Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Mad Magazine's parody of David Lynch's Inland Empire more linear than original


Mad Magazine's recent parody of David Lynch's Inland Empire, a baseball themed piece entitled Inland Umpire, had much more of a coherent plot than the subject of the parody.

In the piece, a woman who mildly looks like Laura Dern is a female umpire in a Pamona-based minor league baseball team. "When looking for love, she strikes out!" says the piece.

The piece also had guest appearances by Agent Dale Cooper from Twin Peaks and Frank Booth from Blue Velvet. And it ended with a cameo from the director Lynch himself, holding a cup of coffee and a piece of cherry pie, and saying "Even I don't get it!!!!" to the reader.

It was clear that the author of the piece had not seen Inland Empire, nor a Lynch film from the past 15 years.

Coming up for Mad, a parody of Alfonso CuarĂ³n's Children of Men, entitled Children of Mensch - in which all the Jewish people on the planet are no longer able to hold bar mitzvahs.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I'm an avid humor magazine collector and I don't remember this piece at all. I'd love to see it! The British edition of MAD made fun of "The Elephant Man". "CRAZY" Magazine had a piece called "The Elephink Man". "CRACKED" featured a "TWIN PEAKS" Game on one of their inside covers, featuring caricatures of Cooper and Harry, but never featured a parody of the actual show. It was kind of ironic considering they made fun of stuff that didn't even last as long as Peaks. When Showtime aired a new adaption of Twin Peaks I honestly thought MAD would finally make a parody since the series has quite an extensive legacy, but alas no luck. I sent Tom Richmond a message expressing my disappointment, but he wasn't very receptive to say the least. He's an incredible caricaturist, you should see his sketch of Lynch! I'd love to see his impression of Ray "Leland" Wise and "The Man From Another Place" though I doubt I ever will. I wish MAD and CRACKED would have done a piece on "Blue Velvet", but that film is even lesser known than Peaks. Though I hear from your article that someone actually did feature a caricature of Dennis Hopper as Frank Booth complete with a gas mask?!? This I gotta see!!!

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