MADness 24: Terminator 3!

It’s another chapter in our ongoing saga of a look back at all my MAD work in chronological order. This week we have a peek at another movie parody, this time MAD‘s MADdest writer Dick Debartolo and I terminate “Terminator 3”. This spoof appeared in MAD #432, Aug 2003.

This is a rare look at my final pencils for a splash page. It’s rare because I very seldom scan in the final pencils. When I post “pencils” here what you are really seeing are the “roughs”, or the initial sketched pages I scan and send to MAD for review. Those I do right on the layouts, and are usually a lot looser and sketchier. Once those get approved, I enlarge them and draw it all out on the final boards. I don’t need those reviewed, so I don’t usually scan them, I just start inking. I scanned these, and since I don’t have scans of any splash page roughs I must have scanned the finals to send to MAD for approval. Not sure why I did that, but here they are.

The above are examples of the “roughs” of the story pages. As you can see, they are much looser. I take an initial stab at the caricatures but don’t sweat it if they are not there yet.

The thing I remember the most about doing this parody was trying to come up with as many visual gags about Schwarzenegger being old as I could. My favorite gag was in in the above page bottom left, when he spits out his dentures along with the bullet he caught in his teeth. There are a lot of other ones. The funniest thing about them now is that at the time I thought it was ridiculous that Arnuld was playing a supposedly ageless cyborg at age 56, when he’d end up playing the same character in several more movies up to age 72. Age 56 was spring chicken territory in retrospect.

Those last two panels are an example of my receiving some art direction from MAD and making changes. I drew the T-X sans skin in that second to last panel because in the movie she was down to the exoskeleton at the end. If I remember right, MAD art director Sam Viviano told me to ignore that fact and do a final caricature of Kristanna Loken because it works better as a wrap up to the character. In the last panel, the editors thought the final scene needed a more dramatic look than what I had sketched. Both correct assessments IMO.

Toon in next Monday for another exciting episode, when we return to the world of sport spoofs!