According to the recent 286 glossy-page “green” issue of Vanity Fair, E.C. Comics was founded 60 years ago by William M. Gaines, kicking up an important early skirmish in the ongoing American Culture Wars by publishing influential, controversial horror, action, science fiction and fantasy titles like Tales From The Crypt, Two-Fisted Tales and Weird Science.
But Mad magazine, which premiered in 1952, would prove to be the company’s most iconic, longest-surviving contribution. Much has been written about the generations-deep influence of Alfred E. Neuman and “the usual gang of idiots” on American satire and popular culture in general...but, this being the Screengrab, I wanted to pay special tribute to six decades of Mad’s sometimes brilliant, sometimes sophomoric movie parodies.
According to our old friend Wikipedia, the first film spoof featured in Mad was 1953’s Ping Pong (get it?), followed shortly thereafter by Noon!, Sane!, From Eternity Back To Here!, Wild 1 (correction) Wild ½, Stalag 18 and approximately a zillion others over the subsequent decades, up to and including contemporary jabs like The Da Vinci Coma, Spider-Sham 3 and Harry Plodder & The Torture of the Fan Base.
I became familiar with the older parodies through repackaged, full-color mini-comic inserts in the Mad Super Special editions, but it’s the mid-‘70s Mort Drucker era that I remember most fondly, with its takedowns of movies I knew and loved (Star Roars, The Spy Who Glubbed Me), “grown-up” movies I experienced in Mad long before viewing the actual objects of ridicule (The Ecchorcist, A Crock o’ (Blip!) Now) and countless flicks I never bothered to see (The Eyes of Lurid Mess, The Calamityville Horror) figuring they’d never be as entertaining as the Mad versions.
Was I annoyed when, halfway through reading the gazillion-page Lord of the Rings trilogy Mad blew the ending of the epic for me with 1979’s The Ring and I, a parody of 1978’s animated Lord of the Rings (which only went as far as the Battle of Helm’s Deep)? Yes. Very annoyed.
But I had to give credit to the magazine for brutally savaging its own 1980 celluloid fiasco, Up The Academy (directed, curiously enough, by Robert Downey, Sr.). And, in addition to the laughs, attitude and cinematic sensibility it offered, Mad also provided my pubescent, pre-internet libido with any number of smokin' hot pen-and-ink fantasy girls to ogle (Undressed To Kill’s semi-clad Nancy Allen caricature, in particular) as fondly remembered now as any Playboy centerfold.
Eventually, of course, like an elder sibling cast out of Narnia, I drifted away from Mad in later years, never to return...but as long as there’s Bleccch in my Kaputnik, the usual gang of idiots will live forever in my Portzebie.