Last Saturday night I went and saw Saturday Night, the new movie directed by Jason Reitman. It tells the story of the beginnings of Saturday Night Live by recreating the 90 minutes before the show first aired. It’s a pretty clever way to do it. Most of the scenes were based on real events, even if they didn’t happen during those 90 minutes—some happened earlier, some later. A few scenes were made up by combining different events with some creative license. But it works.
Overall, it felt very authentic to the spirit of the show and people involved. The humor of Michael O’Donoghue, for instance, was not sanitized for modern audiences—and neither were the reactions he got from the other characters in the movie. While the connection to National Lampoon does not come up (Lorne Michaels hired a significant number of Lampoon writers and performers), the Radio Hour does get a passing mention.
The casting was very good, particularly the actors playing the Not Ready For Prime Time Players. Their voices and mannerisms were very accurate, even when they didn’t quite look like the original person. The guys playing Chase and Belushi were uncanny. The actor portraying Michael O’Donoghue was good, especially getting across his acerbic personality, but he was younger and better looking than the real MO’D. The guy who played Jim Henson virtually brought him back from the dead. On the other hand, I had trouble with the choice of Matthew Rhys as George Carlin. I like Rhys as an actor, but he didn’t sound or look much like Carlin.
I’ve heard this movie described as a “suspense comedy,” and that’s accurate. You know they’re going to succeed, but it’s hard to see how it was even possible before it happens.
As someone who saw the show’s first broadcast when it aired, and was a fan of the show into the early eighties, I really enjoyed it. I want to watch it again just to catch background details I’m sure I missed. It looks like it was made by people who knew the show well and loved it for what it was. Recommended.
(On a personal note, I was thrilled to see that they used one of my fonts throughout the movie for titles and captions.)
Chris Miller was a frequent contributing writer (and later editor) of National Lampoon during the 1970s. He’s best known for his satirical short stories, often revolving around the topic of sex.
During his time with the magazine, Chris went on the road to college campuses around the U.S., giving talks about humor and satire, which included reading some of his short stories from the magazine. This is an audio recording of one of those talks, from early 1977, sent to me by the person who recorded it, who wishes to remain anonymous.
The talk contains adult themes, and is not suitable for young or sensitive individuals. NSFW, as they say. Keep in mind that this was the seventies, when attitudes about sex were quite different from today. Consider yourself forewarned. If you’re a fan of the magazine and Chris’s stories from back then, never mind. You know what you’re in for.
(The newspaper clipping shown in the video is about an earlier campus appearance Chris made in 1975. Read more about it here.)
Director Jason Reitman has announced that a new film about the debut episode of Saturday Night Live is in the works. Most of the cast, including all the “not-ready-for-prime-time players,” has been announced, and you can see them on the People website. I don’t see mentioned yet who will be playing Michael O’Donoghue, who was head writer for the show from 1975-78 and also appeared in the first “cold opening” of the show with John Belushi.
Many of the writers and performers of the show had also worked on the National Lampoon Radio Hour (1974) and on National Lampoon comedy albums, as well as National Lampoon magazine itself. These included writers Michael O’Donoghue and Anne Beatts, and performers John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, and Gilda Radner.
It will be interesting to compare the cast of this to the cast of the 2018 Doug Kenney biopic A Stupid and Futile Gesture, which features some of the same people played by different actors.
Last month, I added a new category called Bookshelf. This listed all the stuff I’ve posted about various books that have been released over the years by people who worked for National Lampoon and also books about the history of the magazine and the people who worked there. This was just a temporary solution.
I’ve reworked it so that it’s now a listing page for that purpose. It lists all the books that were previously scattered across various articles and pages on this site in one place, along with links to where you can get the books (where possible). I’m also in the process of adding write-ups for some of the books (the ones I have read and own). These will be marked with an asterisk (*).
The way Mark’s Very Large National Lampoon Site looked like before I switched to WordPress in 2017.
Back in the earlier days of this site, I used a blogging engine called Movable Type. The static pages (listings, info pages, etc.) were simply coded in DreamWeaver or BBEdit (a text editor). For several technical reasons—an overwhelming comment spam problem, a broken search function—I decided to move to WordPress, a much more popular and better-supported alternative, where you could get decent plug-ins to thwart spam bots.
Unfortunately, the classic design of the site, which I’d spent years developing and tweaking, had to be set aside. WordPress has something called a “theme” that controls what the site looks like. It soon became apparent that my old design was not something I’d be able to easily recreate or adapt to WordPress. So I picked a WordPress theme that was acceptable, tweaked the typography and link colors, and called it a day. It was a big step down from my old design—not just the look but the functionality. But I now had protection from spam bots and the site worked better on smartphones.
The generic WordPress template I reluctantly settled for in 2017.
I figured that this was just a temporary solution, and that someday, somehow, I would restore the old design.
Well, that day has come.
