Last day of "MAD Magazine Week"!
Like many great innovators MAD Magazine spawned some imitators. Cracked Magazine and Crazy Magazine were two of these MAD wannabes and each have come and gone. Though I'd sometimes buy and enjoy their issues – depending who was on the cover – my vote was always with MAD. (To read about how I got Tom Wopat's autograph on this issue of Cracked (to the right), click here.)
Cracked and Crazy blatantly aped just about everything MAD put in print...from it's subject matter...to it's artwork...and even the use of a mascot character. Like MAD's Alfred E. Neuman, Cracked featured a dumb, wide-jowled mascot janitor named Sylvester P. Smythe on its covers, while Crazy had a short, bug-eyed mascot with a large black hat and cape named Irving Nebbish, who was later replaced with the belligerent Obnoxio the Clown in 1980. 
Like I said on the first day of "MAD Magazine Week", MAD has been tamed over the years, but it's stood the test of time.
1 comments:
I would read CRACKED occasionally...it wasn't all that bad, really (and had art by the talented John Severin)...but CRAZY wasn't all that good, really, and had just a weird mascot. Why all these magazines decided to use a mascot is beyond me. Yes, both very clearly imitated MAD, to the point of embarrassment, but then some imitators can actually be good, as with so many of the movie monster magazines during the 1950s-1970s.
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