Showing posts with label OKLAHOMA!. Show all posts
Showing posts with label OKLAHOMA!. Show all posts

Thursday, September 17, 2020

007: THE MUSICAL

007
MAD #94, April 1965
w: Frank Jacobs
a: Mort Drucker

At this time, only Dr. No, From Russia with Love, and Goldfinger were the only James Bond novels to have been adapted to film but were enough of a screen franchise (and at that time, pretty much the only post-television one).

All starred Sean Connery, here ably caricatured by Mort Drucker.

The songs here are all from Oklahoma!, which by then was more than twenty years old (the movie ten) but still well-known enough then that the plot and lyrics would be recognizable enough to the average MAD reader. Almost all of MAD's song parodies were written by Frank Jacobs. There was a landmark class action copyright suit in the sixties based on MAD's song parodies in which a court ruled that a composer does not own the right to a rhyme scheme or memory of a song, something they exploited well into the 90s.

Drucker is usually used as MAD's caricaturist, but M and Miss Moneypenney aren't drawn to look like Bernard Lee or Lois Maxwell at all.




The most recent incarnation of Mike Hammer then had been Darren McGavin, but I can't tell who this is supposed to be.

Earlier M says "We've lost Richard Burton and Hayley Mills", yet here they are in this montage.

In the ending panel famous Brits here are caricatured. I identify half of them. 1)George Harrison 2)Ringo Starr 3)Paul McCartney [no John Lennon?!] 4)Richard Burton 5)Bernard Montgomery 6)Rex Harrison 7)Hayley Mills 8)Peter Sellers as Mandrake in Dr. Strangelove 9)Winston Churchill 10)Harold MacMillan 11)PM Harold Wilson

Feel free to label others in the comments below so I can feel stupid for knowing something all along but didn't think of it until someone else pointed it out.


MAD's main imitator Cracked, in addition to doing plenty of James Bond movie parodies themselves (which we'll get to later) did some Bond articles as well, and their main artist John Severin often signed his work O. O. Severin. Here are a couple examples of 007 parodies from #50 (March 1966) and #56 (November 1966).
THE WINGS OF THE DOVE

Sick #32, November 1964
w: Dee Caruso
a: Angelo Torres

Sick also jumped on the bandwagon when James Bond hype was relatively young with their interview with Ian Fleming.