MONTY SNAKE

MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS
1969-1974 BBC

THE TAIL OF MONTY SNAKE
National Lampoon #72, March 1976
a: Randall Enos

I'm sure anyone familiar with any of these magazines or just any late 20th century comedy is also quite familiar with Monty Python, so I need not give much background about them. Here's a curiosity from National Lampoon's second phase. I like to think there were several different phases of the magazine. The first five years was with the original staff that helped create the counterculture/nostalgia aesthetic that they continued where MAD left off, and has carried on in comedy that exists today. After that and before Animal House, they had no idea what direction they wanted to go, no two issues looked alike, and there was no coherent art direction. Then after Animal House, they got their groove back except they had a conservative/libertarian streak, punching down rather than up, and becoming increasingly more misogynistic (downright hostile to women on staff from some stories I've heard). In the eighties they started to rely on nude photos to sell the magazine and you could tell the staff didn't even care anymore, anyone new using it as a stepping stone to write for television. Eventually the publisher decided he could do it himself and had his sons take over, a combination of Elon Musk at Twitter and the Trump Kids. By the time a new company tried to revive it in the nineties it was too late.

But why and how parody something that was already way beyond parody? I think it's more bitterness and jealousy than anything else. Like I said, this was around the magazine's second phase. By then most of the original staff either went on to other projects or counted money from their buyout. Many of National Lampoon's writers had gone to write for Saturday Night Live and those still at the magazine believed it was stealing their thunder. If you look at issues from around this time there are a lot of sour grapes digs at the show. Also around this time Monty Python's Flying Circus was starting to show in the United States and was becoming the hip new thing in comedy that they once were, and television was a more popular and lucrative medium than print. And Lampoon editor Tony Hendra, once a sketch comic, claimed Monty Python stole a bit from him.

Though the troupe was made up of six people—John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Terry Jones, Eric Idle, Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam, many of their fans thought there was a person named 'Monty Python'.

CAN A LOT

CAMELOT (1967)
dir: Joshua Logan

CAN A LOT
MAD #123, December 1968
w: Frank Jacobs
a: Mort Drucker

Not a whole parody of the movie but an updated version of the stage musical and story with likenesses of the stars. MAD liked to do that when they parodied musicals, it was more about the songs than a scene-by-scene breakdown of the movie and its conventions. In this case, it's a good thing since I don't have to sit through a movie that's three hours long.

When they parodied musicals back when I read the magazine, I never knew the songs. Probably neither did you. This is why I provide clips.

Arthur (Richard Harris) and Merlyn (Laurence Naismith) are happy their company is doing well, but there's talk the workers are unionizing. Arthur wonders how other companies are dealing with the same situation.

Mordred (David Hemmings), the union representative, comes to discuss demands, and Arthur considers just firing everyone. He calls in Sir Lancelot (Franco Ner) to discuss this.

There's a board meeting, at which they decide the solution is to cut corners everywhere. Mordred can't accept this and calls a strike.

With a strike going on, Arthur tries to decide the best way to handle things. Merlyn replaces everyone with robots.

That's Tiny Tim in the first panel.


Production is up and they're not too concerned about what happened with the workers they laid off. Arthur shows the new factory workplace to Guinevere (Vanessa Redgrave)

Arthur overworks the robots and they rebel and burn down the factory.

COMICLOT
Not Brand Ecch #12, February 1969
w: Stan Lee & Roy Thomas
a: Marie Severin

Not Brand Ecch was Marvel's first humor title once they became Marvel, and mostly spoofed their own characters and comics in general. Marvel parodying their own characters was basically just doing puns on the names and making them look funny.

Everybody knows who the characters are, mostly from the movies, but I'll say mostly who they are anyway. If you only know them from the movies they look slightly different.

I'll mention who the kid is later. You'll probably guess. King Arthur here is Thor. Pictured here in the splash panel are Captain America, Thing, Daredevil, and the Black Knight.

There's Iron Man in the top panel on the lower right and Nick Fury in the bottom panel on the lower right.

Guinevere is Mary Jane Watson accompanied by Aunt May and J. Jonah Jameson.

He's singing about the first version of the Comics Code, something created in the fifties wasn't updated often enough and scrapped only recently, saying what the content and behavior of the characters was supposed to be in mainstream comics in orfer to prevent juvenile delinquency, but was really an attempt by some publishers to put others out of business. (For example, the words "weird" and "horror" weren't allowed to be used in titles. Coincidentally, EC, publishers of MAD, had the titles Weird Fantasy and Vault of Horror.)

The Lizard has a shirt saying "Liz" as a pun on Dick Burton and Liz Taylor.

Spider-Man comes as Sir Lancelot while Arthur/Thor beats up Dr. Doom and the Red Skull.

Iron Man, Daredevil, Captain America, Sub-Mariner, and Human Torch battle Green Goblin, Kingpin, and Hydra, with Dr. Strange doing his Merlin.

MMMS was the Merry Marvel Marching Society, their fan club at the time. Callback to Tiny Tim, a pop singer with long hair. The other villains in addition to Green Goblin are Magneto and Dr. Doom. Hoppy The Marvel Bunny, a Golden Age character from another publisher, is behind a tree in the middle panel.

The kid at the beginning was a young Stan Lieber, the reason for the "Class of '39" emblem being that's the year he would have graduated high school, pitching ideas to Jack Kurtzberg over the phone to be executed by him, the way they worked by most accounts.

Camelot's a silly place.