cover image The Harvard Lampoon Presents Mediagate

The Harvard Lampoon Presents Mediagate

undefined. Atlantic Monthly Press, $12.95 (262pp) ISBN 978-0-87113-179-9

``This mild tale concerns the fate of identical twin sisters who can read each other's thoughts, but only when they are written legibly on a scratch pad,'' so begins one lampoon about The Twilight Zone 's unreleased final season, and it typifies the humorwitty and funny but also surprisingly mild, inoffensive and even wholesome. Also unusual for the editors of the Harvard Lampoon are the work's wide-reaching time span, with its targets ranging from McCarthy-Cold War era television to contemporary rock star Michael Jackson, and heavy emphasis on nostalgia: the Beatles, Elvis Presley, Curious George (the fictional monkey) and Dean Martin. The six sections (six weeks of a Senate hearing into an alleged conspiracy by the media to ``suppress, censor, bury, and badly smudge information''), excellently illustrated, parody magazines, audio, movies, newspapers, television and books. $50,000 ad/promo. (August)