A couple of weeks ago I saw Charade (the 1964 stylish thriller with Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant) for the first time, and it reminded me of the many films I’d only experienced by reading the Mad magazine takeoffs, 'cause basically I was just a kid then and wasn’t likely to see many of the adult pictures that were typically mocked. I suspect this is true of many other Mad consumers.
The Mad versions I remember from the 60s were almost always drawn by Mort Drucker (a wizard caricaturist who just turned 90 last month) and written by Dick DeBartolo or one of the regular idiots. I recall a lot of the humor, such as it was, was of the “meta” variety, with characters commenting on the actors playing them or the artifice of Hollywood movies in general - “Oh you think this (disaster) is bad, you haven’t seen Tuesday Weld in (movie)”. Etc.
My pre-adolescent years as a regular Mad consumer go from around 1963 to 1966. Here are some of the parodies I’ve read, which to date I have yet to see the source material:
“Lord Jump” (Lord Jim). Peter O’Tall as a a cowardly guy who keeps jumping ship.
“The Sinpiper” (The Sandpiper) Liz and Dick in what I guess was some sort of attempt to do an arty Ingmar Bergman facsimile.
“Bubby Lake Missed by a Mile” (Bunny Lake is Missing) Title child goes AWOL, there’s something about the Zombies (group) appearing on a TV set as a cynical ploy to draw in the teen crowd.
“Hood” (Hud) Paul Newman (I don’t recall the funny name they gave him) as a neer-do-well cattle rancher; there was a scene where they have to shoot a bunch of cattle and Elsie the Borden’s cow was pictured among them.
Of course, there are others - “Mutiny on the Bouncy” and such - that I’ve since caught up with the pictures that inspired them. And others that I was old enough to have caught at their time of release.
But I’m guessing some of you may have your own personal lists. Remember only include films you’ve never seen.
Who in Heck Is Virginia Wolf Before they even got into the narrative, they describe how the producers had to turn Elizabeth Taylor into a “hideous, overblown, sexless blob.”
Lord Jump Peter O’Toole’s character describes in great detail how he pauses for dramatic effect. The second time he pauses, he explains it’s because he’s having a problem with the natives’ drinking water.
I also remember the Charade parody from one of the paperback MAD collections. Didn’t see the original film until college.
My peak MAD consumption was mid-1970s. Parodies of movies I’ve never seen that I still remember:
Popicorn (Papillon)
Shampooped - (Shampoo)
The Misery Breaks (The Missouri Breaks - western. I remember a panel of a guy getting shot in an outhouse and complaining about the toilet paper)
The Bad Mouth Bears (Even though I was a kid at the time, I’ve never seen The Bad News Bears)
Also, there were parodies of TV shows I never watched.
What Happened? - spoof of “What’s happening?”
The Lust Boat - (Love Boat)
As a kid I read lots of Mad parodies of movies that I had never seen. Some of which I’ve seen in the years since then, some of which I haven’t. Three that I remember reading the Mad versions of but have never seen in full (though I’ve seen significant chunks of all three) are Death Wish, Ishtar, and Yentil.
The OP has most of the ones I recall as not seeing, although he doesn’t have Midnight Cowboy or Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice or Easy Rider or The Carpetbaggers.
Mad did parodies of a lot more “adult” movies in the 1960s than they did later. From the 1970s on they did more of the movies that teens and even pre-teens were likely to see.
Probably because there weren’t many of these prior to the '70s. I think the big watershed was in 1975 with Jaws, which was followed by a flood of summertime blockbusters.
I read MAD regularly until the early '70s, when it got political. I remember pretty much all of the movie and TV satires up to then, though I didn’t see many of them until I was high-school age or older. The Sinpiper comes immediately to mind, and the movie was just as silly as MAD portrayed it.
I think the earliest TV satire I read was Perry Masonmint, and I never really watched that show until it was revived in the early '80s.
The ones I remember are mostly from circa 1980. Maybe we had a “Mad Goes to the Movies” collection or something?
