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 issue of MAD this was in also spoofed Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom that month.
MAD #250, October 1984
w: Arnie Kogen
a: Mort Drucker
Allen Bauer (Tom Hanks) runs a fruit distribution business with his brother Freddie (John Candy). Another typical chaotic day at work handling drivers and customers.
This film was one of the first releases of Touchstone Pictures, one of the many subsidiaries in Disney's “new look”. It's a completely innocuous movie, but the fact that it showed rear nudity was the furthest they had gone up to then. Anyway, it's the reason for the cartoon characters at the bottom of the splash panel (no pun intended).
Freddie is Allen's perverted brother and partner, bragging about a letter he had printed in Penthouse Forum and later at a wedding he's contriving ways to look up womens' dresses just like the earlier flashback (not shown). Allen is depressed that he just broke up with his girlfriend, and his brother tries to fix him up.
Allen decides to get away from it all by going to Cape Cod for the weekend. While there he tries to get directions and asks Dr. Walter Kornbluth (Eugene Levy), a condescendeing, hostile scientist convinced a mermaid exists, to help him across the ocean. He eventually finds someone to help him, falls out of the boat and drowns, and is rescued by a naked woman (Daryl Hannah).
The naked woman turns out to be the mermaid. When Allen drowned, his wallet fell out, which she found his address in. She goes to New York to find him and surfaces on Liberty Island where she's arrested for indecent exposure. All she has is his wallet and she can't talk, so the police call Allen and he bails her out. He takes her home, and they do nothing but have sex all night. He has to go to work and leaves her alone. She learns English from TV, and that clothes come from Bloomingdale's, which she finds her way to. When Allen returns home, he finds out from his doorman that the woman has gone there.
She's mastered how to speak and read the English language by watching the TVs at Bloomingdale's all day, though much of it is advertising hyperbole. After a night on the town, she decides her name is 'Madison' after seeing a street sign. Madison is always trying to hide the fact that she's a mermaid from Allen despite the clues being there. Doctor Kornbluth has found out where Madison is and is bent on exposing her but keeps bungling his attempts and getting injured.
Madison agrees to marry Allen but keep putting off telling him something about herself. When Kornbluth finally exposes her as a mermaid, Allen realizes what she's been hiding, and other scientists seize her for observation. Kornbluth has a change of heart and with the aid of the Bauer Brothers, helps her get back home to the sea. Allen says goodbye to her but once they're cornered goes in to live with her.
This was the cover to the Mexican edition. I can't tell what's going on either, though it looks like their Scarfaceparody was also in that issue.
SPLAT!
Maniac #1, c. 1984
w: Jovial Bob Stine
a: Sam Viviano
MAD didn't use the prologue of the movie where Allen fell overboard on a trip twenty years earlier and met Madison when they were kids.
Charlie was the mascot for Star-Kist tuna modeled after Phil Silvers.
SPLATT!
Muppet #3, Fall 1984
w: Jay Itzkowitz
a: J. McIntosh
NOT QUITE UP TO SPEED
MAD #332, December 1994
w: Dick DeBartolo
a: Angelo Torres
Pop quiz: You see the latest blogpost and have fifteen minutes to read it. What do you do?
Speed begins with Howard Payne (Dennis Hopper) having placed a bomb in an elevator, holding its passengers for a three million dollar ransom. Jack Traven (Keanu Reeves) and Harry Temple (Jeff Daniels) are able to temporarily keep the elevator from crashing to the ground and let the passengers out.
Sure, they laugh at Keanu Reeves' credibility as an action star now but a lot of actors got their start as stoners.
Howard flees, grabbing Harry. Jack shoots Harry in the leg to get Howard to release him. Howard runs away detonating the bomb, and it is assumed he has killed himself in the wreckage. Jack and Harry are rewarded and it is assumed the whole thing is over. The next morning, Jack sees a bus blow up on his way to work and gets a call from a payphone. Howard is still alive, is angrythey foiled his ransom plan, and now he has a new bomb threat.
Howard Payne has put a bomb on a city bus, and once the bus goes over 50 MPH, it sets off the bomb, and the bomb will explode if the bus goes under that speed. No passengers are allowed to leave the bus, or Howard will detonate the bomb. Jack is able to get on the bus and warn everybody of the situation. One passenger is in trouble with the law already and despite Jack telling him he's not in trouble, he still threatens to kill Jack. In the midst of attempting to disarm the guy, the driver (Hawthorne James) is shot. Annie (Sandra Bullock), a passenger, has to take control of the wheel and ironically, she's taking the bus because her license was revoked.
Jack, with the rest of the police force by his side, is able to get under the bus and find out what kind of bomb it is, so he can call his partner Harry, find out what kind it is, and hopefully diffuse it. On the street, where the bus is, there's the “baby carriage of peril” motif that originated in Battleship Potemkin, which gets hit but turns out to just be full of empty cans. The highway that's been cordoned off for the bus has a gap they have to jump. The chase is all televised this whole time, parallels the O.J. Simpson trial that was concurrently going on. If that was too subtle a joke, O.J. lawyer Robert Shapiro is caricatured in the last panel.
They find out Howard knows what's going on in the bus because he's placed a security camera there, the police have found a way to jam the frequency of the camera so he sees the same footage of the passengers in a loop, making it look like like they're still on the bus, enabling the police to get them all off and letting the bus stop by itself and explode while empty on an airport runway. At the station, they've tracked down Howard Payne but Harry is killed on the way to his house. Howard will get the ransom money dropped off in a garbage can in the city. A squad is waiting for him but he never shows up. Jack figures out Howard took the money from beneath and is somewhere underground.
