Sunday Mailbag- CLAPTRAP Movies?

Q: I love the movies you’ve chosen for your Claptrap book. I know your supporters got to choose a few, but I’m just curious what your thinking was behind your choices?

A: When MAD writer Desmond Devlin and I decided to do CLAPTRAP, we were thinking we would do a mix of classic/cult classic movies and new releases. We were going to do about a 50-50 split between older and new films. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was always the first one we were going to do because we wanted to complete the MAD parody series of all the Star Wars films. We figured we’d monitor the new releases and decide which ones we’d tackle based on box office and audience reaction.

Then 2020 happened.

Only a tiny handful of new movies came out last year, none of which were released in theaters or had been seen by the number of people major films are usually seen by. As a result, Des and I decided to go 100% retro, and we turned our attention to well known films from the past.

Our main criteria was that any films we would spoof in CLAPTRAP would not already have been parodied in MAD, and that they were movies most everybody would have seen or at least been very familiar with. That list is actually pretty big. After all, MAD only came out 8 times a year for most of its life, and the timing of issue production along with some films coming out at the same time, etc, caused many movies to miss being satirized in the magazine.

Des made a list of movies that today are considered classics or “cult” hits that never got the MAD treatment (BTW We have to thank Doug Gilford and his amazing MAD Cover Site for this handy list of all movies that HAVE been parodied in MAD! That made our job a lot easier!). From there several were very obvious choices based on being either universally considered some of the best films ever or at least in their genre (The Shawshank Redemption, Goodfellas, Blade Runner, Unforgiven) or being a true cult hit and constantly quoted/referenced/memed (The Big Lebowski). We also took into account the genre they were in. We wanted westerns, sci-fi, crime, dramas, comedies etc represented. We also wanted to range the decades fairly well, and not double up too much on the same stars or themes.

The two movies chosen by our “Megalomaniac” backers were Psycho and Toy Story 4. Luckily, both of those films were on our shortlist already, representing two other genres (horror and family/animation) and different decades. Plus we wanted at least one black and white movie. Both of those picks sat squarely in our overall criteria.

The three backer chosen movies were also all on our shortlist. Citizen Kane is another black and white movie, is from REEEEAAAAL far back (1941!) and is of course considered by many the greatest film ever made. The Blues Brothers is one of those cult classics that is constantly quoted and referenced in pop culture, as is The Princess Bride. That last one will be a challenge for Des, because it is not just a comedy but one that is “self aware”, i.e. it is in on its own jokes and laughs at itself. That’s the hardest kind of subject matter to parody.

We have one more film to choose. We’ve had no shortage of suggestions from people, from “epic” films to musicals to whatever. We still have long list of movies that fit our original criteria, so we’ll be picking one that fits that bill, and does not duplicate too many of the qualities of the other 11 films we’ll be doing. We’ll reveal that choice sometime on the next few months.

Thanks to Richard G from Madison, WI for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!