art by Wallace Wood - click to make it better, but of course, you knew that.
I love to reread my old MAD comics. They are very detailed. In fact, they are so detailed, it is hard to catch every little side joke. Almost every time I reread a old MAD I catch something that slipped by me before.
Take issue #15 for example:
In it is a lampoon of the movie The Wild One with Marlon Brando. The name of the lampoon is The Wild ½ with Marlon Brandflakes. What I didn’t notice is the scene above with Marlon Brandflakes in his devil-may-care character enters the town’s little restaurant, and he does what any rebel would do, spin the counter stools as he walks by as you see in the first panel. What got by me, was the second panel – he spun a stool with somebody sitting in it. Not a word was said about it, you either caught it or you didn’t.
Have the MADs gone down in the amount of verbal content in the last 3 or 4 decades? This seems to be a trend in text books also. Funny how we have access to so much information but seem to be becoming less literate.
ReplyDeleteSteve,
ReplyDeleteI think the verbal balloons volume went up in volume after Harvey Kurtzman left - it was like they felt they had to explain their jokes so you could appreciate the humor - Kurtzman felt you either got it or you didn't.