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  • Approval of God: Over the years, countless targets of parody have sent letters and photographs to MAD showing their approval over being the target of a parody. One notable example is George Lucas, who sent a letter to MAD praising their parody of The Empire Strikes Back. This letter came right after Lucas' lawyers had sent a cease-and-desist order to the magazine, to which publisher William M. Gaines responded by forwarding them a copy of Lucas' letter and a note reading "That's funny, George liked it!"
  • Banned in China: One page containing a strip mocking the British royal family had to be ripped from 25,000 copies manually before that issue could be sold in the UK. Though they have relaxed their attitude on such jokes since then.
  • Board Game: In 1979 there was a Board game. The goal was to lose all your money. Play went counter-clockwise, and you rolled the dice with your left hand. Other rules made for an unusual experience.
  • Cowboy BeBop at His Computer:
    • Occasionally in the parodies, such as failing to notice that Mystique replaced the dead Senator Kelly in the first X-Men movie.
    • In the Back to the Future Part II parody "Bleak for the Future, Part II", "Mutty" complains "Look at me in 2015! I'm a complete failure! Why don't I do something about that?" Probably because in the actual movie, Marty a) has no idea how he turns out in 2015 and b) never does find out, although his girlfriend Jennifer does (she's in no position to tell him either, because she spends a lot of Part II and almost all of Part III unconscious).
    • In the Mork & Mindy parody, Darth Vader (who, beneath his armor, is a human) is shown as one of the aliens complaining about Mork.
    • In the parody for Twins (1988), they got the names of the protagonists mixed up, calling Danny DeVito's character "Juiceless" (Julius) and Arnold Schwarzenegger's character "Duncent" (Vincent).
    • And boy did they get it when they put out issue #292, the front cover of which featured Mario and Luigi bashing a TV with Alfred's face on it. They actually put a list on their letters page three months later (in small print, taking up a quarter page) of readers who wrote in to tell them that Luigi should have an L on his hat!
  • Creator Backlash:
    • Mort Drucker illustrated the 24 parody that ran in issue #429. According to a Facebook post by Tom Richmond, the original intent was to have his art colorized digitally, but when he was dissatisfied with the results, it was redone with a grayscale shading instead. Drucker didn't like this either, and there was no time for him to try shading it himself, so he took his name off the art and it was credited to "Bob Julian".
    • MAD lent its name to an Animal House-style comedy, Up the Academy. After it did poorly at the box office, MAD was quick to disown it, and wrote a two-page satire of their own movie, which ended with the entire staff fictitiously quitting in shame. William M. Gaines also paid Warner Bros. $30,000 to remove every reference to MAD from the movie. However, following being more integrated in the TimeWarner corporate culture after Gaines's death (as compared to their relative freedom under Gaines during the Kinney National/Warner Communications/early Time Warner years), the references were restored on all recent TV airings and the DVD.
    • Some characters in parodies refer to their previous roles as such. In the parody of "Eraser", Arnold's character is asked to "erase" some of his co-stars' previous roles, and he tells them to wait until he's done with his own.
  • Creator Couple: George Woodbridge's wife, Deborah Mills Woodbridge, contributed needlepoint to a few articles that called for it. Dick DeBartolo's husband, Dennis Wunderlin, has illustrated a few articles over the years.
  • Defictionalization: Some people actually play "43-Man Squamish", a Calvinball-esque game invented by the mag in the 60s.
    • One of the last mostly-original issues they did had the cover from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The first half of it was a black-and-white period piece and included a parody of Bounty Law.
    • A number of product enhancements suggested in the magazine have since become commonplace, such as peelable postage stamps, lids that stay attached to tube dispensers after opening, and spell checkers ("Hey, stupid! What kind of a word is 'teh'? Don't you mean 'the'?").
  • Distanced from Current Events:
    • Issue #122 (October 1968) features a front cover image of Alfred E. Neuman holding a pin toward several balloons with caricatures of contemporary politicians. One of the politicians depicted was Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated shortly before the image was set to hit news stands. His likeness was hastily replaced with one of Alfred.