-Altered States (“Assaulted States”)
-Dressed to Kill (“Undressed to Kill”)
-Ordinary People (“Extraordinary People”)
-Popeye (“Flopeye”)
-The Deep (“The Dip”)
I think I’ve seen a few minutes of “Altered States”, “Ordinary People” and “Popeye” now, but not the whole film.
In a similar vein, years ago I read Harvard Lampoon’s Bored of the Rings before I tried reading the LOTR trilogy and/or The Hobbit. I could NOT get past the first 3 pages. And years later, the films did nothing at all for me. Except get me strange looks when I walked out of the theatre after 5 minutes.
More movies that I STILL haven’t seen, although I’ve read the MAD Parodies:
The Blue-Eyed Kook ("Cool Hand Luke)
**Balmy and Clod ** (“Bonnie and Clyde”)
the Wild 1/2 (“The Wild One”)
Hood (“Hud”)
In the Out Exit (“Up the Down Staircase”)
Hoo Boy, Columbus (“Goodbye Columbus”)
Shmoe (“Joe”)
The Foul and the Prissy Cat (“The Owl and the Pussycat”)
After that I don’t really count them, because I was certainly old enough o see them, although I didn’t, always.
I actually saw “The Birds” I the theater before the parody came out. In other cases, I saw the films on TV or elsewhere long after the parodies came out, but before I read them. There were also Mad parodies of Movies The Never Existed, which I never saw most of the inspirations for, like The Flying Ace (starring The Beatles and Ed Sullivan and, for some reason, Natalie Wood) and I read **O-o-o-o-o-o-07, the Bond Musical" before I saw any of the James Bond films. But I did see all the Giant Ape movies before I read the Son of Mighty Joe Kong (starring Dick van Dyke, James Garner, and Doris Day)
Oh man, the Joe parody, Schmoe, had me (as a mid teen) literally crying with laughter. We were at Kennedy Airport picking up a relative and I bought that issue at the news stand in the Pan Am terminal. My parents had to practically gag me. My foreign relative thought I was disturbed because I wouldn’t stop laughing. It took me almost 20 years before I finally saw the actual movie.
Ditto. I still laugh about the scene where Bill, the one who killed his daughter’s drug dealer, comes to Schmoe’s apartment with his wife Joan (don’t remember their MAD names). They meet Schmoe’s wife at the door, and Joan says “Bill, I think I’m going to be violently ill.” It’s just such a fitting expression of utter contempt, I use it in conversation as much as possible.
Later, they join Schmoe at the dinner table, which is already a mess, and Schmoe lets out a huge belch. He says “I’m sorry, I should have belched after I picked my teeth!” (I used that in front of a Sunday school teacher, and she was not impressed) Joan says “Bill, I think I’m going to throw up all over the table.” Bill responds “Go ahead. They won’t notice.”
I saw The Sound of Music on my first trip to the Soviet Union in 1975, at the age of 20. It was a very old print, badly spliced together and dubbed into Russian, which I didn’t know well back then (the songs were in English with subtitles). I had no trouble following the story, though.
A month or so after I returned home, I was at the house of a friend who had a copy of the issue of ***MAD *** that contained The $ound of Money. As I read it, I was laughing so hard I literally fell out of the easy chair I was sitting in.
“I have something to **tell **you, Maria. The Captain is in **love **with you.”
“But, Countess! I’m in love with the Captain. And if he’s in love with me, that means I must leave! If that makes no sense to you, it makes even less sense to me. But then, I didn’t **write **this picture. Did anyone?”
Oh my God, it was priceless. I finally saw The Sandpiper for the first time, about a year ago, and it instantly brought the parody back to my mind, panel by panel, even though I hadn’t read it in at least 40 years.
The parody ends with the Token Negro and the Beatnik on the beach, delivering a meta-commentary on the movie, and I was actually disappointed that the movie didn’t end that way. It felt incomplete.