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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THE PUNS OF WILL BONNETT
Not Brand Ecch #11, December 1968
w: Arnold Drake
a: Tom Sutton
Western about Will Sonnett (Walter Brennan) and his grandson Jeff (Dack Rambo) and their search for Will's son/Jeff's father Jim Sonnett (Jason Evers). These are all puns on Jim Sonnett's name. The hat in the last panel is a reference to Walter Brennan's previous show The Real McCoys.
The people the Sonnetts encounter are TV characters from other shows about people on the lam in search of someone. The man here is David Janssen as Richard Kimble of The Fugitive.
Next are Ben Gazarra of Run for Your Life and Roy Thinnes of The Invaders (though he was also on one episode of The Fugitive).
The signs point to The Virginian, The High Chaparral, Gunsmoke, Cimarron Strip, and Wagon Train, which were other TV Westerns at the time.
UPDATE:
From TV Scenes Worth Waiting For in Cracked #74, January 1969, art by Lugoze.
THE STOOGE-ITIVE
MAD #325, February 1994
w: Dick DeBartolo
a: Angelo Torres
Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford), is a doctor wrongly accused of killing his wife (Sela Ward), and is being grilled by the police. Doctor Nichols (Jeroen Krabbe) is his co-worker and friend, Marshal Sam Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones), the man assigned to bring him to justice, and Frederick Sykes (Andreas Katsulas) is the one-armed man Kimble is going to prove is the real killer.
References are made throughout to other Harrison Ford movies. In the background of the splash panel is David Janssen, who played Richard Kimble in the TV series this is based on.
Kimble is sentenced to death and sent to prison on a transfer bus. In transit, one of the prisoners has a seizure and Kimble, being a doctor, is the only one who can treat him and must have free hands in order to do so. The sick man is faking it and makes the bus crash into a train, and instead of freeing everyone as intended, kills them. Kimble is presumed dead, but Marshal Gerard finds empty leg irons and realizes Kimble has escaped.
Richard Kimble has run away, escaping to a nearby hospital where he has sews the wound he has acquired while escaping and shaved off his beard. He escapes to a sewer, where he is cornered by the marshal and his men in a pipe leading to a dam, which he jumps off. None of the other men think he could have survived and consider the case closed, but Gerard thinks he's still on the loose.
Kimble has used various disguises and his calls from payphones have been traced. He finds Dr. Nichols, asks for change and leaves. The marshal questions Nichols, who refuses to cooperate, telling them Kimble is too smart for them. Kimble has gone to the hospital where he used to work, pretending to be a janitor while looking up the records of one-armed men. A nurse (Julianne Moore) has asked him to transport a sick patient, but he cures the patient which the nurse witnesses. Marshall Gerard catches up to Kimble yet again.
In the middle left panel is Dr. Kevorkian
Kimble escapes yet again into a St. Patrick's Day parade. At a medical conference, Dr. Nichols is speaking to promote a new drug called Provasic. Richard Kimble disrupts the speech to say he knows the records were falsified by Nichols to get FDA approval for the drug he stood to make millions from. He also knows how the murder of his wife went down--it was originally meant for him, Nichols arranged for Sykes, the one-armed man to commit the murder because Kimble would have come forth with this information, and he would have succeeded if it weren't for you meddling kids. This leads to a big fight on the rooftop, Gerard finally catches up again, and says he's known Kimble was innocent all along.
THE PHEWWW-GITIVE
Cracked #287, January 1994
w: Lou Silverstone
a: John Severin
The picture the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have on their wall is of co-creator Kevin Eastman.
Julianne Moore isn't caricatured here. Even though she'd had plenty of roles at that point, Lost World was her big breakthrough. Or maybe John Severin was just lazy.
Also not in the MAD parody are Kimble breaking into Sykes' house to get the evidence, the subsequent questioning by the feds, and Kimble's fight with him on the El train.
THE PHEWGITIVE
1963-1967 ABC
MAD #89, September 1964
w: Stan Hart
a: Mort Drucker
The Fugitive started out as a TV series, which MAD did a parody of back in the day, with Barry Morse in the Marshal Gerard role. The formula was used later for Kung Fu and The Incredible Hulk, which were also parodied by the other major humor magazines, and will be posted soon.
Jack Palance's show was The Greatest Show on Earth, which was only on that one season.
I believe the police chief is supposed to be Bert Lahr.
And the head of the Olympics is Wally Cox.
David Janssen sent MAD a letter of himself enjoying his roasting.
From If TV Shows Were Written by the Ad Agencies in Sick #48, November 1966. Artist unknown.
Chris Elliott did his version for a few years on Late Night with David Letterman.
DUMB ADAMS' SCREEN TEST
Sick #112, October 1976
w: Jim Simon
a: Jerry Grandenetti
Kind of like Star Search or American Idol. Contestants were picked from the studio audience to re-enact scenes from a famous Hollywood movie with movie stars, and the winner was picked by a director to have a part as an extra in a movie.
The contestant plays opposite Clint Eastwood, though the show would never have actors of that caliber.
This was TV/comics writer Mark Evanier's description of how the show came about:
"He had one other series which almost no one remembers and which is not in any of the obits I've seen. In the early seventies, Adams made the rounds of talk shows and often brought out-takes from Get Smart, mostly of him and Don Rickles. They were hilarious and the reception gave him the idea to do a whole series showing out-takes…or bloopers, as they're sometimes called in a quasi-trademarked way. When he tried to put it together, he discovered that the union contracts made it prohibitive; that he'd have to pay or negotiate with dozens of people for each 30-second clip. In fact, the Screen Actors Guild told him that he technically shouldn't have been airing the Get Smart footage without paying actors, directors, writers, etc. Years later, the union rules were changed in a way that made the Dick Clark "Bloopers" shows do-able but at the time, it killed Adams's plan. Trying to figure out a way around it, he came up with the only possible solution: Create new out-takes just for the show! So in 1975, he hosted Don Adams' Screen Test, a kind of talent competition where the idea was to get aspiring actors, pair them in scenes with established stars and then have a lot of things go wrong. It didn't last long because, I suspect, the out-takes just didn't seem real. Which they weren't."
UPDATE:
from Sick#46, August 1966
Every single one of these shows was or will be covered on this blog. From Sick #46, August 1966. Founding Sick writer Dee Caruso was one of the main writers of Get Smart.
BRAND-XED
MAD #102, April 1966
w: Lou Silverstone
a: Mort Drucker
Short-lived western about Jason McCord (Chuck Connors), drummed out of the U.S. Cavalry for deserting his troops at Bitter Creek, a crime he did not commit, and forced to roam the West disgraced and never believed for his innocence. The premise was similar to The Fugitive, something they mention at the end of this.
