The Mad Magazine TV Special

This was a prime-time cartoon pilot for a potential series. I was just into MAD magazine at the time, and became a voracious collector. Great idea for a show, huh? Certainly preferable to what was on prime-time TV at the time.

But the pilot was victim of the wrong animation studio--Format Films, run by producer Herb Klynn. They specialized in low-budget animation; their past work included the original "Alvin & the Chipmunks," the inferior low-budget mid-60s Looney Tunes, and animated links fot the "Hee Haw" variety show.

The scripts used the actual texts from mainly 1971-72 issues of MAD, though drastically edited--hurting the program already. There are reasonable attempts to duplicate the art styles of the zanier MAD artists Don Martin and Sergio Aragones; but sophisticated, detailed drawing from George Woodbridge and Mort Drucker is another matter; the chintzy budgets and scrappy animation/design of Klynn's uncreative forces do it all in.

No wonder the networks didn't pick it up.

This is an interesting "what could have been" special, to be sure. Making what amounted to a video version of the actual MAD Magazine is an great idea in theory... but in practice it showed to be lacking. This goes to show why later iterations (the live-action "MADTv" of the '90s and Cartoon Network's recent "MAD" series) wisely backed off on slavishly emulating the magazine's style and content.

First off, the animation is stilted. To be sure, they nailed the various styles of Jack Davis, Don Martin, Al Jaffee, Mort Drucker and the other members of the "Usual Gang of Idiots" from MAD's heyday, but that comes with a major downside. You can tell that doing so severely strained the budget, as the animation seems to be shot with all key frames and with only the most limited of animation to reduce the time, effort, and money needed to reproduce the intricate caricatures and insanely-detailed whackyness of the usual MAD issue of the period. It's a necessary weasel as animation is expensive, especially old-stye cel animation (this is why, by the way, Filmation was so in love with extreme closeups in its shows -- if all you had to do was animate the face, you could save money on a shot). But still, it looks just plain bad on screen. If you can't do it justice in animation, don't do it at all.

The writing is not a help either. Again, the scripts are almost verbatim taken from actual MAD Magazine articles and gag pages. While they work perfectly on the page, the same writing ends up being too plodding and verbose on screen. Numerous jokes take way too long to land, and when they do, they could have been better served by a sight gag. One of the best examples of this is in the "Car Manufacturer of the Year" segment, where when the auto exec is talking about how his workers have to have six people to carry a bumper because they're so fragile, the whole punchline is hearing an offscreen tinkle of breaking glass, implying that 60 butterfingers collectively dropped the thing. Why not actually play up the havoc the accident caused onscreen? The only ones that don't fall to this problem are the one-pager adaptations (The two Doc Martin gag strips, the "Spy vs. Spy" strip, the "X-Rayvings" segment, and the Tarzan gag) as those already told their jokes visually and so were much, much easier to translate verbatim to animation. In fact, the Spy vs. Spy skit gave me one of the very few laughs I could find in this special, because it was so on-tone.

In fact, the whole thing stuck me as being better served as a radio show. If you ever watch the special on YouTube, close your eyes during the three tentpole segments (the aforementioned "Car Manufacturer", "Parent of the Year Awards" and "The Oddfather") and the comedy makes as much sense without the visuals. This is not a good thing, not when you're an animation house that has access to the gleefully and unapologetically visually anarchic MAD Magazine at your disposal.

The acting and music were unspectacular, but solid. The actors came off as really kind of tentative in their deliveries, almost as if they were deliberately dialing it back in some of their roles. Also, they really needed to have invested in a couple of good impressionists for "The Oddfather", as none of the three major characters sound like Marlon Brando, James Caan or Al Pacino. If anything, Pacino's actor seems to be channeling a slightly more macho Woody Allen half the time. The music was mostly variations on the main opening theme, which while catchy, really didn't exude any real MADness. Instead it sounded like it could have come straight from the soundtrack of "Standard Issue Sitcom #725" or "ISO9000-Compliant Game Show #624".

In all, it gets a barely passing grade. It's by no means the worst I've ever seen, and I do see glimmers of effort in the execution -- and bless 'em, they sincerely tried to keep the distinctive styles of the individual artists -- but it is a demonstration that a slavish aping of the magazine's art and style was just out of the reach of television animation, particularly in the 1970s "dark age" of animation.

Finally, why wasn't it picked up for broadcast? Well while IMDB says it was "adult humor" that killed the show's broadcast, there really isn't any humor that could be called "raunchy", and the violence in "The Oddfather" wasn't really beyond what you could see on any given Western or detective show of the period. Instead, I'm pretty sure that the "Car Manufacturer" segment killed any chance of networks or sponsors picking up the special. All three networks probably knew they'd catch Hell from Ford, GM, Dodge and other US car manufacturers (who, then as now, make up a not-insignificant percentage of any given TV outlet's ad revenue) if they ran something so viciously critical. Meanwhile every potential sponsor was probably scared off fearing that if MAD could attack the automotive industry on national TV in their debut episode there was nothing to stop them being next in the crosshairs.

And so the special ended up being sponsored by a Don Martin character falling to its inevitable doom. In a way, that seems to sum up the entire special, sadly.

"The Mad Magazine TV Special" is a pilot episode of a series that was never approved. In fact, apparently this show was never seen on TV and it currently is posted to YouTube.

According to IMDB, the networks thought this show was too adult. However, as I watched it I didn't think this was the case.... I just think the show wasn't very good. The biggest problem is the animation. The cel count of the animation is VERY low...almost to the point of looking like a slide show. As a result, it looks cheap and the lips of the characters seem to have little relation to what the characters are saying. On the positive side a FEW of the cartoons look like those of famous "Mad Magazine" artists, such as Don Martin as well as Sergio Aragonés' "Spy Versus Spy", but the majority of the cartoons look nothing like what you might have seen in the magazine. The other problem is that most of them just aren't funny....though you'd think they would have put their best stuff into the show to impress the networks. If this their best....it's incredibly sad. Overall, a failed attempt at a show that really should have failed.