Change Your Image
patpayne79
Reviews
The Mad Magazine TV Special (1974)
An Object Lesson In a Harsh Animation Truth
This is an interesting "what could have been" special, to be sure. Making what amounted to a video version of the actual MAD Magazine is an great idea in theory... but in practice it showed to be lacking. This goes to show why later iterations (the live-action "MADTv" of the '90s and Cartoon Network's recent "MAD" series) wisely backed off on slavishly emulating the magazine's style and content.
First off, the animation is stilted. To be sure, they nailed the various styles of Jack Davis, Don Martin, Al Jaffee, Mort Drucker and the other members of the "Usual Gang of Idiots" from MAD's heyday, but that comes with a major downside. You can tell that doing so severely strained the budget, as the animation seems to be shot with all key frames and with only the most limited of animation to reduce the time, effort, and money needed to reproduce the intricate caricatures and insanely-detailed whackyness of the usual MAD issue of the period. It's a necessary weasel as animation is expensive, especially old-stye cel animation (this is why, by the way, Filmation was so in love with extreme closeups in its shows -- if all you had to do was animate the face, you could save money on a shot). But still, it looks just plain bad on screen. If you can't do it justice in animation, don't do it at all.
The writing is not a help either. Again, the scripts are almost verbatim taken from actual MAD Magazine articles and gag pages. While they work perfectly on the page, the same writing ends up being too plodding and verbose on screen. Numerous jokes take way too long to land, and when they do, they could have been better served by a sight gag. One of the best examples of this is in the "Car Manufacturer of the Year" segment, where when the auto exec is talking about how his workers have to have six people to carry a bumper because they're so fragile, the whole punchline is hearing an offscreen tinkle of breaking glass, implying that 60 butterfingers collectively dropped the thing. Why not actually play up the havoc the accident caused onscreen? The only ones that don't fall to this problem are the one-pager adaptations (The two Doc Martin gag strips, the "Spy vs. Spy" strip, the "X-Rayvings" segment, and the Tarzan gag) as those already told their jokes visually and so were much, much easier to translate verbatim to animation. In fact, the Spy vs. Spy skit gave me one of the very few laughs I could find in this special, because it was so on-tone.
In fact, the whole thing stuck me as being better served as a radio show. If you ever watch the special on YouTube, close your eyes during the three tentpole segments (the aforementioned "Car Manufacturer", "Parent of the Year Awards" and "The Oddfather") and the comedy makes as much sense without the visuals. This is not a good thing, not when you're an animation house that has access to the gleefully and unapologetically visually anarchic MAD Magazine at your disposal.
The acting and music were unspectacular, but solid. The actors came off as really kind of tentative in their deliveries, almost as if they were deliberately dialing it back in some of their roles. Also, they really needed to have invested in a couple of good impressionists for "The Oddfather", as none of the three major characters sound like Marlon Brando, James Caan or Al Pacino. If anything, Pacino's actor seems to be channeling a slightly more macho Woody Allen half the time. The music was mostly variations on the main opening theme, which while catchy, really didn't exude any real MADness. Instead it sounded like it could have come straight from the soundtrack of "Standard Issue Sitcom #725" or "ISO9000-Compliant Game Show #624".
In all, it gets a barely passing grade. It's by no means the worst I've ever seen, and I do see glimmers of effort in the execution -- and bless 'em, they sincerely tried to keep the distinctive styles of the individual artists -- but it is a demonstration that a slavish aping of the magazine's art and style was just out of the reach of television animation, particularly in the 1970s "dark age" of animation.
Finally, why wasn't it picked up for broadcast? Well while IMDB says it was "adult humor" that killed the show's broadcast, there really isn't any humor that could be called "raunchy", and the violence in "The Oddfather" wasn't really beyond what you could see on any given Western or detective show of the period. Instead, I'm pretty sure that the "Car Manufacturer" segment killed any chance of networks or sponsors picking up the special. All three networks probably knew they'd catch Hell from Ford, GM, Dodge and other US car manufacturers (who, then as now, make up a not-insignificant percentage of any given TV outlet's ad revenue) if they ran something so viciously critical. Meanwhile every potential sponsor was probably scared off fearing that if MAD could attack the automotive industry on national TV in their debut episode there was nothing to stop them being next in the crosshairs.
