One of the first of many, many issues of Mad magazine I bought included a parody of RETURN OF THE JEDI. And the last issue of Mad magazine I ever bought was 1999’s STAR WARS SPECTACULAR special, which gathered previously printed material from all the STAR WARS stuff Mad had run in the past. That ended up getting destroyed by my son, but luckily, the new trade paperback MAD ABOUT STAR WARS replaces it, and then some.
Boasting an introduction by a game George Lucas and collected and annotated by Jonathan Bresman, the slick book covers 30 years of “classic parodies” of filmdom’s most successful science-fiction saga. For fans of the landmark magazine, this collection is an absolute no-brainer. For the STAR WARS fanboys … well, hope you have a sense of humor.
As expected, all six of the STAR WARS movies are represented by their wonderfully titled, dead-on parodies: STAR ROARS, THE EMPIRE STRIKES OUT, RE-HASH OF THE JEDI, EPIC LOAD I: THE FANDUMB MEGAMESS, EPIC LOAD II: ATTACK OF THE CLOWNS and – particularly vicious – EPIC LOAD III: RETREAD OF THE SH*T. Having read the first three several times over as a kid, it was a treat to do so again, partly to groan at all the bad jokes I once thought were funny, and partly to marvel at how dated many of the references are. The great Mort Drucker’s art is timeless (but for the most part, that of the current crop of contributing illustrators is sloppy or ugly).
But what’s not fun here? Very little. Lucas’ cash-cow franchise has been ripe for skewering, so it’s no surprise how often the usual gang of idiots has turned to it to poke a few well-deserved but good-natured barbs. They’ve turned it into a musical, political satire and several of Al Jaffee’s fold-ins. Heck, it even inspired an episode of “Spy vs. Spy.” My favorites – then and now – remain Don Martin and Sergio Aragonés’ multi-panel and mostly wordless strips on various chapters of the series.
With the wealth of material here, there’s much to enjoy, and it’s heightened by Bresman’s in-the-margin bits of trivia that points out – among other things – hidden background gags, Mad’s uncanny knack for prescience and the mag’s ability to run a joke into the ground, i.e. R2-D2 as a mailbox. –Rod Lott
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Luckily I can separate out my childhood nostalgia for the first trio of movies from my view of the newer trilogy, the things that have retroactively been done to the originals, and so on. So I think this would be quite a fun read!