Psycho, Hitchcock and The End of MAD Magazine

As I post this comes word that Mad magazine is going out of business.

Oh, I'm waiting to see if some "weak tea" version of Mad will be placed on the Internet, but evidently, sales have declined for years. Its a satire magazine pitched mainly at pre-teen boys, so I haven't had reason to even try to read it in years. But evidently a new generation of pre-teen boys don't think much of it.

I read a "history" article on MAD. It seems that it began as an offshoot of the gory "horror comics" of the early fifties(early issues of MAD have a gross-out angle to the humor which suggests it was STILL a horror comic), but came 1960, it brought in some new artists, and some new writers, and got a "hook" going that created the MAD Magazine my generation knew and loved. Evidently MAD peaked with 2 million readers in 1972 and 1973; makes sense, a lot of boomers were closing out their pre-teen years then.

There were some things in MAD even a kid of 6 could understand -- like "Spy vs Spy" -- a kind of Road Runner/Coyote thing where the black clad spy and the white clad spy would switch roles (winner/loser) in panels without words.

There was the "fold in" at the end of the magazine: one statement while the page was fully open turned into something else when you folded it together(hard to explain.)

There were panels drawn by a guy named Dave Berg -- "Berg's Eye View." I recall that often Berg would draw scantily clad women with hour glass figures and help train young boys for manhood -- there was one with a newlywed husband in his pajamas looking at his new wife in a negligee that told me: "Hey, the adult years look pretty fun!"

But a big item in each issue was a movie spoof and a TV series spoof.

The movie spoofs(and maybe the TV series spoofs) were drawn by a man named Mort Drucker. His very name seemed funny, though as with a lot of MAD contributors, he was New York Jewish with the humor of those influences.

Anyway, to do his movie spoofs, Mort Drucker would be provided by the movie studios with production photos from a movie and re-draw them "funny." John Wayne on his horse in True Grit became an even more overweight John Wayne, with the horse in morose pain, buckling under the weight. The spoof was called "True Fat" and Wayne admonished Glen Campbell that he didn't have it -- "Kid, True Chubby isn't enough."

As I agreed on the net with some fellow ex-youths from during MAD's heyday, when 1968 and the R rating came along, MAD was often the only place we could see even a SEMBLANCE of an "R-rated" movie, with spoofs of Midnight Cowboy and Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, often drawn with scantily clad women in the Mort Drucker tradition -- visually different from Dave Berg's scantily clad women, but still sexy.

Backing up in time, it was the MAD magazine version of Charade that told me the movie was violent and maybe I couldn't see it -- the killings of George Kennedy, James Coburn and Ned Glass were rendered in all their gory glory, and maybe a little worse..

MAD made fun of the Psycho/Slasher genre with a spoof of Hush, Hush, Sweet , Charlotte -- showing a "microscopic close-up" of a giant knife blade breaking through epidermal layers to show little dancing red blood cells at the end of the knife ("Nothing can be more graphic than THIS!)

MAD and Mort Drucker never did a spoof of the 1960 Psycho, but they did do one of Psycho II in 1983, I recall buying my first MAD in over a decade to read it. I recall in the opening frames of Norman in the courtroom getting his release, they drew Martin Balsam as the court reporter...with a knife in his chest and a sorrowful expression.

MAD and Mort Drucker DID do a spoof of "The Birds" in 1963. It made sense. Unlike Psycho, this was more of a "horror movie for kids" and so it made sense for MAD to go there.

I recall in the "Birds" parody a re-print of Hitchcock's billboard for The Birds with Hitch saying:
"the birds is coming!" ...MAD put graffiti on the billboard: "And good grammar in advertising has went!"

I recall in the "Birds" parody how the characters always stop to get excited about Hitchcock's cameo: "Here is is, the director of our movie, the famous fat man" ...and...well, one time it was Nikita Kruschev, and one time it was Jackie Gleason. By the time he made his cameo, Hitchcock was dead and covered in birds -- angry at their treatment by the master.

I also always liked this line when Tippi Hedren is first pecked on the forehead by a seagull:

"So -- am I about to be horribly killed early in the movie like Janet Leigh in Psycho? Nope, nothing like that...I just get pecked by this bird."

True, that. Its a long wait to something happening in The Birds, but when it does, its minor. We still have to wait a long time for something more exciting or scary. Unlike as with the shower scene.

Tippi also takes note that the blood on her gloved finger looks like grape jelly. (It does, but new printings of The Birds have added red.)