Mad #177

Alfred E. Neuman steps up as the world's least qualified firefighter on Norman Mingo's cover for this September 1975 issue, gleefully squirting a tiny seltzer bottle at a dramatically blazing skyscraper — complete with helicopter rescue and rooftop survivors — in a spot-on send-up of The Towering Inferno. That gap-toothed grin says it all: MAD has arrived to "shpritz" Hollywood's disaster-movie craze, and no amount of inferno is too big for Alfred's comically undersized solution. Inside, Stan Hart and Angelo Torres are also on hand to keep the satire sharp.