"Mad" Magazine and Rick Dalton (SPOILERS)
Mad Magazine has announced that it will be closing down soon.
Mad and its cover boy "Alfred E. Neumann" have been part of American(and international?) life for decades, but Mad was really big in the fifties, sixties, and seventies.
The early fifties Mad was an outgrowth of EC Horror Comics, which had been put out of business by Congress. The gory drawings of Tales from the Crypt became the very GROSS drawings of early Mad Magazine, but as the 60's came on, new artists were recruited and Mad got more...sophisticated?(even for pre-teen boys, the main audience.)
With Mad getting ready to close its doors, I was pleased to see that the new Quentin Tarantino movie makes heavy mention of Mad magazine...principally showing how Mad magazine once put TV hero Jake Cahill(Rick Dalton, aka Leo DiCaprio) on its cover, and how a TV Guide cover drawn by Mad's Jack Davis, uses a cartoon version of Rick Dalton.
Leo's Rick Dalton has framed copies of both the Mad magazine cover and the "Mad"-like TV Guide cover framed on his wall...a TV star would be proud to be deemed important enough to be spoofed by Mad circa 1958-1962.
And turnabout is fair play...I was in the supermarket a day or two ago and on the magazine rack was a NEW Mad Magazine...with the Rick Dalton cover. I guess before it closes down completely, Mad is going out with a bang, courtesy of Quentin Tarantino.