The 1974-1975 Primetime TV Season: 'The Mad Magazine TV Special'

In the mid-1970s, the satirical magazine Mad Magazine was arguably at it creative and sales peak, so it's not surprising that one of the broadcast networks would try and turn the idea into a television show. After all, someone at NBC thought it would be a great idea to take the sad and borderline mopey made-for-television movie Sunny (which focused on a dad raising his daughter alone after the death of his wife) and turn it into a weekly series with inviting loglines such as "Jill doesn't understand the meaning of death." So in comparison, a TV drawing from the pages of Mad Magazine might have sounded like a near-sure thing.

ABC ordered a pilot for a proposed series, but at some point decided that they would just greenlight a stand-alone 30-minute TV special. Which as produced but never aired.

Why the special never aired depends on who you talk to. If the network ever publicly acknowledged the reason, I couldn't find any documentation. The Mad Magazine staff who worked on the project later told reporters they were told the humor was too "adult" for the network to air in primetime.

But looking back, that seems less likely for the reason why ABC shelved the show. Nearly all of the scripts used in the special were adapted (sometimes quite literally) from bits that had appeared in recent issues of the magazine. And while it is true that powerful advertisers such as the big American car companies might not have appreciate the humor of the special's big "the American auto industry is doomed" sketch, I haven't seen the slightest indication any of that mattered to the executives at ABC.

In fact, when it comes to the writing, the problem was often that it felt nearly unchanged from the magazine's original version. The scenes were stilted and honestly feel more like radio scripts than a fully realized television production.



But ultimately the biggest problem was the animation style of the footage. Some of the artwork you'd find in Mad Magazine was certainly simplistic, but the special's attempts to match the more complex and iconic style of animators such as Mort Drucker fell quite short.

The problem seems to be that producers picked the animation studio Format Films, which was responsible for low budget animated shows such as Alvin & The Chipmunks and those whacky animated horse segments on Hee Haw. And Format had to have been hampered by a fairly tight budget, because the cel count of some scenes is so low that it almost looks like a series of rapidly changing flashcards instead of seamless animation.

Watching the special (see above), my main takeaway is that the so-called "adult" content wasn't the problem. It was a low-budget animated project produced by an animation studio that wasn't able to translate Mad Magazine's incredibly distinctive style to the TV screen.