The book is at amazon. It has a cover drawing of Alfred E. Neumann dressed like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. Inside, if I remember correctly, you will find the satire (among other satires) ‘Saturday Night Feeble’ spoofing the 1977 hit disco film.
Now, this magazine-type book (along with one for the 60’s and another for the 80’s) is just one example of how Mad keeps reprinting its old issues over and over and over again. Many of their books are also reprints of the Magazine. Its very good stuff this Mad Magazine. Very funny and clever but way too reprint is indeed overkill.
Similarly, Cracked Magazine was very funny and clever too. But Cracked did not keep reprinting their stuff over and over (and over!!) again. I wish Mad had been more like Cracked as far as reprint.
Another beef I have is that they are too select in what they reprint. Too much by far Saturday Night Fever-spoof reprint and not enough, say, Starsky and Hutch-satire reprint is another issue. But that is another beef almost entirely.
Mad also printed many super specials with just about all reprint too. I heard Cracked had a few super special reprints as well but I do not remember ever seeing even a single one of those.
Just to clarify: they don’t “repeat” the material; the publish reprints of it. But they’ve never stopped generating new material based on contemporary society (movies, TV, politics, etc.)
Mad readers tend to love the magazine for a while, and then lose interest in it. (One staff member joked that they published the first issue, and then published a letter in the second issue from a reader who told them that they weren’t funny anymore.) The break often coincides with adulthood.
I am in this category: although I absolutely loved *Mad *when I was young, I haven’t cared for much of it in decades. But I still love the material from my youth. And before ubiquitous digital media, I often had to scrounge in used bookstores and yard sales to find it. Reprints of the old stuff were a godsend. This culminated in Absolutely Mad, a DVD containing every issue from the beginning through 2002.
Well put. But my beef is too much reprint of it. I would not have minded if they just put it in super specials from time to time. But not books as well as ss.
Pretty much this (though before the DVD, there was a set of 7 CD-ROMs).
When I was a kid, I liked the super-specials and books because they let me see the stuff that had been published in the couple of decades before I was old enough to start reading the magazine. (And most of what I know about the 60s and 70s I learned from reading Mad. :D)
You’re upset because a collection of reprints from the seventies contains reprints from the seventies?
Anything other books upsetting you this week? Maybe you saw a cookbook that was full of recipes or a crossword collection that was full of crossword puzzles?
Actually the reprints were published in the 1990s, so he’s only two decades late, not four.
I started buying Mad in the 1960s, when I was 10, and stopped when I got to college (when I started buying the National Lampoon). I bought all the paperback re-issues of MAD stories from the 1950s, when it was in a quite-different comic-book type format. It was very interesting to see how it had changed.
Back to the second point I made. Mad reprinted over and over again their very good satire of Columbo (called “Clodumbo”) but rarely (if ever) their satire on the equally popular Hawaii 5-0 series. Reminds of a book I read on TV shows. “Does your TV station bore you playing a handful of shows to death and ignoring the rest”–the book asked (or something very close to that.
here’s a link to the page so you can see the Mad H50 satire. fiveohomepage.com
Scroll down to where it says something much like “Duke, someone is trying to make five-0 look silly”. There you can find the satire link and (best of all) link to outtakes from season 11 of the show itself!!! Outta sight!!!
People buy the books. Why shouldn’t they reprint them?
And it’s far simpler and cheaper to reprint a book then to make changes to it, especially since the book is aimed at an audience that hasn’t read the first one.
MAD has been reprinting their stories almost as soon as they had enough stories to reprint. The Mad Reader came out two years after their debut and has been reprinted in the same form (other than cover changes) constantly. They’re treating these repackagings the same way they always have.
Sometimes I see the bible reprinted. It’s such an ordeal to see it so often with the same parables and psalms. Jesus Christ, can’t they get new material, or something?
