Who can forget this tragic frame from Abraham Zapruder's home movie shot in Dallas on 11/22/63, moments before the First Lady was run over by the press bus?
And who can forget the highlights of Jack Kennedy's five terms in the White House?
- August 1964: the Kennedy-Connally ticket elected by acclamation as Goldwater-Miller withdraw in sympathy.
- The withdrawal of all American soldiers from Vietnam in 1964? (Too bad about the last American troop killed in action, Pfc. Cassius Clay.)
- The Cultural Revolution of 1965 when Chairman Jack mobilized the energies of America's youth with his Spare Change zero interest loans and Head West federal gas stamps for anyone under 25 wanting to check out the scene in San Francisco?
- The successful nationalization and federal coordination of the music industry?
- The successful nationalization and federal coordination of the music industry?
- JFK's galvanizing speech at the Woodstock festival declaring war on Great Britain to liberate the Catholics of Northern Ireland and give America's young people a war of their own?
- The failed protest movement by elderly WASPs?
- The fourth Kennedy-Nixon presidential debate in 1976?
You can relive all these fond memories, and many more, in the
of the February, 1977 edition of National Lampoon
of the February, 1977 edition of National Lampoon
And from the Letters-from-the-Editor column:
LOL.
ReplyDeletereminds me of watchmen and it's alternate history timeline where the comedian is the one who kills john kennedy, richard nixon has doctor manhattan intervene in vietnam, and nixon is still president in 1985 during the cold war.
http://watchmen.wikia.com/wiki/Richard_M._Nixon
So many cigarette advertisements. Clearly a product that can only be differentiated by marketing.
ReplyDeleteOh, and the ads that aren't for cigarettes are speakers and tape decks and turntables. That isn't a surprise, but the prices! 250 dollars for a turntable! That's about 1000 dollars in today's money. Think about the technology you can buy with 1000 dollars today, and in 1977 you could get something Thomas Edison would have recognized. Crazy.
ReplyDeleteHow great would it be if one of Biden's speechwriters gave that inauguration speech to him to deliver?
ReplyDeleteManaging editor: P.J. O'Rourke
ReplyDeleteAwesome! $3000 cars and $450 tape decks. Oh for a time when young hipsters had nothing better to do than listen to music and smoke.
ReplyDeleteAnother choice letter there was the knock-knock joke submitted by Eric Sevareid (lol)
ReplyDeleteWow! Stereos and race jokes!
ReplyDelete"...and America got itself a Pope as Richard Cardinal Cushing became Pope Merlin I."
ReplyDeleteI had never seen this. I was out of college and married, losing touch with National Lampoon.
ReplyDeleteThis was brilliant.
In their fake ad for the "New Frontier Book Club" the titles sound like the table of contents from the Weekly Standard or National Journal.
ReplyDeleteImagine the impact such a thing might have on a fourteen-year-old mind. Actually, I don't have to; I remember this issue, among many others, acutely even now.
ReplyDeleteWell, basically everything in that old parody resembles the dead-serious self-conceit of the Obama-era best n' brightest:
ReplyDelete- Pink Floyd's hit "Set the Controls to 1000 Words Per Minute with 99% Comprehension"
- "Club Peace, a leisure division of the Federal Youth Administration"
- Congressman Jann Wenner of Sausalito
- the ridiculous gibberish of the faux-Village-Voice film review that's indistinguishable from standard academic writing, let alone every SWPL magazine piece today
- Ted Kennedy tersely conceding the regrettable death of his "female coastronaut in the Apollo accident" and introducing an "Accident Witness Protection Bill"
- Jeff Greenfield employed as a reporter producing bland, inane coverage of partisan mischief & civility lapses in D.C.--hmmm...
Anyhow, it's just a bit startling to see the ingredients of materialistic bobo self-righteousness and glamour-worship were so obvious that early in the game.
Plus a 54 MPG Honda Civic for $3600. Plus Donna Summers as head of the Department of Disco Records. What's not to like?
ReplyDeleteThe pic of Jackie is brutally funny. I'd forgotten why I enjoyed National Lampoon so much back in the day.
ReplyDeleteIt sure is something seeing the lunatics emerge for this JFK anniversary. It got too easy to forget about them.
