June 16: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is ‘80s Comedy!

In 1980, 8-year-old Sam was all in on MAD Magazine—every issue. It’s how I saw so many R-rated movies, as I couldn’t go to the theater but could read them as redone by Mort Drucker. Imagine my joy when the Usual Gang of Idiots decided to make a movie, just like those new kids, the National Lampoon.

A note: MAD has the humor of old school Jewish comedy, teaching me words like schmuck while the Lampoon was rich kids who went to an Ivy League school and did drugs. Also: Oversimplification can be funny.

Publisher William Gaines — yes, the same guy who did Tales from the Crypt — told The Comics Journal, “What happened is that we had a contract with Warner Brothers to put out a MAD movie. It’s like four years old now. They came up with a script that we didn’t like, and then they came up with a script using our scriptwriters that they didn’t like, but meanwhile they threw this script onto our desk … Although there were many things in it that I thought were offensive and should be removed, generally, I liked the script. And I thought, “Well, in addition to a MAD movie, there’s nothing wrong with having something like Lampoon did with Animal House.” Animal House was “Lampoon Presents” and really had nothing to do with the magazine; it was just using their name, and it was a good movie, and it was very successful, and it made Lampoon a lot of money. I guess. So we were going to do the same thing. “MAD Magazine Completely Disassociates Itself from Up the Academy“. But that was too long for them; they couldn’t think in that many words. They put the damn thing out without all the deletions they had promised to make, which means they’re liars. I’m talking about one of my sister companies [laughter] … And there we were connected with it, and there wasn’t much we could do about it. I paid Warner Bros. 30 grand to take MAD‘s name off for television. So, for $30,000, we got out of being associated with it on Home Box Office. It won’t say “MAD Magazine Presents,” and Alfred E. Neuman won’t be in it. And it was well worth $30,000.”

It is quite like many other sex comedies that came after the men of Delta House. Chooch (Ralph Macchio) is the youngest son of an organized crime family; El-Hashid “Hash” Amier Jr. (Tommy Citera) is the son of an oil sheik; Eisenhower “Ike” MacArthur (Wendell Brown) is the son of a faith healer who keeps marrying young wives and Hash keeps schtupping them (see, I did learn from MAD!). Oliver Holt (Hutch Parker) has a governor for a father and just wants to sleep with his girlfriend Candy (Stacy Nelkin, who is Ellie Grimbridge, and if you get that, welcome to the site), except his father doesn’t want a teen pregnancy getting in the way of his re-election.

Chooch wants to go straight, so enter new recruit, Rodney Ververgaert (Harry Teinowitz), who likes to make things explode.

They’re all being brutalized by Major Vaughn Liceman (Ron Leibman, the Emmy and Tony-winning actor who asked for his name to be removed from this movie; he was also married to Linda Lavin and Jessica Walter, which is pretty good when you think about it), your typical bad guy in a teen sex comedy.

Candy ends up getting sent to military school as well, so Liceman sets the couple up and takes pictures of them in the act while demanding that he gets to sleep with Candy to protect Oliver’s father’s election. There’s also a snobs vs. slobs soccer game, Tom Poston playing the most stereotypical mincing gay character ever, Antonio “Huggy Bear” Fargas as a coach, and the mind-blowing Barbara Bach, Lady Starke as Bliss, the teacher every boy in school wants.

Also, it’s not good. It’s aggressively bad.

Directed by Robert Downey Sr., who said it was “one of the worst fucking things in history,” and written by Tom Patchett and Jay Tarses, it was so bad that MAD skipped a letters column to present MAD Magazine Resents Throw Up the Academy, which called out Leibman taking his name off the movie, the fact that actors had to have been pubished by being in it and just two pages of the writers, artists and editors being so mad about the movie that they all quit.

Here’s just a sample of this hit piece:

“Once upon a time, there was a Publisher of a magazine. He was a happy man, publishing his magazine. But one day, he said, “Wouldn’t it be swell if they made a movie and my magazine sponsored it?! It would help sales! Isn’t that a wonderful idea?” All of his Yes-Men agreed that it was a wonderful idea, and so the smart people in Hollywood made a movie, and the magazine sponsored it. But did the Publisher live happily ever after? Not on your life! He overlooked one little thing while summoning images of millions of people rushing to see the movie and then rushing to newsstands to buy his magazine. The thing he overlooked was to find out if the movie was any good! Well? Was it? If you’ve seen it, you already know the answer to that question!”

I had never seen a magazine hype something and then apologize. It really was a big deal to my young brain.

It also has a terrifying real-life Alfred E. Newman, designed by Rick Baker. I can only compare this, as the end of the movie, to taking a painful shit and then wiping, only to find blood all over the toilet paper.

Yes, Rev. MacArthur, Ike’s dad, is played by King Coleman, the man who sang “(Do The) Mashed Potatoes.”

At least the soundtrack is good, filled with stuff like The Stooges’ “Gimme Danger” and “Night Theme,” Blondie’s “One Way Or Another” and “X Offender,” The Kinks’ “Yes Sir, No Sir,” Lou Reed’s “Street Hassle,” The Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner,” David Johansen’s “Girls,” Nick Lowe’s “Heart of the City” and Cheap Trick’s “Surrender.” There’s no reason to have that many great songs in a film this fecund.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.