Howard is upset the ransom money has been triggered with a dye pack (not shown) and has commandeered a subway, taking Annie hostage. He fights Jack on the roof of the subway but is decapitated by a railway signal. The runaway subway is on an unfinished track, and ends up bursting out into the street, throwing Jack and Annie off as they're embracing and thinking they're about to die, to the amazement of a crowd of onlookers.
In a TV show or movie, a character is often shown reading a comic book or an issue of MAD to show their low I.Q. An episode of Seinfeld showed George Costanza reading an issue of Cracked, specifically the one containing this Speed parody.
When this cover was drawn, did they think the movie was about a school bus or were they celebrating Back to School season? The Sweet Hereafter wouldn't be released for another three years.
PEED
Cracked #294, November 1994
w: Lou Silverstone
a: Walter Brogan
The MAD parody didn't use poilce lieutenant “Mac” McMahon (Joe Morton).
“Most excellent” in the second panel is a reference to Keanu Reeves' role in the Bill and Ted movies.
So's the flying phone booth on this page.
John Wayne Bobbitt was famous because his wife cut off his penis.
SPACED 1999
MAD UK #185, c. 1977
w: Hitch Hitchings
a: Alf Saporito
Here's another look at the future of the past. This was a series about Moonbase Alpha, a nuclear waste storage site stationed there in 1999. An explosion sends the moon out of Earth's orbit and the series centers on situations involving worlds the station encounters.
The base was led by Helena Russell (Barbara Bain) and John Koenig (Martin Landau), with Victor Bergman (Barry Morse), their science advisor.
The next to last panel has various British 70's TV personalities such as the casts of Are You Being Served? and the UK version of General Hospital. Barry Morse had also been on US's The Fugitive.
The other versions of Russell and Koenig that they see are Landau and Bain's characters from Mission:Impossible, their previous series. The “planet” is Lew Grade, producer. And the punchline is the characters are the Thunderbirds, Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's show before this. The Andersons had done many sciene fiction shows before this, but this was the first to be done with live actors.
SPACE: 1998
Cracked #133, July 1976
a: Sururi Gumen
Allen Carter (Nick Tate) was the chief pilot of Moonbase Alpha.
The “instruments” gag was later used in Airplane!. An obvious joke anyone could come up with but funnier in the latter because it was in and out quicker.
Star Trek may have been considered a fly-by-night series in the seventies but sure came back with a vengeance. In a while we'll be devoting two entire weeks to the franchise.
SPACE $9.99 MARKED DOWN FROM $22.68
Crazy #20, October 1976
w: Len Herman
a: Ernie Colon
SOILED GREEN
Crazy #3, March 1974
w: Marv Wolfman & Steve Skeates
a: Enrique Ventura
Science-fiction film about a dystopian society that takes place... last year. The meat shortage and population explosion were big hot-button issues when this came out so this was the major subject.
The population of New York City is 40 million and the main diet of the people is a food called Soylent Green, which is rationed weekly. William Simonsen (Joseph Cotten) is on the board of the Soylent corporation. He is in his luxury apartment which is broken into and he gets whacked. Robert Thorn (Charlton Heston) is the detective who investigates his murder.
Det. Thorn goes home to his squalid apartment which he shares with Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson), a former librarian, and he's brought items he's taken from Simonsen's apartment such as real food, booze, and some books containing potential information about Simonsen and Soylent. Thorn goes back to Simonsen's apartment to further inventigate his girlfriend Shirl (Leigh Taylor-Young) who is holding a party for the rest of the women in the building. It's unauthorized because in the future, women are considered furniture that come with the apartments. Of all the things about a dystopian society, this seems to be considered normal.
Not shown: Thorn is being followed by Tab Fielding (Chuck Connors) an associated of Thorn who feels he “knows to much” while he's been searching for clues about the crime, excess people in the street are purged by scooping machines that take them away to an unknown location.
Sol goes to be euthanized, feeling he's already lived a long life, leaving only a note behind. Thorn finds the note and runs to see him before he dies. Then he sees he dead bodies being carried away in trucks and processed. He runs away and fights off people working in the processing plant but is defeated and carried away, but not before letting out his last words:
Spoiler:
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SOYLENT GREEN IS MADE FROM PEOPLE!!!!!!!
IT'S PEOPLE!!
In MAD's parody of The Music Man that I posted a few months ago, I went off on a tangent about how humor magazines parodied this hippie phenomenon, portraying them as a bunch of dirty kids who have sex all the time and do drugs and never take baths. Sick especially used them as a go-to target. I said then that it would be impossible for me to find every use of comedians not getting the counterculture, but I should put up more pages from issues of Sick.
The issue I had with 101 Hippie Jokes was missing a back cover, now that I've seen it, it continues the jokes from the inside.
Here's more hippie material from issue #58, February 1968.
Hippies made up the rumor about smoking bananas themselves. There's a part of Steal This Book that helped spread the hoax, saying the insides of bananas had hallucinatory properties. Donavan's Mellow Yellow was said to be about smoking bananas.
I've said Fred Wolfe is Paul Laikin. I believe this to be true because Paul Laikin has edited practically every MAD imitation in existence and used the same material in different magazines. Some of the recycled material has had both bylines.
Speaking of hippies, in 1991 there was a movie of The Doors directed by Oliver Stone, starring Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison. Cracked didn't do a parody of it, but did a poem about it in #263, September 1991.
