National Lampoon
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National Lampoon is a humor magazine that began in 1970 as an offshoot of the Harvard Lampoon. Harvard graduates and Lampoon alumni Douglas Kenney, Henry Beard, and Rob Hoffman licensed the "Lampoon" name for a national publication.
After a shaky start, the magazine quickly grew in popularity during the 1970s, when it regularly skewered pop culture, the counterculture and politics with recklessness and gleeful bad taste. Notable cover images include:
- The court-martialed Vietnam War murderer William Calley affecting the guileless grin of Alfred E. Neuman, complete with the catch phrase, 'What, My Lai?" (August 1971) [link];
- The iconic image of Argentinian revolutionary Che Guevara, being splattered with a cream pie (January 1972) [link];
- A dog looking worriedly at the revolver pressed to its temple, with the famous cover blurb "If You Don't Buy This Magazine, We'll Kill This Dog" (January 1973)[link];
- A replica of the starving child from the cover of George Harrison's charity album The Concert For Bangla Desh, rendered in chocolate and with a large bite taken out of its head (July 1974)[link].
The magazine produced and fostered some notable writing and comic talents, including (but not limited to) Kenney, Chris Miller, P. J. O'Rourke, Michael O'Donoghue, Sean Kelly, and Tony Hendra. Many important cartoonists and illustrators appeared in the magazine's pages, including Neal Adams, Vaughn Bode, Shary Flenniken, Edward Gorey, Larry Hama, Jeff Jones, Bruce McCall, Rick Meyerowitz, Joe Orlando, Ralph Reese, Arnold Roth, Ed Subitzky and Gahan Wilson. Hendra's 1987 book on 1950s-1970s humor, Going Too Far, contains much information about the magazine's early days.
Most fans consider the glory days to have ended in 1975, when the three founders took advantage of a $7.5 million dollar buyout in their contracts. Also, some of the magazine's contributors left to join the NBC comedy show Saturday Night Live (SNL) around the same time, notably O'Donoghue and Anne Beatts. Even so, the magazine still made money and continued to be produced on a monthly schedule until the early 1990s.
The magazine also spun off an off-Broadway hit (Lemmings), a series of popular record albums, a radio show (The National Lampoon Radio Hour), several hardcover books (the most successful of which was a faux high school yearbook), and a line of motion pictures, most famously Animal House in 1978. One National Lampoon movie, National Lampoon's Vacation (1983), spawned a series of several sequels, including National Lampoon's European Vacation (1985), National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989), Vegas Vacation (1997), and (2003).
Four of SNL's Not Ready For Primetime Players — John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner and Bill Murray — first gained attention as part of the Lampoon's stage and/or radio shows.
A snide parody of Les Crane's 1971 hit "Desiderata" was recorded and released as "Deteriorata," and stayed on the lower reaches of the Billboard magazine charts for a month in late 1972. The gallumphing theme to Animal House rose slightly higher and charted slightly longer in December 1978. Several comedy LPs were released throughout the 1970s. In the 1990s, a CD boxed set of recordings from The National Lampoon Radio Hour was released by Rhino Records.
Throughout the 1990's, the number of issues per year declined until the magazine was published only annually; the magazine's last print publication was November 1998. An on-line version of the magazine began after that. Some success was achieved but the creative staff were laid off unexpectedly and replaced with freelancers. Eventually, in a move that seemed like a classic National Lampoon parody but was not, Brian "Kato" Kaelin was hired to work and write for National Lampoon. [link] In June 2005, Kaelin was named as the host of National Lampoon's new daytime TV court show, Eye for an Eye.
In 2002, a New-York-based provider of television shows to campus cable channels, the Burly Bear Network, became the National Lampoon Network. The company currently provides a weekly block of programming to over 600 colleges and Universities throughout the United States, serving over 4.5 million students.
Though the magazine essentially exists today only as a logo and a trademark for licensing purposes, its comedic influence on a previous generation of writers and performers was seismic. As co-founder Henry Beard described the experience years later, "There was this big door that said, 'Thou shalt not.' We touched it, and it fell off its hinges."
Circulation
The Lampoon's commercial heyday was roughly 1973-75, with its national circulation peaking at 1,000,096 copies sold of a single October 1974 issue. The Lampoon's 1974 monthly average was 830,000. Former Lampoon editor Tony Hendra's book Going Too Far includes a series of precise circulation figures.
National Lampoon movies
- Disco Beaver from Outer Space (1978) (TV)
- National Lampoon's Animal House (1978)
- National Lampoon's Class Reunion (1982)
- National Lampoon's Vacation (1983)
- National Lampoon Goes to the Movies (aka National Lampoon's Movie Madness) (1983)
- National Lampoon’s Joy of Sex (1984)
- National Lampoon's European Vacation (1985)
- National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989)
- National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1 (1993)
- National Lampoon's Last Resort (aka National Lampoon's Scuba School) (1994)
- National Lampoon's Senior Trip (1995)
- Vegas Vacation (1997)
- National Lampoon’s Golf Punks (1998)
- National Lampoon’s Men in White (1998) (TV)
- National Lampoon's Van Wilder (2002)
- National Lampoon's Repli-Kate (2002)
- National Lampoon's Gold Diggers (aka National Lampoon’s Lady Killers) (2003)
- National Lampoon's Dorm Daze (2003)
- ''National Lampoon's Barely Legal" (aka "After School Special") (2003)
- National Lampoon's Thanksgiving Family Reunion (2003) (TV)
- (2003) (TV)
- ''Going the Distance(2004)
- National Lampoon's Adam & Eve (2005)
- National Lampoon's Strip Poker (2005)
- National Lampoon's Pledge This!(2006)
- ''National Lampoon's Last Guy On Earth (2006)
- (2006)
- Dorm Daze 2(2006)
National Lampoon's Strip Poker, which was filmed at the Hedonism II nudist resort in Negril, Jamaica, was released on Pay-Per-View in 2005. These titles, which consist of one-hour episodes in which various Playboy, WWE, and pin-up models compete in strip poker match-ups, contained more nudity than any other National Lampoon production in the company's history. National Lampoon's Strip Poker is expected to develop into a franchise, with new episodes scheduled to be filmed in 2006.
As of January 2006, National Lampoon has 3 movies in development: The Last Guy on Earth, Dorm Daze 2 and Pledge This! starring Paris Hilton. All are scheduled for a 2006 release.
Two recent DVDs "Lost Reality" and "Lost Reality 2" gained notoriety by featuring controversial comedy sketches by Ari Shaffir as "The Amazing Racist".
External links
- [Official website]
- [Official website for National Lampoon's Strip Poker]
- [National Lampoon's Former Creative Staff of Steve Brykman, Joe Oesterle, Sean Crespo, and Mason Brown sell themselves on Ebay after being laid off]
- [Mark's Very Large National Lampoon website]
- [The Mad Store.Com's National Lampoon page]
- ["National Lampoon Grows Up By Dumbing Down] by Jake Tapper, The New York Times'', July 3, 2005.
- [List of National Lampoon movies]
- [Interview (MP3) with John Belushi biographer Tanner Colby and widow Judith Belushi Pisano] on the public radio program The Sound of Young America regarding their book, "Belushi." Includes clips from Belushi's work on The National Lampoon Radio Hour.
- [Message board discussion of plans to revive the magazine]
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