Yes, but it’s sub-tle. Very sub-tle. I started at it a long time before I realized what was going on in it! :eek:
This was the first thing I thought of when I saw the thread title. I got Boy’s Life for several years as a kid. Don’t really remember anything about it. But the parody is with me forever. Here’s the whole issue of National Lampoon that contains it. NSFW.
Oh … my … God! I haven’t laughed that hard in ages! 
Pure comedy gold!!!
It took me a while to get it, but I did eventually. Now I’m wondering if I shouldn’t be on some sort of government watch list 
youngsters these days can’t read and need pictures.
why back in my day the only picture stories were the heroic rescue and camping hints.
Boy’s Life might have had the first science fiction I ever read- I believe it was some sort of serial about a guy from the far future, where brains were huge and bodies frail. That’s all I remember of it. Late 50s or early 60s.
And aren’t you posting child porn yourself?
Boys Life still runs some of the same comic strips it used to back in the 1960s, when I got it. Although the style for Pee Wee Harris has changed radically.
Make fun of Boys Life if you want, but it had some good stuff in it. Bobby Fischer had a chess column (! – at least, there was one with his name on it). It frequently featured science fiction by significant SF writers. Arthur C. Clarke’s Sunjammer first appeared there (they later changed the title to “The Wind from the Sun”), and had a GREAT cover illustration. Isaac Asimov Poul Anderson, and Robert Heinlein also had stories in there.
There were directions for making some decent camping contraptions – I still have the combination pack frame/folding stool/folding table I built from plans in BL.
They had interviews with famous people – like Salvador Dali – and “how to” instructions on wood burning with a magnifying glass and the sun, and such things.
They did have a lot of good stuff, that’s true.
The thing I remember best is when they reprinted chapters from Bertrand Brinley’s The Mad Scientists’ Club. God, how I loved that book back then (and still do)!
Great OG! Pee Wee Harris has been around a LOT longer than I realized. He pre-dates Boys Life. Next year he’ll be a century old!
+1.
Soooo… did you ever try tilting your head back to make blood flow to the part of your brain where the good ideas lived? 
As a matter of fact, yes, I did. I also used to keep m glasses pushed up on my forehead. 
I used to read my brother’s copies when I was a kid. I thought it was way better than American Girl, which never had any science fiction or much of anything else I found interesting.
I loved it, in the 70s.
Their Mascot, Pedro The Mule, had his own letter column. He’d sign his replies with a double horseshoe mark.
What kind of correspondence did “Pedro The Mule” have?
When I was a Scout in the early '80s, they ran John Christopher’s The Tripods as a serialized comic strip. One of my earliest exposures to Sci-Fi.
Wasn’t he kind of the BL version of Ann Landers? :dubious:
I do have to say that Boy’s Life really did a great job of tapping into the mentality of its target demographic. I was a Boy Scout so I got my own issues in the 1980’s but the ones I really liked were the large format ones from the 1950’s that my father got and my grandparents saved. I read all of those dozens of back issues many times. It was like a time capsule but still seemed somehow relevant to me. I wanted to go camping in the ways they were describing and I tried out the exercises to get really good at basketball and everything else.
It’s for sale at a nearby chain bookstore, and our library carries it. I often read the section where they show (in comic strip form) how Scouts earned medals for saving lives.
I remember seeing issues of Boy’s Life in my middle school library (1974-76 - actually, for the first year, it was a K-8 library). It was a rare thing when the Scout in the “Scouts in Action” story received something other than the Honor Medal (for saving a life - although the picture of the medal in the magazine had the words “For Saving Life” on it, but the medal on the Boy Scouts web site (a) does not seem to have this on it, and (b) says that it can be awarded for “attempting to save a life” as well).