There is at least one parody earlier than the ones we have here today listed for Lala Palooza in Feature Comics #32. (Don't bother with the digital golden age archives. What i've seen of #32 may have the right cover, but the interior seems to be issue #44. There is an odd superhuman in Poison Ivy reminiscent of Flash, but only in appearance.)
Conveniently enough, since we've been doing a lot of Funny Animals lately, the next earliest i've found is Flash Rabbit from All Top Comics #s 1 & 2, written by Pat Parrish (artist unknown) -
Zany #2 brought us Flush Gordon -
Whack #2 remixed the name to Flush Jordan with artwork by William (Alex) Overgard...
...and Humbug #10, Jack Davis had fun mixing it with the paranoid times and gave us Flyashi Gordonovich, Intergalactic Commissar...
...while Wally Wood was hinting towards later work over in Mad #11 with the title Flesh Garden! -
Of course, there have been many more over the years - we're only scratching into the 1950s here. But this post is getting long, so...
So long!
page art by listed creators, otherwise unknown, for All Top Comics #2 1 & 2, Zany #2, Whack #2, Humbug #10, and Mad #11 (1946, 1953, 1954, 1958)
As popular as the comic strip and movie serials were, I would have expected parodies in Mad and elsewhere over the years. But I never realized there were so many.
ReplyDeleteThe Sam J. Jones movie ended up being a comedy/parody. Maybe not intentionally, though.
I was a bit surprised at how many i found once i started looking. (Many more that what ran) Perhaps more surprisingly though - how few Buck Rogers parodies there were by contrast. Most of them seem to be aimed at the Gil Gerard/Erin Gray tv show version of Buck, a half century after he first appeared.
ReplyDeleteI don't think i'd call the Sam Jones version a parody, though it definitely embraces camp to the fullest. I did watch it again just last month, and it's still ridiculous fun, but playing the material straight while mining the comedy. So, yeah - we get Dale literally cheer-leading our quarterback hero, and yet... it stays on this side of the parody line. For me, at least.
Hmm...
DeleteNow that i'm thinking Flash Gordon parodies, maybe i should go watch those 2 Flesh Gordon movies for a Blue Monday feature...
Now that you mention it, the only Buck Rogers spoofs that I recall offhand were a South Park episode (with a scene that parodied the Gil Gerard TV show) and the Daffy Duck "Duck Dodgers" cartoons.
DeleteWhich seems odd. I would have expected a lot more. That comic strip was so popular and widely known that, for years, "Buck Rogers" was a common metaphor for science fiction and space age technology.
Today, "Star Wars" and "Star Trek" probably serve the same purpose.
Duck Dogers is, of course, THE Buck Rogers parody. But so few others. Gray Morrow did a piece in Heavy Metal that both was and wasn't a parody - it was more like straight Buck Rogers in a weird universe. Most everything else that comes to mind is based on the tv show. Not counting Tijuana Bibles. And Flash Gordon outdid Buck Rogers something like 4 to 1 there, too.
DeleteSurprisingly, nobody even seems to have done the obvious porn parody of Buck.