Tuesday, March 26, 2013

MAD? You Betcha!

The influence of MAD* on the non-conformists, creeps, losers & general weirdos (i.e., the interesting members) of this reporter's generation probably can't be overstated, especially among aging losers expressing themselves on the Internet. (Hi there!)
Rude, irreverent, and with 58 years of history now behind them, [Hey, that's us! — Editor] MAD magazine’s movie satires gave some of us our first encounters with the modern cinematic canon.

[...]

While film studies majors gasp over the deconstruction of genre in the works of David Lynch and the meta-movies of Charlie Kaufman, “the usual gang of idiots” over at MAD have been deconstructing, meta-narrativing, and postmodernizing motion pictures since the very first movie parody (Hah! Noon!) appeared in 1954.
Also the mocking of comic books, esp. in the reprint paperbacks those of us who are around the same age as the magazine snatched up in the '60s, & a lot of other crap. We've nothing else, but we'll link to what inspired this observation of the obvious.
*The magazine, not Mutually Assured Destruction, although that M.A.D.'s influence on us all might deserve a look as well. Could someone get on that right away before the rest of us die & can't answer your survey?

1 comment:

Batocchio said...

Great piece! Yeah, I stopped getting MAD when they all but stopped doing the movie parodies. The Dick DeBartolo-Mort Drucker collaborations were the best. (They outdid themselves on the Star Wars and Star Trek parodies.)