A couple of weeks ago, I discovered a very good video tutorial that explained how to create a custom WordPress theme from an existing static website design. This was exactly what I was looking for. I also realized that I needed to update my old design to modern web design standards (HTML5 and CSS3) and ditch the antiquated HTML-table-based methods I’d built it with. And I had to revise the design so it would work on smart phones. (The old design didn’t.)
So I cracked open some books on HTML5 and CSS3, and started coding for the first time in almost ten years.
Turns out, it wasn’t as hard as I thought.
I launched the new design a couple of days ago. For those of you who have been following me for a while (I launched the site at the end of 1996) the new design will feel very familiar. For newcomers, this is what I’ve wanted the site to look like all along. The listings pages are dramatically better than in the old generic WordPress theme I had to use. And I’ve been able to customize the theme to work exactly the way I want it to work.
The new design is even better than the original. As I mentioned, it’s “responsive,” meaning that it adapts to the size of the device you’re using. On smaller screens, the navigation menu shrinks to an icon at the top of the screen. Tap on the icon to see the menu. Tap on the “X” to close it.
The new design also brings back some things that were lost when I switched to WordPress in 2017:
The Answers page now shows the full text again, instead of just the topics
There is a new Unanswered page that shows just the unanswered questions I’ve received, in case you want to take a crack at it
Comments are more visible and accessible again
Generally, everything is more compact and snappy. Like it used to be.
If you run into any problems with the new design, let me know. Like I said, I haven’t done web design or coding in a while, so there might be some glitches or things that don’t work in the particular browser that you use. If so, I’ll try to fix it.
For now, I couldn’t be happier with the new design, which is really just the old design with a new and better foundation.
Brian McConnachie, in a photo that appeared in the August, 1974 (Isolationism and Tooth Care) issue.
Brian McConnachie, editor and writer for National Lampoon from 1972-76, has died at the age of 81.
McConnachie was known for his offbeat style of humor, which tended toward the absurd. The former Madison Avenue ad man’s entree into writing for the Lampoon was sending poorly-drawn cartoons to the magazine, some of which were published. Eventually, at the invitation of Henry Beard, he joined the staff as a writer.
Some of McConnachie’s most memorable pieces were “Amish in Space,” a sci-fi comic parody, Guns and Sandwiches magazine, the ultimate special-interest magazine, Pamplemousse, an absurd and slapstick parody of Papillon, Kit ’n’ Kaboodle, a “funny animal”/Tom and Jerry-type comic book with realistic violence (very likely the inspiration for Itchy and Scratchy on The Simpsons), and Negligent Mother, a parody of women’s magazines.
After leaving National Lampoon, McConnachie joined the writing staff for Saturday Night Live and later SCTV. He also wrote for kid’s shows Shining Time Station and Noddy, and acted in over a dozen films, including Caddyshack, Strange Brew, and several of Woody Allen’s.
Most recently, he has been Head Writer for The American Bystander, a humor magazine he originally tried to launch in the early 1980s, but which was successfully re-launched in 2015 and continues to be published.
At the time of this writing, I haven’t found any obits for Brian. But when I do, I will append them here.
If you look at the site navigation to the right (or the “Mobile-Friendly Menu” above for you smartphone users), you’ll see a new category listed: Bookshelf. This will provide quick access to anything I have or will post here having to do with books by or about National Lampoon contributors. Currently, it will only show what I’ve written about so far, which I admit is a bit random and incomplete. But I plan to add listings to all the books I know about and where to get them (if they are still in print).
Update 1/21/24: I’ve reworked the idea for Bookshelf. It’s now a list of books by staff and contributors not published by National Lampoon, plus books about National Lampoon and/or people who worked there. More info here.
This is something I’ve personally been waiting for for a long time. Poor Helpless Comics! The Cartoons (and More) of Ed Subitzky is a newly published collection of comics (and more) by Ed Subitzky. It’s fairly large format, soft cover, 184 pages.
Subitzky’s drawing style is minimal. As he says in the book, the characters are almost not there. It’s all about the words and what the characters are doing and, above all, the humor.
The book contains what seems like most of Subitzky’s cartoons and writing from National Lampoon, where he was a contributor for over two decades, starting in the April 1972 (“25th Anniversary”) issue with “Anti-Comics!”, a strip in which the words are the characters and the speech balloons are filled with drawings of people and places. It also contains some of his post-Lampoon comics, which have appeared in The New York Times and most recently The American Bystander.
Subitzky’s comic strips often had a sort of “meta” angle to them—they were often about the form of the comic strip itself, with strips such as “Moebius Strip Comics!”, “Eight-Way Comics!”, and “Crossword Puzzle Comics!”—where you had to fill in the word balloons based on a list of clues—or “Background Music Comics!” which included a musical score which you were supposed to play on a piano or other instrument as you read.
Included in the book are a few of the articles he wrote for the Lampoon, including some of my favorites like “An Evening in 1973” (which tells of the wonderful world of the future as imagined by a writer in 1923) and “Stupid World” (in which everyone and everything, including the laws of physics, is stupid).
