Some critics sneer at everything MAD Magazine printed after the departure of Harvey Kurtzman. I'll admit that there were some features that were essentially "get off my lawn" rants from aging artists like Dave Berg, but some writers and artists turned a sharp satirical lens upon the shibboleths of the "now generation." One of the best sendups of the counterculture was the Frank Jacobs-Mort Drucker spoof of 1939's classic WIZARD OF OZ, described in a header as "the story of a teenage girl who loses touch with reality and meets a lot of way-out characters."
So here the heroine-- played by Liza Minelli, daughter of the late WIZARD star Judy Garland-- doesn't seek to escape the dullness of Kansas by visiting foreign lands with her little dog Toto. She wants to escape the "real world" by getting her freak on:
Someday.. with an insane glow...
I'll get high...
And I'll freak out until my
Brain starts to petrify...
Drucker's caricature skills are excellent here as elsewhere, but for this story his choice of imagery is a lot more free-form than in most of his MAD movie/TV spoofs. At far left we see the entirely predictable figures of Dorothy's Oz-crew, although to one side of Minelli-Dorothy, Drucker crammed in the side-wise head of mature Judy Garland, who passed away the same year this satire appeared on newsstands. As if the artist is seeking to duplicate drug-induced fantasies, Minelli-Dorothy's body has morphed into the head and body of a minatory-looking owl, and a flower-wreathed skull appears next to her, with the legend "Love Me" just beneath. The other images all reflect standard hippie-images of the era, possibly with some Peter Max influence here and there. (The Jimi Hendrix analogue has the name of MAD contributor Al Jaffee on his shirt.)
Minelli-Dorothy sings this, BTW, to an "Auntie Em" that might as well have been called "Auntie Tim," since he's played by novelty singer Tiny Tim. A handy tornado-- the only marvelous phenomenon in the spoof-- whisks up the farmhouse and drops it down in an unspecified city. (Given all the freaks and actors she meets, San Francisco seems like a good nominee.) Incidentally, while the heroine has a dog with her on page one, on page two she addresses a pig by the name "toto." Said porker follows Minelli-Dorothy for the rest of the story without anyone commenting on the discrepancy.
So the house gets dropped on the stereotypical enemy of hippies, the college dean, and the Munchkin-hippies, led by Dustin Hoffman, celebrate the functionary's passing. Minelli-Dorothy expresses her desire to "groove in on that Cosmic High and rap with the Universal Ooom," so the Munchkin-students send her to meet "the Biggest Head of Them All," the Guru of Ours. (The pun, an attempt to associate the Big Head of Oz in the Garland movie with the slang for a doper, as in "hophead," doesn't come off that well.)
In the space of a couple of pages Minelli-Dorothy meets her Three Musketeers: (Pat) Boone-Scarecrow, (George) Hamilton-Tin Man, and (Michael J.) Pollard-Cowardly Lion. They all sing their "I want" songs, and unlike Dorothy they all want some sort of societal satisfaction, not to groove on any Universal Oooms. Nevertheless, the foursome (and Toto the Pig) continue following the Dirty Dark Street in search of the Guru of Ours.
The spoofs of Boone, Hamilton and Pollard for their acting-personas have nothing to do with the Oz spoof. However, the celebrity-identity of the Guru is insightful, for he's played by none other than Ed Sullivan, the presenter who introduced Middle America to such counterculture figures as Elvis, the Beatles and the Stones. The Guru immediately gives the three schmoes "solutions" to their deficiencies that are as empty as the flapdoodle tossed out by the 1939 Wizard, but the Guru makes a lot of money off these phony cures.
"But what about Dorothy?" Well, she makes a weak request for Nirvana, and the Guru suggests "sensual mysteries" in his bedroom. Called a crook and a fake, he posits that the only "Nirvana" is money and that his fakery extends to both hippie-fantasies and all of avant-garde sixties culture.
With the greed of a vulture,
I keep cashing in on culture,
'Cause I'm nothing but a fraud...
And in the final panels, Minelli-Dorothy, her musketeers and Toto the Pig all get with the commercialization program and sing about how "merrily off to the bank we'll go."
The full spoof is here.
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