To Absent Friends - Mort Drucker

Mort Drucker

1929 - 2020

Like many people my age, especially males, I spent much of my teenaged years pouring over MAD Magazine every time a new issue was released, and the highlights of these issues were always the TV Shows and Movies Parodies, and over the years 1956 through 2008, 238 of those parodies were illustrated by Mort Drucker, who died earlier this week at the age of 91.  If you have ever read an issue of MAD and enjoyed those fantastic stories, you know just what I am talking about.  

A Confession: To this day I still refer to the great Fred Astaire as "Fred Upstairs" and actor Roddy McDowell as "Roddy McTowell" because for whatever bizarre reasons, those two MAD-isms have stuck with me over all of these years.

A great story from Drucker's obit in the New York Times. 

When MAD did a parody of George Lucas' "The Empire Strikes Back" called "The Empire Strikes Out", Lucasfilms served MAD with a Cease and Desist Order and demanded that all issues of the magazine be recalled.  In its defense, MAD presented the courts with a letter complimenting the story and asking if the writer could be able to purchase Drucker's original artwork from the parody.  The letter writer? None other than George Lucas himself.  Case dismissed.

Lucas also commissioned Drucker to draw the artwork that was used as the poster for his earlier film, "American Graffiti."

Another Drucker illustration called "The Battle for the Senate" appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in 1970 and today hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington.

You can go on Google Images and see many, many of Drucker's pieces for MAD.  I chose to include this one as it depicts the opening panel to MAD's satire of one of my favorite movies, Woody Allen's "Hannah and Her Sisters."  Drucker slipped a drawing of Louise Lasser, Allen's first wife who was not in the film, into the artwork here.

RIP Mort Drucker, a guy who delivered many, many hours of entertainment pleasure.

By the way, a printed out version of this Grandstander post is suitable for framing or wrapping fish.  (Not everybody will get this, but many of you will, I'm sure.)