MADness #86: American Sniper!

Hooyah! It’s Monday, and that means it’s time for another off-target look back at my work for MAD Magazine. This week we shoot and miss with another MAD movie parody, this time of the film “American Sniper”, written by David Shayne and first appearing in MAD #533, June 2015.

This was the issue of MAD that was guest edited by “Weird Al” Yankovic, so it was mandatory to include a cameo of Al in every feature. In this case David actually wrote him into the final panel, delivering the last line of the parody.

The concept of this parody was to feature two opposing political talking heads, Sarah Palin and Michael Moore, as “Siskel and Ebert” sort of reviewers watching the movie and making comments based on their ideological stances. That make this half a parody and half a political satire piece.

You may notice the plastic baby doll appearing in most panels where the theater environment appears. This is a running gag making fun of the incredibly bad fake baby that appears in the film.

In the film, there as scene where Bradley Cooper‘s character is holding a small baby in his arms in the nursery, talking to his wife. Apparently the real baby that was to be in the scene showed up sick with a fever, and the second baby that was the backup was a no show. Rather than delaying the shoot of the scene or using expensive CGI for the baby’s appearance, Cooper held an obviously plastic baby and even used his thumb to make the baby’s arm move in the scene. It was so incredibly fake looking it was laughable. The actual scene is in the last panel of this page:

I expanded that gag by adding the kwepie doll baby in panels throughout.

There’s my Weird Al in the last panel! I don’t think Al had much to do with the editing on this piece, but I loved his involvement with the issue.

This was one of only three pieces I ever illustrated for MAD written by editor David Shayne, and the last one.

That’s it for another edition of “Monday MADness!” Toon in next week for a look at another Showtime TV show parody!