MADness #10: Boston Pubic!

We continue our Monday MADness chronological crawl through my work for MAD (henceforth titled “MADness #xx) with a look at my 10th appearance in the magazine.

Remember the early 2000’s TV show “Boston Public”? Neither does anybody else. Although it was a critically acclaimed show at the time, particularly for its diverse cast. It was big enough that MAD did a spoof of it. Once again I teamed up with my CLAPTRAP partner Desmond Devlin to poke some fun at this show in MAD #412, January 2002.

This parody was the first time I drew someone I knew into the art, something I would do a lot of over the years. See that sullen looking guy in the middle of the bottom panel with his head leaning on his fist? That’s my pal and fellow cartoonist Ed Steckley, who would make several appearances in MAD over the years. I believe he has the original, although he probably hawked it on ebay years ago.

After doing a couple of movie spoofs, this was a return to doing a TV show parody. There are several differences between the two. In a film spoof, the script follows the film, and each panel is a specific scene from the movie. That makes the visuals pretty specific, particularly in terms of angles, lighting, etc. Generally when we spoofed a TV show, the script was a made up episode that riffed on the tendencies and tropes of the show rather than a specific episode. That meant the visuals where supposed to capture the overall feel of the show, as opposed to specific moments.

Another thing about spoofing TV shows as opposed to movies is the amount of research needed to do it. With a movie, you only have to watch a single film, which is about two hours or so (or nine if it’s a “Lord of the Rings” movie). With a TV show, I needed to watch a lot of episodes to get a feel for the show, understand the characters, get ideas for visual gags based on the content, etc. If possible I would watch an entire season of a show before doing the parody. This was not so easy back in the early 2000’s, when streaming services and ondemand content was still science fiction. MAD would sometimes send me VCR tapes of episodes, and I’d start taping the show the minute I was told I would be doing the spoof. In latter days it was easy to go back and watch an entire season via streaming.

In my early days with MAD sending the digital files over the internet was impossible. Too big a file for the primitive bandwidth and connection speeds of the time. So I would FedEx them a DVD with the files burned on it. The latest FedEx dropoff site was 8 pm at the airport, about a 20 minute drive from my place. Naturally I would push things to the last second. There was a weird interstate exit tangle to get to the site that had no direct exit to the site from my direction. Coming from the south I was forced to take an exit to a street that then required you to drive through several stop lights in the wrong direction before I could turn back around, take another exit to get on the highway I wanted, and then go a couple of miles to the exit for FedEx. This added several minutes to my trip. Worse, there was a 50 yard stretch when I took that first exit where the off-ramp ran parallel to the on-ramp I wanted to be on, but I’d have to illegally cross a six foot grassy median to get there. If I was running late (I usually was), I just crossed that median and saved several minutes. Eventually there was an obvious wheel track across that median from all the times I (and no doubt other people) crossed that grassy space. I never got busted for it. They eventually put a steel rail up to stop us from doing that.

This is another job where the original digital files are lost to the ether. I burned a second copy to save for myself, but a lot of these ended up either not being readable later or being lost. These are page scans.

Toon in next Monday for another riveting tale of cartooning derring-do, with a look at another TV show parody!