife have dinner with the Comptons (we get to that later in the parody), their backgrounds initially clash, but they bond over their hatred of hippies, and go out infiltrating the hippie scene so they can find Bill's daughter.
This is the dinner part. They write it out of order so they can do the punchline, and the movie satire being for kids can't use the getting laid at orgies (remember to pronounce that with a hard G) and killing hippies.
Joe shows Bill his gun collection they later use to kill the hippies. Here they use the punchline that he's really Spiro Agnew. Hard to imagine in the polarized country we live in now that Nixon and Agnew were once considered as far right as you could go. Like most people my age who began reading MAD post-Watergate and before 1980, we learned who he was from MAD's specials reprinting five-year old material.

Peter Boyle was offered the lead in The French Connection but turned it down because he was allergic to the gray paint he didn't want to be typecast as a psycho.