A Long Sought After Treasure!

 I've always been a HUGE fan of MAD magazine; ever since first getting turned on to a "Mad Fold-In"  in elementary school I've collected as many issues as I could get ahold of and have never looked back!

Over the years I've managed to track down a bunch of issues, including some very early issues- my earliest copy was issue 37 from waaaay back in 1958(!), but one thing that I've always wanted to have was one of the original first 23 issues.

As some of you may know, MAD magazine started out as a comic, yes, a EC Comic title in fact, alongside such notorious titles as Tales from the Crypt and Shock SuspenStories, and didn't turn to magazine format until issue 24!

Mad would occasionally reprint facsimile copies of those issues in Super Specials, but I really wanted a real one, ANY one, for my collection! 

Among them was  a cover I'd always liked, featuring Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland Tenniel illustration on the cover, and I recently found someone selling a copy for VERY reasonable amount!

Getting it in the mail recently, it is simply BEAUTIFUL and SUCh a SIGHT to behold! And yanno, the inside stories? Some of them I'd already had in some of those aforementioned facsimile issues, including a big fave, a spoof of Gasoline Alley! Such a surprise!

(Funny, the issue it was in had a completely different cover though!) 

Now, these issue are pretty pricey, and I have no expectation of "completing the set" as it were, but I'm entirely happy to at least own one of the original 23 in my collection!

A Favorite MAD Magazine Strip: "A Modern Business Success Story"

Was flipping through an old MAD Magazine and came across a strip that I really, really loved as a kid. Written by Dick De Bartolo and illustrated by Bob Clarke , “A Modern Business Success Story” showed a little old lady selling Apple Pies out of her house and slowly becoming more and more successful til she was the president of a huge conglomerate business.
Boy, did I LOVE this strip, ESPECIALLY the art- artist Bob Clarke was really a master at details in his artwork, and I remember spending ours poring over his stuff, looking at every thing going onion his pictures, from the customers, children, dogs and even chickens, to houses, cars, trucks and trains. He drew whole WORLDS in there!

At a kid, I enjoyed reading the strip and following the little old lady on her step up to the top, but it was only when I was older that I realized the REAL message wasn’t about how she grew from small time to big time, but, like a LOT of real businesses out there that you deal with all the time,  the more successful she got, the more her product relied on cost-cutting methods,, from mass-marketing her items, moving from fresh to frozen pies, and finally, substituting real ingredients for processed, artificial substitutes, and as we see in the little corner, the people are now flocking to a NEW little old lady, offering what “Mom” once did, real, homemade apple pies!
From the beautiful artwork to the tale’s valuable lesson, this is MAD at its best! Man, they just don’t make strips like these anymore!
PS, if you look really close, you see only TWO people going to the huge factory outlet at MOMCO, and one of them is a blind man that probably meant to got to Aunt Bertha’s but got led to the wrong place by his seeing-eye dog, LOL!

Mad Magazine Special "It's A Super-Spectacular Day"!

  Back in 1979 or so, MAD Magazine  came up with this pretty nifty novelty included in one of their quarterly Super-Specials- a flexi disc called “A Super-Spectacular Day”, which would play a total of 8 different endings...which one would it play?

 Man, this was a fun disc! With a catchy tune the singer sang about how great the day felt like it was going to be

“It’s…A…

Great Big Beautiful Wonderful Incredible

Super-Spectacular Day

And your Heart is hummin’ with good times comin’

And you’ve got the happy feeling things are going your way

All the bells are ringing and a little bird’s singing while he sits on your window sill, saying, “Yessiree, I can surely see this will plainly be MOST DEFINITELY a Super- Spectacular Day!”

…then an obnoxious voice yells out “UNNTIIILLLLL…..!”

Then the “surprise” second half of the song sang about bad things happening all day, ending with the refrain “It’s not such a Super- Spectacular Day”

After a few days of spinning that disc, me and my friends started wondering if we’d heard all 8 tunes yet. We tried comparing notes with each other to get an accurate “list” of what each “surprise” ending  consisted of. Trouble was, the song endings had no official titles, and so we inevitably had to describe them thusly: “OK, I heard that one where he gets abducted by an alien”… and so on, making it EVERY hard to keep track of!

 After much discussion and arguments about what was heard and remembered, we more or less nailed it down to SEVEN tracks, and trust me when I tell you, we were entirely SICK of the intro part of the song by then! Funny, it seemed so CATCHY the first 65 times we heard it!

