MAD Magazine Leaving Newsstands.

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death by youtube....

Long ago when my mother found my stash of "mens" magazines she seemed more concerned that I was read Mad magazine than Playboy (somehow too subversive and crude)...anyway got a stern lecture for both...veritable filth

RIP Mad...

Sad.

The end of an era.

MAD is a magazine that several generations of parents would PRETEND to disapprove of so that their teen kids would be SURE to read it (between the covers at night with a flashlight, along with Playboy, and with "The Congressional Record"). Kids would think that it was bad for them, but it was the most educational thing that they could read.

It was right on the heels of the Six Day War in the Mideast in 1967 when I was 12 that I picked up, not the magazine version, but the paperback book version with old stuff from the Fifties. And I read about one of the players in the then current Mideast war: Gamel Abdul Nassar of Egypt. So right there I learned from the book that Nassar had been around for a LONG time. The cartoon strip had Nasser with his hands in his pockets moping around his palace like a middle school kid like myself at the time. His aides doting on him like parents. The reason Nassar was feeling down was because he couldn't go to "the dictator's dance". Couldn't go because he was broke. But then...Nassar gets a thought light bulb! He gets on the phone to Krustchev and says "if you don't give me five billion I will join NATO". And then he gets on the phone to Eisenhower and says "if you don't give me five billion dollars I will join the Warsaw Pact". Nasser's aides are astounded and say "your excelliency! you're a genius! Now you CAN go to the Dictator's Dance!". To which Nasser replies that when he gets to the dance "I cant wait to tell Tito and Franco this. They'll flip!".

The comic strip was so masterfully stupid that I still remember it.

But that one comic strip in MAD taught me more about Cold War geopolitics than any geography teacher I had in junior high. But I didn't even realize that I was being educated. I thought I was just being entertained!

My folks bought it for me,Cracked was the other one.

I am only vaguely aware of its existence and would have thought it had gone out of publication a long time ago.

RIP the Usual Gang of Idiots.

I hate modernism. It would've been cool if I was born a decade or two earlier.

...Nobody commented when I wrote about. this in another forum ! At Mad's commercial height it sold something like 3.5 million per eight??-times-annually issue and had THREE long-term successful clones/imitators from other lublishers - Cracked, " Sick ",and " Crazy " ! Crazy was published by Marvel Comics. DC Comics had bought Mad in the 60s, though they treated it seperately.

_________________
Renal kidney failure, congestive heart failure, COPD. Can't really get up from a floor position unhelped anymore:-(.
One of the walking wounded ~ SMASHED DOWN by life and age, now prevented from even expressing myself! SOB.
" Oh, no! First you have to PROVE you deserve to go away to college! " ~ My mother, 1978 (the heyday of Andy Gibb and Player). I would still like to go.
My life destroyed by Thorazine and Mellaril - and rape - and the Psychiatric/Industrial Complex. SOB:-(! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !!

That's one of my favourite magazines. How could they do that to me?