A Selection of Harvard Lampoon Illustrations From the 1990s

My sister, being smarter than me, went to Harvard. Somewhere along the line, picking at the crumbs of her Ivy League education, I managed to glean a few copies of the Harvard Lampoon from the mid-90s, which I recently rediscovered in a box.

Since getting the entirety of their archives online doesn't seem to be a priority (as opposed to, say, getting their ass kicked by The Onion, College Humor, and, shit, 4chan in any objective measure of humor quotient and cultural influence), I scanned in a few of the more interesting illustrations -- the full set, which I'll probably be adding to, is on Flickr: Harvard Lampoon Illustrations from the 1990s.

First, a few items I'd photocopied (in the pre-digital era) for wall decorations:

Superhero comic strip parody, Vol 182, Issue 3 (Fall, 1992): "Got to push the button before Dr. Bad Guy destroys the planet! Gotta do it! Gotta do it!"

Vol. 180, #2 (Dec, 1989): Bunny ears parody of DaVinci's Vitruvian Man.

Vol. 182, Issue #4 (Winter, 1992): "The Wonderful Treasure in Every Light Socket Which You Can Get Out With a Fork."

Next, a couple of items from the Lampoon's Monday Poster Series:

Vol. 180, #2 (Dec, 1989): "As an animal, Mondays are irrelevant to me."

Vol. 180, #2 (Dec, 1989): "When you are stupid, you do not get embarrassed."

Another comic:

Vol. 182, Issue #4 (Winter, 1992): "Dr. Tom Batchelder's Instant Self-Improvement Courses"

Lastly, here's not an illustration, but an actual advertisement, for some upstart humor publication at some podunk state school that will never amount to anything:

Vol. 183, Issue #4 (February, 1994): Subscribe to the Onion.

Tags: harvard lampoon, the onion

Welcome, You've Got Dammit! 24 in 1994 (Video)

Here's a CollegeHumor.com video that's far funnier than it has any right to be:
24: The Unaired 1994 Pilot (link via TotalFark):

College Humor's 24: The Unaired 1994 Pilot

It's a 24 short that portrays the people at CTU trying to do what they do now, except using early 90s technology -- dialup, one-way pagers, pay phones, dot matrix printers (with tractor feed paper), etc.

As a tech user during that era and a former AOL insider, it was especially fun to pick out the anachronisms (though I could not for the life of me remember the term "anachronism" -- unemployment is making me soft).

If you want to get picky, AOL 3.0 didn't come out until 1996 (I was still using 2.5 when I started); Geocities wasn't really Geocities in 1994; they did, you know, have fax machines in 1994; and people were able to get stuff done before online (And even before computers. Or so I heard.)

Oh, and you can see they're using AIM (on a Windows 3.1 machine?) instead of an AOL client -- AIM didn't come out until 1997:

Since I don't even know if you can run AOL 2.5 or 3.0 on a modern machine (I couldn't, the last time I tried -- don't remember if they were ever officially sunset or just allowed to die... assuming you could find an installer -- need an install floppy?), chalk it up to "revealing mistakes."

The references to Lycos, Encarta, and such, as well as a contemporaneous event or two (Nancy Kerrigan, anyone>) were amusing. I got a few chuckles. (But why did the terrorists just disappear?)

College Humor's production values have been pretty good and are getting better all the time. Good job.

Dammit!

Tags: 24 in 1994, college humor, dammit