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With that in mind, we set out to identify the five best pop culture parodies from the 1990s, skewering movies like Gremlins 2, The Flintstones, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. While it's been more than 30 years since issues appeared on magazine racks, most of the jokes haven't aged a day since the source material has remained popular. Actually, a couple of them have managed to get better with age thanks to the current state of American politics.

1

The Flintstones

In issue number 331 from 1994, artist Angelo Torres and writer Dick DeBartolo parodied The Flintstones for the release of the new movie starring John Goodman as Fred Flintstone. There are a bunch of good little jokes in this one, like Dino's resentment of Barney the Dinosaur, but the best one is a running gag about how much of a rip-off The Flintstones is of the 1950s sitcom The Honeymooners, as the characters keep accidentally calling each other by the character names from that show.

2

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Artist Sam Viviano and writer Dick DeBartolo took on the 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film in issue #298 from October 1990. Much of it is about how the characters seem like rip-offs of Star Wars characters — like, Splinter resembling Yoda; and Shredder resembling Darth Vader — but the best jokes are about the merchandising juggernaut the Turtles had become at that time. The best line in the parody comes on the first page, when Splinter chastises Raphael for beating up a pretzel vendor since the Turtles are supposed to remain in the shadows.

“We must not be seen anywhere!” Splinter shouts, “except on licensed lunch boxes, sweat shirts, hats, bendable dolls, watches, and our Saturday cartoon show and Nintendo games!”

3

Gremlins 2

In MAD issue 298 from October 1990, artist Mort Drucker and writer Stan Hart took on Gremlins 2, and as much as Gremlins 2 is already a parody, they managed to squeeze off some good jokes that actually play better in 2026 than they did in 1990. The main reason for that is because of the character Daniel Clamp, played in the movie by John Glover. That character was already an obvious parody of Donald Trump in the movie, but in the five-page parody, the character is renamed to “Donald Chump” and made to look exactly like Trump. There are also a number of jokes about what a gross, greedy sleazeball he is, the best of which comes from a panel where the female Gremlin has become Chump’s secretary, and he thinks how easy it’ll be to take advantage of her at the company Christmas party, which sounds pretty much exactly like our esteemed commander in chief.

4

The Wizard of Oz

This is another one where our current politics enhance the comedy from a quarter-century ago. In issue number 300 from Jan. 1991, MAD did a 1990s take on The Wizard of Oz where the movie was recast with celebrities from that time. Some of them are still recognizable — like Vanna White as the Good Witch of the North — while others are nearly forgotten to history, like Tammy Faye Bakker as the Wicked Witch. The best bit of casting goes to the Wizard, played by Donald Trump. At the end of the story, rather than grant them whimsical gifts like the Wizard does in the movie, he gives them all loathsome advice, like encouraging the Scarecrow to get into selling junk bonds.

5

Edward Scissorhands

Artist Angelo Torres and writer Dick DeBartolo spoofed Edward Scissorhands in issue number 304 from 1991. Most of the parody points out the film's many idiosyncrasies, like why Edward was given scissor hands to begin with, or why this woman would bring him home at all. One fun running gag in the story is that Edward keeps cutting all the hedges into licensed characters, like the Simpsons and Big Bird, but the best joke comes in a flashback where Edward recalls the death of Vincent Price's character, The Inventor. In the parody, The Inventor begins to choke on some food and Edward tries to give him the Heimlich maneuver, slicing him in half. %!s()

Bass Persuades is her sixth album to top the albums chart, and the first to hit Number One since 2013’s Bangerz. In all, she’s had 16 Top 10 albums comprising her work as Miley Cyrus (she’s now working under the mononym Miley), and her soundtrack releases as Disney character Hannah Montana.

Bass Persuades arrived on Sept. 18, preceded by its title track on Sept. 3. The song bowed at Number 35 on the Billboard Hot 100. The album is the follow-up to Something Beautiful, which peaked at Number Four on the June 14, 2025 albums chart.

Of the 61,000 units earned, 47,000 of them are made up of Bass Persuades’ albums sales; and streaming equivalent albums (SEA) comprise 14,000, which equates to 14.22 million on-demand official streams of the LP’s songs. The album’s opening week was boosted by sales across 16 vinyl variants, with one including a bonus track; nine CD versions, with one also having a bonus track; six download variants with bonus offerings; and a cassette.

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Elsewhere on the charts, Ella Langley’s previously chart-topping Dandelion, is at Number Two, with just under 61,000 equivalent units. Also, a couple of newcomers to the Top 10 made splashes. Riley Green’s That’s Just Me debuted at Number Three, with 60,000 equivalent album units earned. Beabadoobee scored her first Top 10 album with Pylon, which bows at Number Seven. It earned 35,000 equivalent album units.