    • Issue #300 (January 1991) originally had an image of George H. W. Bush burning a flag with the magazine's logo on it. Supposedly the editors felt that the image was in poor taste in the wake of the Gulf War, so it was hastily replaced with a stock image of Alfred spoofing People's "Sexiest Man Alive".
    • Issue #411 (November 2001) was originally supposed to have a cover featuring Alfred mistaking crime scene tape for the finish line of a foot race. The cover was deemed insensitive after 9/11, so a last-minute replacement was made with a close-up of Alfred's mouth showing an American flag in place of his missing tooth. A few copies of the original cover supposedly got out, and the cover was recycled in international markets.
    • According to this interview with artist Al Jaffee, he created a Fold-In themed to the 2012 theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, and the editors decided that it was in poor taste, and 600,000 copies were shredded to cover it up. The Fold-In was finally approved for use in issue #7 of the reboot.
  • Executive Meddling: Mike Snider revealed in his now-defunct blog that his first approved piece for the magazine, a parody of "A More Humane Mikado", was greatly altered by the editors, who felt that The Mikado would be too unfamiliar to readers. As a result, the parody barely scanned to the song at all.
  • Follow the Leader: The magazine's success inspired a succession of copycats, including Cracked and countless others, many of which even had Expies of Alfred E. Neuman as their mascots (and many of which lasted for only a few issues). William Gaines supposedly kept a voodoo doll that had pins marked with the names of Mad knockoffs; by his death in 1992, only the Cracked pin remained.
    • Gaines even launched his own rip-off, Panic.
  • Life Imitates Art: The Wheel of Fortune parody ends with the contestant owing a large amount of taxes due to all the undesirable prizes he's accumulated. Not long after the parody was published, the show dropped the "shopping" aspect for this very reason.
  • Missing Episode: A total of seven known articles from between 1957-1964 have been omitted from Totally MAD and Absolutely MAD, the majority believed due to declines from the creators or their estates.
  • The Other Darrin: Many recurring features have changed artists and/or writers:
    • Frank Kelly Freas, who did the majority of the early magazine covers, left in 1962. After his departure, the main cover duties went to Norman Mingo until his 1980 death. Jack Rickard then took over until he died in 1983, and then Richard Williams did most of the covers until the mid-1990s. By the end of the decade, cover duties were rotated among several different artists until about 2003, when Mark Fredrickson became the primary artist (although he had done the occasional cover as early as 1995). Interestingly, the Burbank reboot reverted this and has let several different artists contribute.
    • After Antonio Prohías retired in 1986, Spy vs. Spy went to other artists. Bob Clarke did the art from 1987 to 1993, then George Woodbridge for two issues, Dave Manak from 1993-97, and Peter Kuper ever since. Gag writing during the other artists' timespan was typically handled by Duck Edwing, although a few other writers pitched in now and then (notably, at least one installment paired Manak with his Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) collaborator Michael Gallagher, who would go on to become a semi-regular at MAD). Ever since Kuper took over, he has handled almost all of the gag writing as well.
    • This has also shown up in Monroe and..., which was originally drawn by Bill Wray (the same one who worked on The Ren & Stimpy Show in the 1990s). After a short retirement, the feature was briefly revived with Tom Fowler as the artist before retiring again.
    • Mike Snider's "Celeberity Cause-of-Death Betting Odds" was originally drawn by Thomas Fluharty for seven of its first eight installments (the seventh, in #364, was done by James Warhola instead). Hermann Mejía then drew it for the rest of the run, except for issues #370 (Warhola again), #375 (Fluharty again), and #398-#401 (Jon Weiman). The feature was retired with #417, made a one-time return with #423, then was revived starting at #455 with digital art from Sam Viviano under his pseudonym of "Jack Syracuse". After Snider quit the magazine, the series has been uncredited.