1. Alien Abduction

2. Blind Date

3. Labeled School Nerd

4. Afflicted by Strange Disease

5. Stalled on the Train Tracks

6. Beaten by the Mob

7. Relations show up

 SO…what was that 8th track? We couldn’t remember if we’d heard any more than the seven we confirmed, so we grudgingly went BACK to spinning the record, hoping in VAIN to hear the final song!

One thing my brother noticed upon careful examination was that though it seemed like the song played the first half of the song, then went into one of the eight variations, it actually was eight complete songs fitted onto that flexi, so your ending was already decided when you first dropped the needle on the beginning of the disc…not that it helped us any.

So after days of attempting to uncover the elusive eighth track without success, we became convinced that there was, in fact, no eight track to be found! Plus, this was MAD Magazine we were talking about, and it would be JUST LIKE “the usual gang of idiots” to have their readers losing their minds trying to find an ending that didn’t exist!

Fast forward to a few years ago- through the wonder of the internet, SOMEBODY (I forget exactly WHERE I got it- but whoever you are- a BIG THANKS!)  finally came to my rescue- they had the original flexi disc (mine had long gone the way of most childhood things- worn to death!) and took the time to rip all the different endings! I was finally able to take a listen to that wonderful flexi of my childhood again, and YES, there WERE in fact EIGHT songs after all!

Wow, listening to the tune really brought back great memories of those days back then, when my friends would come over after school and we’d sit there spinning that flexi til the tune was spilling out of our ears! Ah, Great Times!

And that elusive eight track? Turns out it was some version about neighbor problems or something…really had a hard time understanding the lyrics! But you know, it DID sound familiar, so maybe we DID hear it a few times, after all!

Lend an ear and check out ALL EIGHT chapters of the extremely catchy and funny  SUPER-SPECTACULAR DAY! 

Favorite Artists: MAD's Angelo Torres

Angelo Torres Cheesecake Art

People will sometimes ask me why my illustrations of girls always tend to have gals with real curvy hips and legs, and my answer is immediate: “Ah, That would be the influence of Angelo Torres!”, To which inevitably, the next thing the person usually asks is, “Who?!”

 Readers of MAD Magazine in the seventies and eighties knew the format of each issue was pretty set. The magazine would start with a Movie spoof usually drawn by Mort Drucker, the middle of the magazine would feature Dave Berg’s “The Lighter Side Of…”, and the issue would end with a TV Sitcom spoof. The TV spoofs were almost always drawn by an artist named Angelo Torres, and I’ve always just loved how he drew women.

  My first exposure to the greatness of Angelo’s work was way back in 1977 or so. I was an avid Charlie Angels fan, (owing to the fact that I was in love with Jaclyn Smith) and one day I was over at my friend Byron’s house after school, and he had the latest issue of MAD magazine featuring a beautifully rendered cover of Charlie's Angels by Jack Rickard, and a satire inside drawn by Torres!  I immediately sat down and read it, and it was love at first sight!

Charlie's Angels, MAD #193

   First off, His depiction of Jaclyn was right on, and furthermore, most of the s(tory had the girls running around in bikinis! (I’ve noticed that whenever anyone spoofs Charlie’s Angels, they always show the three girls in bikinis, but viewers will attest that Kate Jackson never went NEAR a bikini on the show…but I digress)

  Maybe it was since the first girl I ever saw him draw was Kelly Garrett, but I became an instant fan right there, and from then on I would always recognize him as the guy that drew the Charlie’s Angels Spoof, and over time I noticed “That guy that always draws girls in bikinis ”, or at least It seemed, much to my delight!

Fantasy Island

  One of the things I really dug was the gorgeous way he drew women of all different ethnicities, whether they be Spanish, Black, Asian, or just the good ol’ California girls, and it almost seemed like the script put in exotic bikini-clad women simply because they knew Angelo would be illustrating it!

Six Million Dollar Man,MAD #172, Hawaii 5-O, MAD#141

    The girls were always drawn with special details in the face (eyes, lips), and MAN could he draw girls’ legs! I remember that every time an issue came out with a story featuring Angelo Torres’ art, I would buy it, and as I got older , I would try and try in vain to copy the drawings of those issues, attempting to emulate the style of the master himself. And I’m still trying to this day!

Here are more of my FAVORITE Angelo Torres "cheesecake" illustrations!

Riptide, MAD # 254

The Love Boat, MAD #202

Vegas, MAD #210

Three's Company, MAD #196

Owl and the Pussycat,MAD #145

  I Love this one- Who else but Torres could give Babs such great legs? AHAHAHA