Rounding out the Top Five, Morgan Wallen’s I’m the Problem is at Number Four, and Olivia Rodrigo’s You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl so in Love falls to Number Five from the previous week’s Number Three spot. %!s()

OpenAI decided not to release an upcoming artificial intelligence model, GPT-6.1 Astra, after determining that it did not adequately meet the company's safety standards, CNBC confirmed on Monday.

The announcement, which landed a day before OpenAI's annual developers conference, comes as the AI industry faces intensifying concerns surrounding the safety of advanced models. Leadership at OpenAI's chief rival, Anthropic, urged AI companies to slow the pace of model development earlier this month — a proposal that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman supported.

"Of course we want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that's in the company, or when we ship it to users," Saachi Jain, head of safety systems at OpenAI, said in a statement. "But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment."

The Wall Street Journal was first to report OpenAI's decision to scrap the release.

Earlier this month, OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra, which the company described as the product of "years of research and big bets." Altman told CNBC at the time that Astra comes with a "new capability level" and would lead to "a boom of entrepreneurship, of creativity, of economic growth, of scientific discovery."

OpenAI introduced two additional tiers to its GPT-6 family, GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna, last week. A spokesperson said Monday that the company has other models coming soon.

Read more CNBC tech news

• Zuckerberg, Amodei among tech executives set to meet Trump Tuesday
• OpenAI sparked Hugging Face bids with early investment offer ahead of Nvidia's $13 billion deal
• Nvidia releases software platform to stop AI agents from misbehaving
• SpaceX launches its massive Starship rocket into orbit for the first time

The safety and security practices at OpenAI, in particular, have been under intense scrutiny since July, when two of its models escaped containment, accessed the open internet and breached the open-source developer platform Hugging Face. The company has since disclosed several additional incidents where its models behaved in unintended ways, prompting industry researchers and government officials to call for additional oversight.

Following the incidents, OpenAI pledged to invest more in its safeguards and alignment work, which is the process where the company works to ensure that its models act in accordance with human interests and values.

"For anything regarding safety and alignment, there's a trade off," Jain said Monday. "You really do need to find what's the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction."

Balancing safety and speed has been a particular challenge as AI companies contend with the Trump administration, which wants to move fast. President Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed frustration with calls for a slowdown, and emphasized his desire for the U.S. to maintain its lead over China.

Altman was one of the tech bigwigs photographed in attendance at Trump's glitzy state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping last week. Other executives, including SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, were also present.  

"The only control or 'guardrails' that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!" Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social earlier this month.

WATCH: OpenAI offered to invest $100 million into Hugging Face before Nvidia’s $13 billion deal

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No discs, only merch

Image: Rockstar Games

Spendy deluxe editions are nothing new in the world of video games. For many years now, players have had the option to pay a bit more than retail price — often between $20 and $50 extra — for a bundle of extra goodies to enhance a new game they're looking forward to playing. These special editions typically include stuff like alternate cover art, powerful in-game items, soundtracks, art books, or the occasional display-worthy figurine. But lately, the prices have started to get pretty wild. Grand Theft Auto 6 is no exception.

Last week, Rockstar revealed its Goodtime State – Vice City Collection collectors box for GTA 6, a $400 assortment of branded merch that does not include a copy of the game. It's the latest example of how the industry has pivoted to pursuing high-spending players instead of trying to reach a wider audience.

Back when Sony announced plans to stop producing physical games industry analyst Mat Piscatella pointed out the writing on the wall. "In a world where consoles potentially cost $1k+ the focus shifts from trying to attract the mass market to targeting only the most affluent with the least price sensitivity and highest preference for convenience," he wrote in a July 3 post on Bluesky. If you zoom out a bit, you can see that same strategy at play when it comes to collector's editions, too.

Right now, Rockstar Games is more interested in the kind of customer that's willing to spend $400 to get what appears to be a box of promotional merch that the company might otherwise send to a YouTube content creator or Twitch streamer for free. Back in August, Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of Rockstar's parent company Take-Two Interactive, defended the decision to go all-digital with GTA 6, saying that discs "don't really make sense for the consumer." So digital goods are the future — except when they can charge people $400 for a hat, sunglasses, and a... [checks notes] "Vice City swizzle spoon."

