In 1973, the promotional movie poster for Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye was designed in the introductory manner of a Mad parody, including the rectangular word balloons with self-referential dialogue; for verisimilitude, the poster was written and drawn by Mad regulars Frank Jacobs and Jack Davis.
For example, Dr. Phil arrives to counsel the Desperate Housewives, or the cast of Sex and the City show up as the new hookers on Deadwood.
Within an ostensibly self-contained storyline, the characters may refer to the technical aspects of filmmaking, the publicity, hype, or box office surrounding their project, their own past roles, any clichés being used, and so on.
In 2013, Film Comment wrote, "While film studies majors gasp over the deconstruction of genre in the works of David Lynch and the meta-movies of Charlie Kaufman, 'the usual gang of idiots' over at MAD have been deconstructing, meta-narrativing, and postmodernizing motion pictures since the very first movie parody (Hah!
[1] In August 2016, four of Mad's longtime contributors—editor/artist Sam Viviano, writers Dick DeBartolo and Desmond Devlin, and artist Tom Richmond—appeared at a public symposium in Nebraska to discuss their work in this particular medium.
[3] In September 2020, with Mad having been reduced to a primarily reprint format, Tom Richmond and Desmond Devlin announced that they were crowdfunding a book of newly created movie parodies called Claptrap.