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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WORSTWORLD
Crazy #5, July 1974
w: Marv Wolfman
a: Bob McLeod
Before Michael Crichton created the blockbuster franchise of movies about robot dinosaurs gone rogue with Jurassic Park, he created a movie about robot humans gone rogue with Westworld. This was a science-fiction film about the Delos corporation, the business behind Romanworld, Medievalworld, and Westworld, amusement parks where you can live out your fantasies in one of these worlds that simulated life in the historical past.
The movie begins with a commercial for the Delos corporation hosted by Ed Wren (Robert Hogan) introducing the audience to these parks and interviewing exiting guests for their reactions to visiting these parks. Then we see Peter Martin (Richard Benjamin) and John Blane (James Brolin) flying in to Wetworld and being served by a stewardess who may or may not be a robot, showing how lifelike the simulations at the parks really are.
Everything at Westworld is realistic. The food, the lodgings, the bars, the prostitutes, but only with conveniences up to a hundred years old. You can have gunfights but you can tell the difference between a robot and a real person because the guns are programmed not to work on real people.
Technicians are supervising everything in all the parks to make sure everything goes smoothly and recalling any models that don't work. Things start to go wrong when Peter kills one of their models in a gunfight (Yul Brynner) and it keeps coming back.
Peter shoots the gunslinger yet again and is sent to jail for it. He's able to blast his way out and he and John flee to the desert. (Not shown: Robots start disobeying guests and rebelling in Medievalworld). Peter and John return to town and John is shot and killed by the gunslinger, who chases Peter out into the desert again. We see it from the gunslinger's point of view.
Peter escapes into the laboraratory, then to Medievalworld, where all the guests and technicians have already been killed. Peter destroys the gunslinger by throwing sulfuric acid on him and setting him on fire, which finally defeats him after several attempts to get up.
references are made to 2001: A Space Odyssey and Henry Kissinger.
Yesterday we looked at the MAD and Cracked parodies of The Towering Inferno (click on “older post” or one of the several other methods), now here are takes from Crazy and Sick.
THE SOURING INFERNO
Sick #105, August 1975
w: Fred Wolfe (Paul Laikin)
a: Jerry Grandenetti
It's the ribbon-cutting ceremony for The Glass Tower, The world's tallest building, located in San Francisco, designed by Doug Roberts (Paul Newman), developed and owned by James Duncan (William Holden). Harry Jernigan is head of security supervising through monitored rooms up inside.
Frank Sinatra and Don Rickles are not in the movie. Red Skelton, Lawrence Welk, Dean Martin, Danny Thomas, and Phil Silvers appear later on. I guess the artist just wanted to show he could draw them.
Roger Simmons (Richard Chamberlain), son-in-law of James Duncan, was responsible for construction, and used shoddy wiring when building it. The premiere party has started on the top floor. Among the guests are Harlee Claiborne (Fred Astaire) and Lisolette Mueller (Jennifer Jones). Duncan has invited Senator Parker (Robert Vaughn) in hopes to win favor and have more building contracts approved.
Publicist Dan Bigelow (Robert Wagner) is having an affair with his secretary (Susan Flannery) and they get trapped in his office. Everybody at the party has to leave the room and move to a lower floor, including Doug's girlfriend Susan (Faye Dunaway). Mike O' Halloran (Steve McQueen) is the fire chief called to put out the fire in the building.
The fire has spread out of control and everyone has to evacuate the building, mostly through makeshift ropes and helicopters.
Commercials for Hanes' Beautymist pantyhose with Joe Namath were a big ad campaign in the seventies,
After a lottery of who gets rescued first and everyone is finally saved, Chief O'Halloran gives Doug Roberts a lecture about how skyscrapers are a potential disaster.
THE TOWERING MESS
Crazy #11, June 1975
w: Stu Schwartzberg
a: Vance Rodewalt
This parodies the entire genre. Mostly The Towering Inferno with parts of The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake, and the Airport series.
Ernest Borgnine and Shelley Winters were in The Poseidon Adventure, Charlton Heston was in Airport '75 and Earthquake. This was years before Airplane was released as a parody of the genre, when they couldn't have been aware Kareem-Abdul Jabbar would have a major part.
Charlton Heston was best known for Moses in The Ten Commandments, so he had to have his crook with him.
A big scene in Poseidon was to have women give up their lingerie so it could be tied together to make ropes for everyone to climb up.
And a few years before Airplane!, the Zucker brothers sent up the genre in The Kentucky Fried Movie.
SHAFTED
Crazy #4, May 1974
w: Len Wein
a: Mike Ploog
Not the films, of which there were three, but the TV series. Since many of NBC's mystery series were revolving TV movies, CBS decided to do the same thing and brought Shaft to the small screen, alternating with the Jimmy Stewart series Hawkins. The Shaft series also featured Richard Roundtree as John Shaft, the big black dick who was sex machine to all the chicks.
There was an unwritten rule in the seventies that if one TV detective was parodied, they all had to be, hence the appearances by Ironside, Columbo, Cannon, Barnaby Jones, and Ironside on the cover. They're on the inside too.
Shaft's boss was Lt. Rossi (Ed Barth).
In Isaac Hayes' theme, a popular song in its own right, he describes Shaft as “a mean mother--” and is then interrupted before he can say the f-word.
