I do. I liked Car-Toons (or as they styled themselves, CARtoons). Unk and the Varmints were fun, and the other stories and features were always good for a laugh. Great art, though not always the best writing. Didn’t matter; my friends and I were into all kinds of cars in those days, and we read and enjoyed every issue. I may still have one or two now-fifty-year-old issues buried somewhere.
If there is any good news, this is it. I’ve been getting the “new” Mad (I consider the “new” Mad to be the one based in LA), and it’s been lacking. Oh, sure, some things bring a smile, and I can see where they are trying (a new artist has taken over Dave Berg’s “The Lighter Side,” for example), and it still has Sergio Aragones doing “A MAD Look At…” in each issue, but there are a lot of just plain dumb one-off comic strips that must have been unsolicited, sent by freelancers. It’s missing the text features (“A Mad Primer To” would be an example), and the movie and TV satires that bookended each issue, back in the day (well, in fairness, it always contains one such satire, but not necessarily at the front or the back), and other content from the Usual Gang of Idiots. Many of the Idiots are gone now, but Mad doesn’t seem to be trying to cultivate a new Usual Gang of Idiots.
But if Mad continues to publish, just with past material, that’s not so bad, IMHO. Let’s face it, I–and I am sure others–remember past features and such fondly, and would like to read them again. Problem is that our original magazines were thrown out by parents, eaten by the dog, or lost in a move. Thing is, that Mad will have to watch for dated material–I doubt very much that Spiro Agnew jokes would be understood nowadays.
If I owned Mad, I would latch onto that and never let go. “Spiro Agnew” would become the go-to name/punchline for everything. It even slots in great with “potrezebie” and “veeblefetzer”; try it, they roll off the tongue.
We worked from an LP, probably an “Original Cast” version. I don’t have that LP anymore, so I’m not sure. Linda Lavin, Jo Anne Worley, Paul Sand, Richard Libertini, and MacIntyre Dixon were in the cast, according to Wikipedia. Not to mention Robert Goulet’s voice.
“Oh, I love my mother!”
“Here I am, in my room, with my tape recorder…”
“Wait a minute! Just YOU sing it!”
“You never can trust those people…just like you never can trust you and me!”
“Tall and tan, moves like a dancer,
But I never seem to get any answer…”
The word “complete” is a misnomer. Several articles by outsiders are not included due to reprint permissions. Most notably the Andy Griffith “What is was, was football.” one. Fortunately, someone has filled in the blanks. (PDF)
My local newspaper said that MAD will not totally cease publication; the magazines will be compilations of old features, and they will still publish books.
Wow; thanks for coming to the thread to tell us all off. :rolleyes:
:dubious: I’m not sure “content farm” is an accurate description of a site that adds new, original content multiple times a day. If it is, then I must love content farms because the Washington Post, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, etc. totally fucking rock.
I don’t know if you got the memo but Cracked 100% sucks now that they got rid of most of their writers and now let freelancers or Cracked readers themselves write most of the articles. I think Seanbaby is the only person who still puts effort into their posts and doesn’t just reuse old articles.
I did my part. I’ve had a subscription since 1987 and still look forward to its arrival in my mailbox. This news broke my heart.
But I also figured we were on borrowed time for a long time…I teach teenagers, and I periodically ask them if they are familiar with Mad magazine. I’ll bet it’s been 20 years or more since one of them said yes.
Once, a few years ago, I saw a girl, maybe 13 or 14, buying one at a B&N, which warmed my heart until my kid suggested that she was almost certainly buying it for her father.
If you buy the Mad DVD set mentioned above, it contains all the specials and annuals, along with scans of all the things they stuck in as “premiums” *. One of the early Specials had a punch-out model of the Mad Zeppelin. You can print it out from the DVD and assemble it again!
*unfortunately, they don’t have music files of the cheap vinyl records they sometimes sandwiched into these special issues.
I have great affection for Mad. It was a great source of cultural literacy for me, and to this day there are many movies, books, poems and the like that I can discuss intelligently without actually consuming thanks to the Mad parodies. Mad has also given me a weird second-hand nostalgia for a filthy, crime-ridden New York of the seventies that I never actually experienced.
When I was a kid, the local flea market had a stand that sold illegal, coverless copies for a quarter. Spending a dollar there was a real treat. I haven’t read a new issue for many years, and the last time it did it wasn’t very good. Maybe I’ll pull out some old issues just to see if they still stand up.
