MADness #18- Harry Potter 2!

We continue the agonizingly slow chronological crawl through my MAD work with a look at my 18th job for the magazine, a movie parody of the second “Harry Potter” film, written by my CLAPTRAP cohort Desmond Devlin. that appeared in MAD #424, Dec 2002.

I remember this job being a pretty big deal for me, because we in the Richmond household were big fans of the Harry Potter books. We used to read them to the kids when we put them to bed each night, and then we’d go downstairs and keep reading them. So, when I got the call to do this movie spoof I was thrilled. It was both the biggest “blockbuster” movie I had done to date, and at 9 pages it was the longest single piece I did for MAD until I did another 9 pager fourteen years later. This was also the first time I did the art on a film that MAD spoofed BEFORE the film was released, something they’d been trying at the time.

Speaking of the Richmond household, all my kids have cameos in the splash page. That’s The Effervescent Gabrielle right behind Harry’s wand, and The Dramatic Victoria, The Animated Elizabeth and Number One Son Thomas on the bottom right by Neville Longbottom.

All my nieces and nephews also make cameos as Hogwarts students. That’s nephews Tony and Cole Williams in line to get their books signed by Lockhart in panel five above.

I mentioned that this was the first time MAD asked me to do the art for a movie spoof before the film actually came out. MAD did this for several of the Harry Potter movies as well as a few other big films, mainly in an effort to have the parody out, with a corresponding cover, at the same time the movie was released. Since this was a sequel, I had plenty of reference as to the sets and the principal characters. If I remember rightly there were several trailers and TV spots plus advanced promotional images that we were able to work from to see this film’s specifics like Dobby, the flying Ford Anglia, Fawkes, etc. as well as set pieces like the girl’s bathroom with the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets. All in all looking back after seeing the movie we did a pretty good job capturing the film’s visuals without having seen the actual movie.

Des worked from the books these films were based on for the scripts. As a result, there are scenes that took place in the books and thus in the parodies that did NOT take place in the movies. The main one for this spoof was in the page above, second to last panel. This is the “Death Day” party scene from the book, and did not happen in the film.

Here’s the rest of my niece and nephew cameos. The kid peeing in a cup with his bare ass hanging out is my nephew Hunter Voss. In the crowd watching the duel are Joey, Luke, Susan and Mia Voss, and Trevor and Jacob Richmond. The blonde right under Draco in the last panel is my niece Brittany Lauseng. I won the “Best Uncle Award” in the family that year from all except for Hunter, who hasn’t spoken to me since this issue came out.

I have to say I never liked doing the spoofs in advance of the film’s release. I understood the reasoning from a sales standpoint. MAD had a problem with timing when it came to these latter day movies parodies that did not exist in the 60’s-80’s. Back then movies came out in a small number of one-screen theaters in major cities and played for months before trickling down to the next tier of cites, then the next, etc. A movie would still be in theaters in small towns six months or more after its first release, and was still relevant when the spoof came out 3-4 months after the movie first hit theaters. There were also fewer movies in those days, so they stayed in the public eye longer.

By the mid-late 90’s, giant theaterplexes with 20 screens debuted films on 3000 screens from New York City to Nosebleed, Idaho, and even the biggest blockbusters were gone in 6 weeks. By the time the MAD spoof came out, there had been two or three more huge “event” movies out and the spoofed film was old news. Working from advanced scripts or source material and doing the parodies in advance got the spoof on the stands when the movie was hot, but the actual parodies suffered as a result IMO.

Doing a sequel like this was easier, especially since the whole thing takes place on the same set, like a TV show does. But without having seen the actual movie I was not really able to bring many visual specifics from the film into the mix. Worse, sometimes we would get burned by major departures from the source material or whatever bootleg scripts we were working from. In a couple of weeks I’ll give you the ultimate example of that when I share another movie parody we did in advance of the film’s release.

At nine pages, I believe this was the longest movie spoof to appear in MAD since the 10 page “Superduperman II” in MAD #226, Oct 1981.

If I remember right, Des suggested I put the famous Bill Gaines “Rubber Stamp Tree” on Dumbledore’s desk. There are a lot of MAD easter eggs in that panel.

Toon in next week for a look at another TV parody, this one written by one of the MAD editors!