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 #244, January 1984
w: Dick DeBartolo
a: Mort Drucker
Twenty-two years later, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) is allowed to go back into the world having spent time in a mental institution.He's been deemed cured of the split personality he had believing he was his dead mother and going on a killing spree dressed up as her. His psychiatrist Dr. Raymond (Robert Loggia) has promised to keep a watchful eye on him despite protests from Lila Loomis (Vera Miles), sister of one of his victims. The Bates motel is now under the management of Warren Toomet (Dennis Franz), who has turned the place into a “no-tell motel”
The stenographer is Martin Balsam, another victim from the first movie. “Mack the Knife” was a popular song when the first movie came out
Norman returns to the mansion where he lived and takes a job at a local diner, and keeps getting threating notes from his “mother”. He takes in Mary (Meg Tilly), a waitress at the diner, after she has been kicked out of her house. He won't let her stay in his mother's old room, as he wants to keep it as it was and it brings up so many bad memories. There is a peephole in the bathroom with his mother's room on the other side, which doesn't seem unusual to her.
Norman keeps getting threatening notes, which he dismisses as a practical joke. The basement to the mansion above the motel, which had been abandoned all these years, has become a hangout for teenagers to make out and smoke pot, and one of the teenagers is killed while Norman is locked in the attic (not shown). The sheriff gets a report on the missing body, goes to investigate, and Mary covers for him. He feels he must have blacked out and done it, as it's the only explanation. It's revealed that Mary is really Lila's daughter, they'd planned on pretending to be Norman's mother and doing the killings themselves in order to drive Norman insane and have him recommitted, but Mary now wants no part of it. He thinks his mother is still alive. Someone is making calls, and Mary insists it's Lila. Dr. Raymond visits him bings him to the graveyard to have the body exhumed to prove she's still dead.
Lila continues the ruse and sneaks into Norman's basement to get the mother costume that's under a stone there, but gets murdered by someone else pretending to be the mother. Inside the mansion, Norman is getting calls, which Mary insists is Lila carrying on the charade, and dresses as his mother to possibly talk him down. She accidentally kills a visiting Dr, Raymond, then gets shot by a sheriff who visits and shoots Mary. The case is dismissed as Lila and Mary messing with Norman's head and he continues with his life. After life returns to normal, he's visited by Mrs. Spool (Claudia Bryar), who was his real mother, left him when he was a baby, and has been doing the killings all along. Norman Bates kills her with a shovel, brings the corpse upstairs, and starts all over again where the first movie began.
When the British edition reprinted the parody, they put it on the cover.
Steven Freeling (Craig T. Nelson) is the patriach of a household in a Southern California suburb, where he lives with his wife Diane (JoBeth Williams) and their three children Robbie (Oliver Robins), Dana (Dominique Dunne), and Carol Anne (Heather O'Rourke). Carol Anne speaks to the static on the TV at night.
You see, at one time before cable was the standard, and infomercials had not yet been invented, television sets used to sign off at night and then have nothing but static until the morning, and... oh, never mind.
The family gets into an argument with the neighbors when his remote control is interfering with their football game. Its significance in the movie is that animosity turns to empathy at the end, which is irrelevant when they leave that part out of the parody. The first omen of the house being haunted is that Carol Anne's pet canary dies. Robbie can't sleep because he's afraid of the tree he sees out a window during a thunderstorm but is assured there's nothing to be afraid of. The parody makes too much out of the fact that the parents smoke pot to relax at night.
Carol Anne, being so small, has no fear of the ghosts inside the TV static, who she refers to as “the TV people”. The ghosts escape and start to do weird things in the house, first harmless things in the kitchen.
The next night, the tree Robbie was scared of comes to life and tries to kidnap him. They save him and Carol Anne has been kidnapped by the ghosts. They call a paranormal team to investigate consisting of lead scientist Martha Lesh (Beatrice Straight) and her assistants (Richard Lawson and Martin Casella).
The children's room that was cordonned off has everything floating around, one of the investigators imagines himself peeling his face off in the bathroom, and Carol Anne communicated with the family through the television.