ReplyDeleteKidding @@ LOL
ReplyDeleteWhy do they continue the canard that JFK would have pulled our troops from Vietnam? He was the dipshit that put them there in the first place!
ReplyDeleteAh, Cardinal Cushing. A more deceitful and Machiavellian churchman never walked the Earth on cloven hooves. He was the PERFECT bishop for the likes of the Kennedys.
ReplyDeleteAs the aforementioned PJ O'Rourke wrote about sainted Rose, "a frigid martinet, unashamed to suckle at the teat of filthy lucre, awash in piety and Tartuffery, filled with the letter of Catholicism and empty of its spirit." The whole clan in a single sentence fragment.
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts will be a better place when, God speed the day, every son and daughter of Eire who grew up with photos of JFK, Cardinal Cushing and the Pope on the mantel are safely in the ground.
Obviously some sort of conspiracy behind those Kennedy assassinations since we all know that communists and Muslims aren't into killing people.
ReplyDeleteBut seriously, how many more boomers have to be eliminated so that I can go a day without having to tolerate their never ending naval gazing.
I was struck by how wordy the ads were.
ReplyDeleteYou have performed another public service, Steve. Can you guess what _I_ wrote in that issue? Hey, nobody's going to brag about it _for_ me. Linked up here:
ReplyDeletehttp://ex-army.blogspot.com/2013/11/remembering-national-lampoon-and-jfk.html
I'm not surprised so many of the ads are for stereo sound systems. Do you have any idea how much high-end TUBE amplifiers in good condition go for on eBay and elsewhere online?
ReplyDeleteFolks in the mid-to-late 1970s were living in the Golden Age of Recorded Sound--they just didn't know it.I'll warrant not one listener in a thousand had any idea of the digital/CD revolution that was only a few years away, and how the rich, buttery sound of analog that man-centuries of sound engineering had been working up to was about to be tossed out for the new metallic, austere regime to come.
There were sensible reasons stereos were an obsession in the 1970s. If you did your homework and spent a not inconsiderable amount of money, you could come up with an incredibly good sounding system.
ReplyDeleteWhat I enjoyed was the implication that wars would have been hip if Kennedy was doing them. I wonder...
ReplyDeleteGreat stuff. Comparing this with The Onion shows how political correctness and general stuffiness have stifled comedy nowadays. The old National Lampoon feels free to lampoon an assassinated President, with his Irishness and Catholicism very much part of the joke. The Onion can't do anything comparable with the half-blood prince in the Oval Office, so they're stuck with Biden jokes.
ReplyDeleteWould there have been a Came-a-lot myth if Kennedy had been short and ugly?
ReplyDeleteThe whole Kennedy myth was pure Hollywood.
"Obviously some sort of conspiracy behind those Kennedy assassinations since we all know that communists and Muslims aren't into killing people."
ReplyDeleteSirhan Sirhan is a Palestinian Christian, dumbass.
NatLamp was delightfully politically incorrect. Notice the "Goobers" strips in that issue. Could they be printed today?
ReplyDeleteTar Magazine
ReplyDeleteBiophysics:
nothing
Astrophysics:
ditto
Tragic? Mayhaps "hilarious" is a better descriptor.
ReplyDelete"NatLamp was delightfully politically incorrect. Notice the "Goobers" strips in that issue. Could they be printed today?”
ReplyDeleteYeah, we’ve all gotten so used to ‘the Onion’ and its occasional ever-so-subtle satire of favored groups that it was really refreshing to see the real thing at 90 proof. Check out ‘Tar’ magazine -- the actually mock MKLJ!
hey, thank you for finding that! i had looked around for it & couldn't find it -- thou art the man!
ReplyDeleteI was shocked at all the turntable ads. I still have a turntable like one of those but I lack the moral courage to throw it in the trash. I still have hundreds of pounds of vinyl records too. Next to a waterbed, vinyl records must be the densest article of domestic furniture.
ReplyDeleteIn those days there were also large heavy and bizarre turntables that sold for many times what those shown in this magazine cost. I used to see them at Hi Fi shows. BTW whatever happened to Hi Fi shows?
But a turntable is a simple mechanical device. The AR turntable was cheap and essentially perfect yet apparently there was no dearth of buyers for a lot of more costly brands.
This issue shows turntables on sale for $300 and a car for $3,000. We really were crazy then.
Albertosaurus