3
Shaft's Big Score was the title of one of his movies.
LIVE AND LET SPY
Crazy #2, February 1974
w: Stu Schwatzberg & Roy Thomas
a: John Buscema & The Crusty Bunkers
The cover has then current Bond Roger Moore with original Bond Sean Connery.
The Crusty Bunkers were a group of inkers led by Neal Adams. There are 60 people that this could have been so let's just say it was Neal Adams.
007 James Bond (Roger Moore)'s newest assignment requires him to go to New Orleans to investigate the deaths of agents who were there looking into Dr. Kananga, dictator of the carribean island of San Monique. As he's told of his newest assignment by M (Bernard Lee), he has to hide the woman he was with in his apartment. Here it's several women.
Christine Keeler was a woman who brought down many government officials in Britain by having affairs with them. That was once all it took.
Bond first needs to go to the United Nations in New York City and his cab driver (drawn as ex-NYC mayor John Lindsay here) is killed on the way there. This leads him to a voodoo store in Harlem...
---which leads him to the Fillet of Soul restaurant. It is owned by Mr. Big (Yaphet Kotto) In the back of the restaurant Bond meets Mr.Big and his henchmen, one of whom, Tee Hee (Julius Harris) has a prosthetic metal-cutting arm. Roger Moore had earlier played The Saint, character of another pulp spy franchise.
He also meets tarot reader Solitaire (Jane Seymour. She was 22 when this came out even though she's drawn as middle aged here).
Reference is made here to Shaft in Africa, part of the blacksploitation wave Live and Let Die was cashing in on.
Every James Bond movie introduces a gimmick at the beginning. This time it was a magnetic wristwatch.
Bond has taken Solitaire's cherry, thus taking away her psychic powers, so the staff of Fillet of Soul has no use for her, and she is on his side now. Mr. Big demands to know if they've slept together and Bond refuses to reveal it. Mr. Big reveals that underneath a rubber mask he is actually Dr. Kananga and orders bond to be taken to the swamps in New Orleans and fed to crocodiles and he narrowly escapes.
Another item in the Bond formula is the villain revealing his plan to James Bond before killing him. Mr. Big/Dr. Kananga reveals he is a heroin dealer, growing poppies on land that is ignored because the locals there believe it is haunted. Big and his men later kidnap Solitaire and sacrifice her in a voodoo ritual at San Monique.
This parody conflates several different scenes. It looks like a minstrel show here but it's actually the funeral procession in New Orleans. They don't bother using voodoo priest Samedi (Geoffrey Holder), who they kill by trapping in a coffin full of snakes. When they get Mr. Big for attempting to assassinate them, it's after the two of them are taken to his lair and lured over a shark pool. Bond uses his magnetic watch to retrieve a gas pellet, which Mr. Big ends up swallowing.(see below)
In the epilogue, Bond and Solitaire appear to be safe, but Tee Hee shows up on the train trying to kill Bond, but he kills Tee Hee by detaching him from his prosthetic arm.
Note Sean Connery is one of the other Bond villains in the last panel. Robert Shaw fought Bond in the climactic train scene in From Russia, With Love.
LAFF AND LET DIE
Cracked #116, May 1974
a: O. O. Severin (John Severin)
Bobby Riggs was a tennis player who believed he could “beat any woman” and was beaten by Billie Jean King in the Battle of the Sexes tennis tournament.
Cotton Comes to Harlem was a seventies film.
There's a long speedboat chase scene, much of the time the boats are airborne on land, which goes through a wedding, but that isn't used in the Crazy parody.
LIVE AND LET SUFFER
MAD #165, March 1974
w: Arnie Kogen
a: Mort Drucker
From 8 “James Bomb” Bomb Movies
Mrs. Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell), who also came to James Bond's flat to let him know of his assignment, wasn't in the other parodies.
Moonraker and The Spy Who Loved Me, both of which had Roger Moore, were also made between The Man with the Golden Gun and For Your Eyes Only. The punchline is that Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz would be the next Bond, I guess because he was popular? He hadn't done any acting roles or was ever considered for one before or since.
THE ALFRED E. NEUMAN SHOW
MAD UK #270, October 1984
w: Dave Robinson
a: Harry North
Now a celebration of the 25th anniversary of MAD in 1984 celebrating how Alfred E. Neuman graced the cover of the very first issue in 1959... or at least that's how MAD began in Great Britain. I don't think most of their readers knew it was an American magazine. They had dozens of foreign editions, many of the covers of which I've posted before, some of which had all-original content based on TV shows and movies only shown there. I'll be putting some of that content up here as I get it, but only when it's in English.
Harry North was drawing for the British and American editions at the same time. The numbering was way ahead over there because even though they started much later, they came out more frequently.
Michael Parkinson was the most famous TV host in Britain then. Not much to describe about him.
Russell Harty is another TV personality there's not much to say about. The artist they're referring to, Kelly Freas, has done a few covers that are also on this blog, and indeed did win a Hugo Award for his covers for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science-Fiction.
MAD publisher Bill Gaines took his entire staff on a vacation abroad every year.
Norman Mingo was 60 when he did his first MAD cover. He didn't “go on” to do movie posters, he had already done several such as for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Artists Jack Rickard and Jack Davis were already doing movie posters at the same time.