And so the special ended up being sponsored by a Don Martin character falling to its inevitable doom. In a way, that seems to sum up the entire special, sadly.
Dünyayi Kurtaran Adam (1982)
The worst movie ever made
This is, without a doubt, the worst thing ever committed to film. Compared to this , Manos is Citizen Kane, Monster a Go-Go is Casablanca, and Leonard Part Six is... still dire, but not Turkish Star Wars. Most bad films have something to redeem them. Manos has bad writing acting and cinematography, but is so darn quirky and at least looks like they made an effort, given that almost nobody in the production had major film experience. Plan Nine from Outer Space has flashes of competence and a cameo by Bela Lugosi.
Turkish Star Wars has none of that. It was written by and starred a man described as one of the leading actors of his time in Turkey. Makes me wonder if the Turkish film industry association played a recording of Ed Wood talking about how to make films backwards so they could find the secret message or something. Everything about this "movie" is incompetent, bad or incompetently bad. They took a theatrical print of Star Wars, cannibalized it, threw the resulting film clips in the air and randomly spliced them in as special effects. Our "Heroes" in their space ship are pretty obviously sitting in front of a rear-projection screen as said random clips (some of which include ground-based scenes!!!) are screened behind them.
The original footage is no better. The editing is so choppy as to make what we're watching incomprehensible, the story is inscrutable, with dialogue that is clunky and anvilicious when it's not trying and failing to be funny. Twice, the entire plot (or unreasonable facsimile) drops away to give us minutes-long ads for Islam and Christianity. (As a Catholic, I'm usually gratified to find snippets of faith in a film, but this had no subtlety, basically coming out and saying "Islam is good -- why aren't you Muslim?" and "Christians are great people" with zero attempt to weave it in with the story.) Much of the film's runtime consists of our two "heroes" engaging in "Bruce Lame", "Jackie Chump", "Chow-yun Fail" and "Toshiro Miserable"-style martial arts antics punctuated by special effects that would make even an amateur cringe -- the villain is killed at the end by our "hero" chopping him in two with a karate chop. Their idea of a convincing special effect to show the bifurcated corpse was to film his face while covering up half the lens, blacking out half the screen.
Nothing is explained. They're chasing a golden brain for some reason. They need to save the Earth (which the opening spiel claims has already been destroyed) from destruction. The Magician (our villain for this evening) wants the heroes' human brains (since this is Turkish Star Wars, he'd probably be better off not bothering...) to defeat the Death Star for some unclear reason. Entire ancient Christian churches and medieval Islamic mosques survived millennia in space and re-entry to land on Planet Whogivsadam. Luke Skydorker gets the universe's most ridiculously-shaped wooden sword and said brain, melts them down, places his bare hands in the resulting goop and comes out with golden gloves which deflect laser beams or something. And somehow also gets golden boots (even though he didn't stick his feet into the gilded slop). The love interest just stares at him mutely throughout the movie until he finds the brain at which time she can suddenly talk. TIE Fighters fly backwards. Satan and guys wearing racist caricature masks of Chinese and Africans are villains. Cylons appear. John Williams, John Barry and Queen are hideously abused. Battles use the TARDIS noise. Mobs of people -- good guys? Bad guys? Random spectators? People who want to gawk at a hideous train wreck? Take your pick -- appear and disappear from scenes at random. Bert I Gordon is also ripped off. And none of it makes any $%^&#@$^*& sense. Turkish Star Wars is not a movie. It is not a film. It is a sequence of random events committed to celluloid with the veneer of a narrative cobbled on to it to try to make it seem legit. It's like a 12-year old made a move... only with fewer "fart" jokes.
After watching this horrid piece of sludge, I had to cleanse my shattered psyche by watching a certified cinema classic. I watched Plan Nine from Outer Space. Ah, the competence, tight story telling and spectacular special effects of Ed Wood -- just the antidote for Turkish Star Wars!