JUNE UPDATES #3: THE REST

The last of the updates... for now. The shows are all highlighted linking to previous postsfrom before in case you need to know the characters' real names or the actors who played them, or are lost in some other way.

I finally found this Bananas article I mentioned last week.

WKRP IN CINCINNATI
CBS 1978-1982

WKLOD IN CINCINNATI
Bananas #44, circa 1981
w: Megan Stine & H. William Stine
a: Samuel B. Whitehead

Funny how in 1981 eight characters was considered “too many”.

I think I see John Chancellor, Chevy Chase, Wolfman Jack, Leonard Nimoy as Spock, John Denver, Dan Aykroyd as Beldar Conehead, and Howard Cosell.

STRAIT-JACKET (1964)
dir: William Castle

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO JOAN CRAWFORD?
Sick #29, June 1964
w: Dee Caruso and Bill Levine
a: Gray Morrow

Sorry a reference to Joan Crawford is the closest thing I have this Pride Month.

The title of this is a play on the film Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. The movie was about a formerly institutionalized woman accused of ax murders.

Back when movie theaters were actual theaters and not just the friend of friend of a rich guy's screening room you once saw, stars would publicize the movie at a screening rather than TV appearances and press conferences.

THE EXORCIST (1973)
dir: William Friedkin

THE EXORSICK
Sick #103, April 1975
w & a: Dom Rinaldo

I'm guessing this was an unsolicited contribution in their slush pile and they needed a few pages to fill, since I never saw the name before or since and the panels are all cut and reformatted to fit the page,

WACKY T.V. WEDDINGS
Trash #3. April 1978
a: Vic Martin

No seventies humor magazine would be complete without spoofs of these shows.

THE HOBBIT (1977)
dirs: Arthur Rankin Jr. & Jules Bass


Before the movies there was this made-for-TV special.

THE HABBIT
Trash #3, April 1978
a: Bill Cicaida

Based on the book by J.R.R. Tolkein

JUNE UPDATES 2: PARODY MAGAZINE #3

Sadly, this blog on a daily basis will come to a close the end of this month. I'm doing most of it in alphabetical order now, but as I mention in the sidebar, I still have holes to fill, so I'll always come back for that, and things always stay on the internet, but here are a few more things I've filled in. Thanks again to Chris Ekman, who has most of them.

The rest I'll have tomorrow. Here are the pieces from the third issue of Parody in September 1977. I don't feel the need to summarize everything so I'll just make the titles highlighted in orange (or underlined or whatever settings you have for links) link to previous parody posts that have texts about them and what the characters' real names are. You can check off these boxes on your seventies references: Rocky, Starsky and Hutch, Muhammad Ali, Howard Cosell, Wonderama, King Kong, Gerald Ford, Bobby Riggs, Olga Korbut, Ali McGraw, Gong Show, Jaws, Charlie'a Angels, The Godfather, Polish jokes.

ROCKY
dir: John Avildsen

ROCKIE
a: Walter Brogan

Marlon Brando is in the corner of the first panel, being a contender I guess.

MONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL
ABC 1970-2005

KING KONG
dir: John Guillermin

HOWARD COSELL INTERVIEWS KING KONG
a: Ed Kaye (Alan Kupperberg)

CHARLIE'S ANGELS
ABC 1976-1981

CHEERLIE'S ANGELS
a: John Reiner

This was the original cast of Kate Jackson, Jaclyn Smith, and Farrah Fawcett-Majors.

Surprisingly, among the seventies refences, no jokes about Billy Carter or Anita Bryant.

JUNE UPDATE 1: A HARD DAY'S HELP

A HARD DAY'S NIGHT (1964)
dir: Richard Lester

When they say “Off-Beatle”, they really mean it. None of them look like the actual Beatles. They took everybody by surprise when they came to America and revived what was assumed a dead genre outside of cities, and I guess Jack Davis and the staff of Sick thought the Beatles would be just a passing fad and by 1966 nobody would remember them. Boy, were they wrong.

MOVIE SPOOF: A HARD DAY'S NIGHT
Sick #33, December 1964
w: Paul Laikin

It's funny they say “staff writer” as if to imply there's a bunch of people who work in an office together when it was just a cubicle where one person probably put several magazines together.

Jake Ehrlich=celebrity fixer/lawyer. Xavier Cugat=Cuban bandleader. C. Aubrey Smith=British cricket player. Jean Hersholt=silent matinee idol. Percy Kilbride and Maria Ouspenskaya=character actors who were old. Shelley Berman=more known now for Curb Your Enthusiasm was once popular stand-up comic.

Frankie Darro=child actor

Tommy Manville=socialite with 13 marriages

Willie Sutton=bank robber. The movies mentioned were known for being inconsequential.

MAD had many references to the Beatles over the years. This was a poster they had as an insert in MAD Super Special #25 in 1978, eight years after they broke up. Did the MAD staff think they were a new thing?

Most of the jokes about them were about their hair. This was a parody of the Breck shampoo ads that had paintings of famous models from the 30s to the 60s. The back cover of MAD #90 in October 1964.

Frank Frazetta only did a few jobs for them and they wanted him to be a regular but they could never work a deal about keeping the original art (contributors were able to just send digital files towards the end). Had he become one of the “usual gang of idiots” he might not have been known for his fantasy art.

Other jokes about the Beatles were just about their name.

More articles from the issue of Sick I showed the cover for at the beginning of this post.

The centerspread for this issue reads more like something you'd read in a fan magazine than something you'd see in a humor magazine.

Back cover for that issue.

Probably a coincidence they were bald for the cover of Help!

Probably also a coincidence the Beatles' next movie was called Help!

National Lampoon did a whole issue dedicated to The Beatles.

The grandfather wasn't actually reading Sick in the movie like above, but they very well couldn't use the photo of their manager with the competition.