It’s really sad, after reading Dick DeBartolo’s Good Days and MAD, to see how low the MAD dynasty has sunk. Little things like cheap black and white newsprint, bigger things like (real) ads in the magazine, and biggest of all- it ain’t funny! Now I see a TV commercial featuring Black & White Spy shilling for Mountain Dew. How the mighty have fallen.
WHERE IS LADY GREY?
I only ask, because I seem to recall that it was the modus operandi for one spy to try to kill the other spy, only to have his plan foiled in some ingenius way… the other spy would then give a wink to the camera. The end.
The only strips where both the black and white spy are injured involved Lady Grey causing both spies’ tricks to backfire on them.
It did say “To be continued…” so I surmise the grey spy is hiding inside the soda machine to be revealed in the next commercial. I also propose that it will be Britney Spears of some other pop-culture female star.
Correction: the cheap newsprint has been there from the beginning. Since you brought up Good Days and Mad, a surprisingly good book I thought, there’s an anecdote in there about once when there was a printers screwup and they got the option of printing on high quality paper for free. Bill Gaines went out of his way to get it printed on the cheap stuff instead because that was part of the magazine.
The rest of your points stand though :(.
Steven Seagal’s Mountain Dew commercial is funnier than anything in MAD recently (and better than his movies).
Granted, I was never a huge fan of Mad Magazine as a whole but I’ve always loved Spy Vs. Spy and have enjoyed the current marketing tie-in. I hope it becomes a serial campaign, personally.
Well, look on the bright side … at least the Spies won’t have any trouble opening the aluminum cans, what with those beaks of theirs.
That’s actually what I meant, but upon re-reading my OP, I see that there’s no way a normal human could infer that. My mistake.
Can anyone explain to me why it is bad that Spy vs. Spy is in a Mountain Dew commercial. I think it’s great! I was delighted to see them, and the high quality of animation.
P.S. Naysayers, before “blaming” Mad magazine, do you know for a fact that Mad owns the licensing rights to Spy vs. Spy? The licensing rights may belong to the estate of the artist; Mad may have had nothing to do with it.
Hey, I agree with you. I thought it was note-perfect.
Walloon - Historically, the art and writing in MAD has been “work for hire”. The artists/writers were paid a fee for their work, and MAD Magazine retained the rights to that work. This is why Don Martin (whose work I love) obstensibly left MAD. He was getting tired of the company reprinting big compilations of his work and him not seeing a dime from those reprint sales.
Unless the situation has changed in recent years, I suspect that MAD holds the rights to Spy vs Spy. So while the artist may have created the characters, he did so on behalf of MAD and so can’t use the characters outside of MAD without permission.
Are you sure about this? Not calling you a liar; simply lookin’ to plug my own ignorance.
I had heard that Martin wanted a large raise, and that Gaines was not willing to submit to sudden demands, but I dunno for sure.
Considering that Gaines supposedly went to great lengths to locate Ghastly Graham Ingels to send him royalty checks when his old EC material got reprinted (royalties that, strictly speaking, Ingels had no legal right to), that just seems kind of cold for Gaines to do.
Then again, all I know comes from books (including the DeBartolo volume mentioned above).
And yeah, MAD ain’t what it used to be. I outgrew it during college, preferring the National Lampoon (MAD was cute, but lacked bare-breasted women in photo fumettis, you see), and when I’ve looked at it since, it just ain’t had the old oomph.
I thought I’d outgrown it, until my wife bought me the CD-ROM set for Father’s Day a few years back. Every issue of MAD from #1, in the original comic book format, through… 1998, I believe.
I’ve read them all.
Y’know what? MAD really began going downhill in the late eighties and early nineties…sigh
Put me down as another one who enjoys the hell out of these commercials. I’ve always enjoyed the Spy vs. Spy comics and the little cartoons that come on MAD TV every now and again.
What I like best about this is the feel and the look. It looks just like the comic artwork and is artistically wonderful! I love visual media, and to see this commercial makes me very happy that stuff like this gets done. If it has to be for a crappy Mountain Dew commercial, so be it, but I think it’s bloody brilliant and hope to see more soon.
I think we can be quite sure of this, since the original creator, Antonio Prohias (AKA .- -. - — -. … — / .–. .-. — … … .- …) gave up the series several years ago, and someone else has picked up (at least) inking Spy.
William M. Gaines was for the most part a helluva guy, a helluva boss, and a helluva editor, and one of the things he strove for was to keep advertising out of MAD. Somehow I don’t think putting MAD in advertising would cheer him up, neither.