Production
The film was created using Rankin/Bass' "Animagic" stop motion animation process. The process involved photographing figurines in still shots and re-positioning them after each shot, the same approach used in Art Clokey's Davey and Goliath and to create the giant ape in the original King Kong. In fact, a Kong-like creature makes a featured appearance in this film, although due to rights issues he is known only as "It." Rankin/Bass had created several stop motion productions before this, spurred by their first, the enormously successful television special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer from 1964.
Classic monster movies were enjoying a resurgence in popularity in the late 1960s, and humorous monsters like The Addams Family and The Munsters were enormously popular. This campy film is a spoof of horror themes, complete with musical numbers and inside jokes.
Mad Magazine creator Harvey Kurtzman penned the script (with another writer, Len Korobkin) and Mad artist Jack Davis designed many of the characters. Davis was a natural for the job, being famous both for his humor work and his monster stories in the pages of EC Comics. It has long been rumored that Forrest J. Ackerman had a hand in the script, but while the dialogue is rife with Famous Monsters of Filmland-like puns, Ackerman's involvement has never been confirmed and his name never appeared in the on-screen credits or in original promotion for the film at the time of its release. In fact, Rankin/Bass historian Rick Goldschmidt, in liner notes accompanying the Anchor Bay DVD release, denied Ackerman was ever involved, at the same time as the DVD packaging promoted Ackerman's name. Goldschmidt repeated this on this in a 2006 blog entry, based on his interviews with Korobkin, who claimed to have written the original screenplay which then was revised by Kurtzman, but never worked with Ackerman.
Although mostly intended as a children's film, the film does feature some of Kurtzman's typically dark humor and a few mildly risqué jokes: Francesca falls over in one scene, and when Felix struggles to lift her she says, "I wanted you to know I'm no easy pick-up." In another scene, a character briefly has his head replaced with a cooked pig's ... and a "kids' picture" ending with a mushroom cloud would have been a bold move at the time.
The stop motion cute/ghastly look of the creatures in this film was very influential on Tim Burton's Vincent, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride; in particular, Burton creations strongly resemble the little monsters seen in the Stay One Step Ahead number.
In addition to the famous monsters seen in the film, Mad Monster Party also features several celebrity likenesses. Karloff and Diller's characters are both designed to look like the actors portraying them, while Baron Frankenstein's lackey, Yetch, is a physical and vocal caricature of Peter Lorre.
Mad Monster Party was one of several child-friendly projects Karloff lent his voice to in his final years (such as the TV adaptation of How the Grinch Stole Christmas). It was his final involvement in a production connected to the Frankenstein mythos that had propelled him to stardom some 36 years earlier.
Read more about this topic: Mad Monster Party
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“The growing of food and the growing of children are both vital to the family’s survival.... Who would dare make the judgment that holding your youngest baby on your lap is less important than weeding a few more yards in the maize field? Yet this is the judgment our society makes constantly. Production of autos, canned soup, advertising copy is important. Housework—cleaning, feeding, and caring—is unimportant.”
—Debbie Taylor (20th century)
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
“To expect to increase prices and then to maintain them at a higher level by means of a plan which must of necessity increase production while decreasing consumption is to fly in the face of an economic law as well established as any law of nature.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)