    • Also present in the Star Wars parodies of the first six movies. Dick DeBartolo and Nick Meglin co-wrote the A New Hope parody, with Harry North, Esq. (who more commonly worked at the British MAD) as the artist; the next four had just DeBartolo writing and Mort Drucker drawing. Revenge of the Sith switched to David Shayne for the writing and Hermann Mejía for the art, and The Force Awakens parody was drawn by Tom Richmond (except for some Call-Back panels from the A New Hope parody) and written by "David Richards" (believed to be a pseudonym for Shayne, as he has also written for some of the Star Wars cartoon spinoffs).
  • Outlived Its Creator: Bill Gaines died in 1992, but the magazine is still in business. (He's still credited as the "founder" among "The Usual Gang of Idiots".) Also, Spy vs. Spy creator Antonio Prohías retired in 1987 and died in 1998, but his strip still appears in the magazine.
    • "The Lighter Side Of..." was revived 15 years after Dave Berg's death.
  • Promoted Fanboy: In 2015, "Weird Al" Yankovic became the first (and, as of the 2020 reprints, only) guest editor.
  • Screwed by the Network: The Burbank reboot was barely a year into its run when the AT&T-Time Warner merger went through and new management switched to reprints, resulting in the sudden firing of the new Idiots. Even more bizarrely, the recently viral "Gashlygun Tinies" poem had shown signs of renewed interest in the magazine. Especially sore were the authors and fans of the serialized Potzrebie Comics, who were just getting the hang of long-form writing. This came to the point where some of them snarked at a Jeopardy! clue about the ordeal. However, Bob Fingerman has stated that he'd like the magazine to return to new ideas in the future, and Luke McGarry is attempting to revive them in his own comic zine, Palaver. The magazine briefly returned to publishing new material in October of 2022 to celebrate its 70th anniversary, potentially giving a sense of hope to longtime fans and readers.
  • Short-Lived, Big Impact:
    • Basil Wolverton appeared very sporadically in the publication, just 9 issues from 1954 to 1970. In spite of that, he's regarded as one of the top artists for the magazine, being dubbed "The Michelangelo of MAD Magazine" by The New York Times. MAD XL, a separate magazine reprinting older articles from the main publication, even named him an "Idiot of the Issue" in 2004. His son Monte has also been an infrequent contributor.
    • Many of the other iconic artists in the early years did not stay for long either. Most notably, Will Elder and Harvey Kurtzman were the main artist/writer duo in the early comic-book days, but both men left in 1958 (although they returned briefly from 1984-88). Other defining contributors who didn't stick around for long included John Severin (who quit after issue #10 and later became the flagship artist of rival Cracked), Wally Wood (left in 1964, except for one stray appearance in 1971), and Frank Kelly Freas (who primarily did cover art in the early days, but did not contribute at all after 1962). To their credit, all of them are known for considerably more than just their MAD work.
  • Technology Marches On: In their article "The 50 Worst Things About the Internet", one of the captions showed a family huddled around their tiny computer monitor watching a movie on Netflix, while their big beautiful flatscreen TV sat in the living room unused. The issue came out in 2009; nowadays there are multiple ways to stream video sites through your television (even back then, the family could have plugged the computer into the TV with an HDMI cable if they really wanted to). Hell, many TV's now have wifi connectivity, eliminating the need for a middleman altogether.
  • Uncredited Role: Many of Don Martin's single-page gags were scripted by ghost writers, most commonly Duck Edwing.
  • Writer Revolt: A running joke in the magazine, and somewhat true behind-the-scenes occasionally.
  • Write What You Know: Dick DeBartolo was working for Mark Goodson Productions when he was tapped to write the Family Feud parody. Naturally, he took that opportunity to knock down every trope that show presented (and submitted the parody under a pen name).
  • You Look Familiar: Certain contributors have returned after a long gap. Most notably, Will Elder and Harvey Kurtzman returned to illustrate some articles (and even a couple covers) between 1984-88, and artist Joe Orlando, a semi-regular between 1957-1969, returned for four articles in 1997.

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