Image: Rockstar Games

What that really means is discs don't make sense for the type of consumer Rockstar is prioritizing in 2026 and beyond. Elsewhere in his July comments, Piscatella wrote, "The choice to go all digital reflects a belief that this is not a market worth keeping or growing." Publishers and developers don't make any money from used games, so Rockstar has ensured there simply won't be a secondary market for GTA 6. It may sell fewer copies as a result, but the company will get a much larger slice of the revenue from each copy it does sell. The same logic applies to the Goodtime State box. After the cost of the items themselves — which, at a glance, is nowhere near $400 — an offering like this is pure profit for Rockstar.

The shift away from expanding audience to doubling down on big-spender whales is probably why collector's editions have gotten pricier in recent years — while not necessarily offering players more. For instance, back in 2017, Atlus sold the Take Your Heart version of Persona 5 for $89.99, which included the game, a plush, a duffle bag, a hardcover book, a soundtrack CD, and a spiffy decorative box to keep it all in. In 2026, a similar offering for Persona 4 Revival includes the game, an art book, keychains, DLC, a storage box, and a little statue of the protagonist for $249.99. Sure, some people might prefer a figurine over the plush and duffle bag, but it's hard to argue that it's worth almost three times the cost of the P5 special edition. And yet, this triple-priced Atlus offering feels like good value compared to GTA 6's Goodtime State – Vice City Collection, which doesn't even include the game.

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I'm not trying to yuck anyone's yum. If you want to treat yourself to a collector's edition of a game, go for it. Some of them are pretty fun! But selling transparently overpriced merch to a microscopic segment of your game's audience doesn't seem like an especially viable long-term business strategy in an industry that's facing serious challenges. Maybe, just maybe, we ought to reconsider the wisdom of paying executives nine-figure bonus checks for making decisions like this one. %!s()

Pike and her boyfriend were convicted in the 1995 killing of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, their classmate at Knoxville Job Corps. Prosecutors said Pike feared Slemmer was a romantic rival and lured her to a secluded area where she and her boyfriend tortured and killed Slemmer.

The case received widespread attention because of the brutality of the killing, the ages of the people involved, and because a satanic symbol was carved into the victim’s body.

Pike does not deny her guilt, but her attorneys and supporters argue a death sentence is not appropriate for a crime committed at that age by a teen with untreated mental illness after a childhood of brutal sexual abuse and neglect. Slemmer’s mother wants the lethal injection to go forward, saying she has waited decades to see Pike’s sentence carried out.

Tennessee governor Bill Lee announced Monday that he would not grant clemency. Pike’s attorneys have asked the supreme court to stay the execution.

Pike’s attorneys said she experienced an exceptionally traumatic and abusive childhood.

Assistant federal defender Stephen Ferrell said Pike was sexually abused starting from when she was a toddler and that she was raped at 11 and 17. He said Pike’s lawyers at the penalty phase of her trial did not present the jury with what he said was critical information about her past or argue that her age should be a consideration.

Pike was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Pike told police she initially only wanted to fight Slemmer but ended up killing her in a frenzied attack. In her clemency petition, Pike’s attorneys said her untreated mental illness and background made her unable to “put the brakes on”.

“I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done. Even more to accept how many lives I affected. I took the life of someone’s child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime,” Pike said in a statement included in her clemency petition.

Ferrell said more is known today about adolescent brain development and that Pike’s death sentence is an outlier. He noted that Pike’s boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, who was 17 at the time, was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole because of his age. He was denied parole last year. A third teen admitted to being an accessory and received probation.

Speaking by telephone from Florida, Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, said her daughter volunteered with the Special Olympics, loved roller skating and wanted to pursue a career in computers.

“She was easy-going. She was a computer geek to begin with. She and my husband would build and tear apart the computers constantly,” Martinez said. “She trusted everybody, and that was her downfall.”

The killing rocked the city of Knoxville. Prosecutors said Pike cut Slemmer with a box-cutter and beat her with a large chunk of asphalt. Elements of the crime stoked fears of Satan worship during the “satanic panic” of the 1980s and 1990s. Shipp, Pike’s boyfriend, has admitted that he was the one who carved a pentagram, a star-shaped symbol associated with satanism, into her body.

If Pike’s execution proceeds as scheduled, it would be Tennessee’s first execution of a woman since 1820, Maher said.

Executions of female prisoners are also rare in the US. Since 1976, 18 women have been executed in the country, representing about 1% of all executions, according to the center.

Most recently, Missouri in 2023 executed Amber McLaughlin, a transgender woman, for a 2003 killing, in what is believed to be the first execution of a transgender woman in the US.

In 2021, the federal government executed Lisa Montgomery, marking the first time in nearly seven decades that the US government has put a female inmate to death. Georgia executed a woman in 2015. %!s()