I just picked up the new Mad DVD – every issue from 1952 to December 2005 on one DVD*. I finally got to see those recent issues i missed, and those early ones I hadn’t seen. I got to enlarge the covers on some of the early issues and could finally decipher what they said (The “Racing Form” issue and the one with a cover covered with hack comic book ads. They never reproduced these in any of the books on Mad magazine so that you could actually read them.
Plus you got all the extras – copies of the stamps, medals, posters, etc. that got packaged in the Special Issues. My one complaint is that they don’t seem to have made recordings of the many records Mad included over the years – so you can see what the record looked like, but not hear them.
*I realize that only a few years ago Mad put out a set of CDs with all the issues on it. But this puts them all in one place, allowing you to break or lose it all in one fell swoop.
Oh, and what’s interesting is that the issues are reproduced intact, with the original ads (when I was a kid, Mad didn’t run ads, but in their earliest incarnation, they did. Now Mad runs ads again, and it annoys me – I have to figure out if something is an ad or not before I can laugh.)
They also have a lot of the bits that never showed up in collections, either because they weren’t thought to be that good, or because of other considerations. There’s a Mad Musical based on “Porgy and Bess” about the black Civil Rights movement, with Mort Drucker caricatures of Martin Luther King and others, that I suspect they were reluctant to re-run in later years. There’s another Musical called “A Day with JFK” that came out not that long before his assassination. And there’s the James Bond musical “007” that, for a long time, was the only bond parody that the magazine ran (they didn’t get around to really doing parodies of Bond until the mid-1970s, aside from this one), but which I don’t recall ever getting republished in any collection.(Why, in this case, I don’t know).
Very interesting! After doing some research on the Internet, I see this is put out by a company called Graphic Imaging Technologies, who does DVD-ROM collections of comic books. This is their first non-Marvel Comics collection. Seems like a very interesting idea. I wonder if some of the copyrighted articles which didn’t make it to the first set are absent here as well. There’s a lot of other questions I have as well, but it’s best not to ask them- as a wise man once said, what, me worry?
When I was a little nipper, my older sister and I found a box in the attic. It was Mad issues number 1 through 20, almost every one of the original comic book issues! We read and re-read them, left them lying around, cut out our favorite panels, and read them again until they crumbled to powder.
I used to think it was a crime.
But I came to realize it was worth it.
No amount of re-sale value was worth the enjoyment that I got out of that time spent pouring over every line and word.
From that day on, no matter how short of money we were, my mom promised to always buy the latest issue of MAD if we saw it on the newstand, and she did. It helped hone my sense of humor and helped me grow into the lunatic that I am today.
Is it easily searchable? I was only briefly a Mad magazine reader and used to get a paperback for Christmas as a kid, but for some reason the vending machine item, culminating in the fantastic Vend-o-vend machine, has had a lasting effect on me.
I have the CD-ROM collection. I bought it around the time it was going out of print, before it became unavailable for a few years. I’m pretty sure my CDs do have at least some sound files (“It’s a great big beautiful, wonderful, incredible, super spectacular day…”).
And it’ll even do the fold-ins for you, so you don’t have to crease up your monitor screen!
I tried once to burn the contents of all 7 CD-ROM’s to one DVD, for backup and convenience purposes, but I couldn’t get it to run from the DVD I made.
I’ll have to check. I’ve never heard of this before. They’ve certainly reproduced advertisements from all the issues with ads – it’s hard for me to believe they got permissions for all of those.
Of the “missing” Mad pages, I’ve only seen the last one (“Comic Strips They’d Really like to Do”), which I saw in the original issue.
Do they have the article that shows what happens to a comedy act – a garden-variety ventriloquist, I believe – when all the groups that write in to complain about sensitive PC issues are satisfied? So much of the act is cut out that both of the dummies have nothing left to say and are just flapping their mouths. It was ca. 1960. That alone would be worth the cost of the DVD.
I’ve just checked these out, and they are not there. Instead, when you click on what should take you there you get an image of a crumpled comics page, with a Post-It-type note that reads:
I suspect it’s exactly the same image they used in the CD-ROM edition, because the letters “DVD” don’t quite match the rest of the typeface, as if they threw them in afterwards.
