MADness #133: Silly Wonky!

Clicky any to Embiggen…

Welcome to 2025! We are back to normal after the holidays with yet another step on the long and tedious road that has been a look back at my work for MAD Magazine. We are nearing the end of the line in terms of regular new material I did for the magazine. This “movie parody” appeared in MAD #8, Aug 2019. That issue is the penultimate one before MAD officially stopped newsstand distribution, which was really the beginning of the end of the MAD we all knew.

I don’t consider this feature a movie parody in the true sense. A movie parody is aimed at making fun of the film it is spoofing, and almost all the humor is derived from ridiculing perceived flaws in the film like plot holes, pacing, acting, visuals, etc. Most of the humor from this feature is derived from replacing Willy Wonka with Guy Fieri, and jokes involving Fieri’s show and persona (and weight). Essentially it is a kind of reimagining of the original Willy Wonka movie with Fieri as Wonka, adult versions of the original 1971 cast, the original aged Grandpa Joe and Charlie, and where meat and BBQ sauce replace candy. This was written by Alec Owen, and is the only thing he ever wrote for MAD. He shouldn’t feel too bad about that. According to the MAD Lists website, Alec is one of 586 people to have had exactly one credit as a writer or artist or contributor to MAD. Considering only 41 creators had 100 or more issue credits, that’s a lot of one and dones.

This was a weird job. Firstly, it was the first one without Bill Morrison as VP of editorial, and it was a new writer. As a result, there were a lot of problems with the script. Some of the gags made no sense, a lot of the set ups and continuity storytelling were confusing, and the description of the layouts were not working in some instances. As a result I felt I needed to do some REALLY rough comps and extensive notes to try and figure it all out. Here are those roughs:

These are obviously very bare bones comps of the general storytelling and compositions, but the script itself had a lot of things I could not figure out or understand. I submitted detailed notes with a lot of questions and suggestions, and did a bunch of surgery on the layouts. Between editorial, the writer, and I, we got everything ironed out. Here are the more complete pencils for the whole story:

And the finals of the other pages:

This job really hit home as to how much Bill had been keeping things on target as to business as usual at MAD, and how inexperienced the other editors were with what made MAD‘s visual humor and writing work together. Sadly, there was not a lot more time for them to get the hang of it before the plug got mostly pulled.

That’s it for another MAD Monday! Stay tooned next week for the the TWO jobs I did for the final newstand distributed issue of MAD.