Interleaved into the book is an interview with Subitzky conducted by cartoonist and writer Mark Newgarden (who was one of the creators of Garbage Pail Kids and wrote the wonderful essay How to Read Nancy which was expanded and published as a book in 2017).
If you’re a fan of Subitzky like me, you’ll definitely want this long-overdue collection. You can get it at Amazon and other bookstores.
I’ve been doing some sprucing up around Mark’s Very Large National Lampoon Site the last couple days. In particular, I’ve made it easier to browse through the Listings pages, adding “Previous,” “Next,” and “Index” links for each item’s page. Plus I’ve added the name of the section to each page to make it easier to tell where the hell you are on the site.
I’ve also dropped the useless and redundant “News” link at the top of each page and replaced it with a “Mobile-Friendly Menu” link, a special page that lays out all the sections of the site for easy access. This is to get around the fact that the WordPress theme I’m using pushes the sidebar menu (on the right side of the page when viewed on a computer) down to the bottom of the page. I’m sure a lot of you didn’t even realize it was there and thought all there was is the News feed. I’m sure there’s a better way to do this by creating my own WordPress theme, but fuck that. I do have a life.
Hopefully, these changes will mean a rapid rise in traffic. Just kidding. But at least things will be nicer for the two of you who still stop by.
O.C. and Stiggs Movie Remastered, Reissued—Plus a Documentary
Ted Mann and Tod Carroll wrote a series of stories about a pair of teens named O.C. and Stiggs, starting in the July 1981 (“Endless, Mindless Summer Sex”) issue—”Summer Fun with O.C. and Stiggs” (Mann), “Some Real Stupid Guys That O.C. and Stiggs Know Go to the Beach” (Carroll), and ending with the entire October 1982 (“The Utterly Monstrous and Mind-Roasting Summer of O.C. and Stiggs”) issue.
To be honest, I was never really into the O.C. and Stiggs stories, but judging by the emails I’ve gotten over the years, I may be in the minority. O.C. and Stiggs was extremely popular during that early-eighties period of NatLamp.
Fast forward a few years, and Mann and Carroll wrote a script for an O.C. and Stiggs movie and started shopping it around (with Matty Simmons’ blessing—he wasn’t a fan), and, long story short, it was eventually made in 1983 by director Robert Altman (released in 1987/88). Everyone involved expected it would be the next Animal House but, alas, it was a flop.
Fast forward again to today, and it has now been remastered and rereleased on Blu-ray, along with a 2-hour documentary by Hunter Stephenson (who alerted me to all this) about the making of the film featuring the two leads, Neill Barry (Stiggs) and Daniel Jenkins (O.C.), Ted Mann (via his emails), Martin Mull (who played Pat Coletti), Josh Karp (author of the Doug Kenney bio and bio-pic, A Futile and Stupid Gesture), actor Paul Dooley (who plays Randall Schwab), and Stephen Altman (Robert Altman’s son).
The disc has been produced and released by Radiance Films UK. You can order it on their site or on Amazon. Two things: If it says it’s out of stock, check again later. Second, for the moment it’s only available as a Region B disc, meaning that it is meant to work on Blu-ray players in the UK and Europe, not on US or North American players. However, if you have a multi-region or region-free Blu-ray player, you will be able to play it no matter where you are. Hopefully, at some point it will also be released for Region A.
Some tidbits from Hunter about the film and the disc:
“I was surprised to hear that his son Stephen Altman’s fandom of NatLamp and the original material predates his father’s involvement. ‘Anyone but you, Dad!’ was Stephen’s initial reaction after being told to report to the Arizona set. In audio commentaries, Altman’s sons, cast, and crew also discuss the surreal possibility of then-planned sequels.”
“Emails from Ted Mann ripping the film appear throughout.”
“The truth is that Altman & Co. thought the script was a searingly funny vessel for satirizing ’80s teen “mallwave” comedies. For me this is why the film and its ‘untold’ story is endlessly fascinating; the director who defined the ’70s with the weed-friendly, anti-Hollywood dark comedy M*A*S*H—which clears the way for Animal House and Sutherland’s role therein—much later appropriates ’80s Lampoon material for a similarly bitter, clever end. Yet it’s instantly forgotten.”
“Personally, Altman’s film works as a Lampoon movie. It’s also surprisingly faithful to Mann and Carroll’s script. Most interesting, this is the only Lampoon affiliated movie, outside Caddyshack, shot with the vibrant, cascading ADHD chaos reflective of the magazine itself.”
Anyway, I’ve never seen the movie, but I ordered a copy and look forward to screening it and the documentary. Thanks to Hunter for letting me know about it.
Mark's Very Large Plug. You might think, as you wade through this site, that I have no life. Not true. I spend about two days a year working on Mark's Very Large National Lampoon Site. The rest of the time I make fonts. You can see my real website here. I also have an “art” website where I post caricatures and other stuff. For Lampoon-related stuff and site updates, follow me on X (Twitter).