The family and the paranormal experts decide to hire a psychic, Tangina (Zelda Rubenstein) who in my opinion was creepier than anything in the movie. Tangina can see the other plane and can figure how to rescue Carol Anne by getting her to looking into the light, testing where things are with marked tennis balls.
The dollhouse says Ibsen because of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, and the doll you see is of The Crypt Keeper, which Davis had drawn years earlier.
They omit the “just when you think it's over” moment where they arrange to get out after the father's last day of work, and all hell breaks loose the minute he leaves.
Diane is thrown around in her bedroom, the two youngest kids are attacked by a doll in their room, and it's revealed all along that the house has been built on top of ancient graves.
POLTERGOOSED
Crazy #94, April 1983
w: David Allikas
a: Bob Camp
Another essential scene MAD omits is when Steven, who works for the agency that builds these developments, is being lied to by his boss Mr. Teague (James Karen, who people from NY and NJ would recognize from Pathmark commercials) about how they move the graves as well as the tombstones when they build new real estate on old graveyards.
The movie ends with the family evacuating prematurely and going to a hotel. The punchline in this is that it's the Bates Motel. In Cracked they decided to go a step further and do a mashup of the two.
POLTER-PSYCHO-GEIST
Cracked #221, August 1986
w: Mortimer Post and Mort Todd
a: John Reiner
Dee Snider, Stephen King, and Mikhail Gorbachev aren't in the article. Cracked would just include everything from the issue on their cover around this time.
Since Poltergeist ended with the Freeling family checking into a motel, they decided to pick up where the movie left off. Here it's the Bates Motel from Psycho run by Norman Bates (Tony Perkins).
The bellboy here is Marty Feldman as Igor in Young Frankenstein.
The twist ending for Psycho was (spoiler) that the corpse of Norman's mother was kept in the basement motel and he would pretend to be her.
There were several unnecessary sequels to both Poltergeist and Psycho.
BURIED WITH CHILDREN
MAD #292, January 1990
w: Dennis Snee
a: Sam Viviano
Sitcom about a white-trash family that became more of an exaggeration of the sitcom genre over time, considered really dirty when it aired, but pretty tame by today's standards. It was closer in content to The Cosby Show but didn't have the “awww” moments, but didn't have the shock of Family Guy either (which is also guilty of redemptive “awww” moments).
Al Bundy (Ed O'Neill) was the father of the family, and his wife was Peg (Katey Sagal). The two children were Bud (David Faustino) and Kelly (Christina Applegate). Neighbors were Steve (David Garrison) and Darcy (Amanda Bearse). Buck was the Bundy's dog that often delivered punchlines with his thoughts.
Terry Rakolta was a suburban housewife who started a boycott and letter-writing campaign against the program, which ironically made it more popular. Andrew “Dice” Clay is still popular though more as an actor than as a comedian. He was taken too seriously as a threat then because fear of filth in media was the late 80s and early 90s equivalent to reefer madness.
Roseanne and Dan from Roseanne were the new white trash sitcom family, but more realistic.
The German edition featured the Bundys on the cover.
MARTYRED WITH CHILDREN
Cracked #239, October 1988
w: Murad Gumen
a: Rob Orzechowski
The Li'l Abner character of Fearless Fosdick was known for see-through bullet holes. Bill Cosby as imitated by Eddie Murphy was portrayed as the spokesperson of morality, and Married: With Children was kind of the “anti-Cosby”.
They put King Kong Bundy here because he has the same name, though he actually did play a supporting character on the show later.
Rupert Murdoch was and is the head of Fox. References are made to the other shows the Fox Network had in its infancy when it was on only one night, such as Duet, The Tracy Ullman Show, It's Garry Shandling's Show, Werewolf, 21 Jump Street, and the George C. Scott sitcom Mr. President.
Cracked did another spoof of the show focusing on Terry Rakolta's campaign against it.
HARRIED: WITH CHILDREN
Cracked #248, October 1989
w: Rick Kriegel (Lou Silverstone)
a: Rob Orzechowski
Jokes about the Bates Motel. Charles Manson called his entourage his “family”. Al Bundy would always refer to his high school sports days on the show.
