Mad Monster Key Party: A Swingin’ Night of Frightful Fun 🗝️ 💋

Lock up your crypts and polish your bolts, because the monsters are getting kinky!

In today's NSFW cartoon, we start a series I'm calling the Mad Monster Key Party. It's loosely based on this Courting Disaster from (holy cats) 8 years ago!

For the uninitiated: a key party was supposedly a 1970s suburban tradition where couples would toss their car keys into a bowl, and everyone went home with someone new. Think of it as wife-swapping with a side of polyester and regret.

Of course, it may have been total bullshit. From the San Francisco Weekly piece: "Did Key Parties Ever Really Exist?":

“Humans are carnal creatures,” Center for Sex and Culture co-founder Dr. Robert Lawrence says. “If you give them an interesting sex idea, they will try it out or talk about it.”

But it may be all talk. The 1970 Journal of Sex Research article “Co-Marital Sex and the Sexual Freedom Movement” labels the phenomenon a myth. “Our data suggest a number of other false myths, but we cannot deal with them all,” co-authors James and Lynn Smith wrote. “There is one, however, that bears mention at this time, and that is the ‘key party’ myth.”

“We were never even able to find an individual who had attended one,” they added in their 1967-68 study of hundreds of Bay Area sexual subculture participants. “Evidently, they do occur, and we have unsubstantiated reports concerning them, but we suspect that the proliferation of the key-party concept has been supported for the most part as a result of fear and fantasy.”

Tonight, the Bride of Frankenstein’s monster plays hostess while her big green hubby proves he’s got more than lightning in his loins. 💀 ⚡️ Of course, these monsters have never been shy about mixing things up. From the Creature from the Black Lagoon making small talk with the Bride, to the vampire who’s about to get a serious stake near her heart, it’s one hell of a spooky soiree.

And if the title rings a bell, it’s a loving nod to one of the greats — Mad Monster Party (1967) — a stop-motion classic where monsters learned to laugh at themselves long before we started drawing them in compromising positions.

Mad Monster Party was a Halloween-themed stop-motion animation from the masters who brought you all those great Christmas specials, like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Santa Claus Is Coming to Town. And it’s on my Halloween movie list every year.

With a heavy influence from MAD magazine — it was co-written by Harvey Kurtzman and the characters were designed by the legendary Jack Davis — it’s a real treat. And with voices by Boris Karloff and Phyllis Diller, it’s absolutely irresistible.

In a notable change from the Victorian-era women in the Christmas specials, the female lead, Francesca, is a curvy, buxom, husky-voiced, sexy redhead with a mind just as sinister as the ghastliest of the monsters.

So grab a drink, toss in your keys, and see who (or what) you go home with tonight. 🦇💋