First music you owned…
Was it a cassette, record, CD, 8-track or what type? And who was it?
Mine was Madonna ‘True Blue’ on cassette. 😎😂
MAD “Twists” Rock n’ Roll, circa 1957. It was of course an analog vinyl LP. MAD+Twists+ Vinyl LP?
Equals long before you were born; but you missed a lot.
The MAD flexi-records were cool. Do you recall the one that had 8 different endings to one song? It played a random one each listen. (though still mostly before my birth in the glorious year of our Lord 1969)
shareAnubis, can you imagine what it was like being a little boy in the 50s discovering MAD (short for “Madison Avenue” (as was MAD Men) Magazine and seeing how UNBELIEVABLY GREAT it was?! I had my first orgasm at 8. MAD clearly inspired the Abrams/Zucker/Abrams movies like Airplane, where all the funniest stuff took place in the background, or on the fringes, or both.
It broke my heart when MAD recently stopped publishing. They had a loooong run. “What? Me worry?”
I used to spend my lunch money on old copies of MAD. I became obsessed with it. When I was 10, I bought some paperbacks collecting issues from the days when it looked more like a comic book. I loved the parodies of the Blackhawks, Frankenstein, Dragnet, Batman, Howdy Doody, G.I. Shmoe!, and tons of stuff parodying things I knew nothing about. Without a doubt, I would have been reading these right off the rack were I born a decade earlier.
MAD's comedic sense from the 50s to the 70s was right up my ally. Whether their approach was crass (a "glitch" for stepping in dog shit), brutal (3 Stooges levels of violence), bawdy (very horny illustrations), or sophisticated (socioeconomic allusions & logic traps), they had me howling. I enjoyed it only slightly less in the 80s and eventually quit reading it by the 90s.
Though I wasn't a reader anymore, I felt sadness at the news of MAD shutting down. It was definitely a major pillar of my development.
Read them all here:
https://viewcomics.me/comic/mad
Did you also enjoy the Rocky and Bullwinkle TV show? Jay Cllampet had a sense of humor very similar to MAD. Very subversive and arch, and supported by the wonderful
voice acting of June Furay. Fractured Farytales?!
That stuff was up there with MAD’s “Spy vs. Spy.”
I spent 1 Thursday Thanksgiving afternoon in my grandparents’ living room, lying on the floor, watching Rocky and Bullwinkle with my Dad and my Uncle Jim sitting on the sofa behind me. We were all laughing our asses off, though there were decades in age between us. To paraphrase my father and uncle, “This is funny for everybody.”
That is REALLY hard to do.
This conversion has been a pleasure. Alfred E. Newman lives!
Quality show. I was most fond of Mr Peabody & Boy and Captain McBrag.
A pleasure indeed. Beware Brand X!
Did you know that the Brit 60s rock band, Herman’s Hermits (“I’m telling you now”) was originally named Sherman’s Hermits, in reference to Mr. Peabody and His Boy, Sherman? There was some legal geffuffle over the band’s name, so it was modified as a path-of-least-resistance; but how can anyone claim that the given name Sherman is intellectual property? The anecdote shows what a huge influence MAD had on the pop culture of the post-WWII world.
My fondest Bullwinkle memory: I don’t think it was a Fractured Fairytale, but a parody of a poem about the American Revelation, Barbara Fritchie, by John Greenleaf Whittier. The refrain line in the poem, spoken by an old lady, leaning out of her window to defend The Stars and Stripes from English Soldiers, is “Shoot if you must, this old gray head, but spare my country’s flag!” The Redcoat, portrayed by Boris Badinoff (sidebar: I’m sure you know there is a Russian play titled Boris Goodinoff), replies (paraphrase), “Okay, if that’s what you want,” and chuckles as he hefts his musket to his shoulder.
Bullwinkle whips a musket twice the size out the window. He says (paraphrase), “Hold it right there. HE WHO TRIES TO
SHOOT AN OLD LADY DIES LIKE A DOG!!”
When did we lose this kind of wit in popular print and TV media? Why did we lose it? At the very least, we can remember it today.