MADness #26: Trading Spaces!

I’m sure you are on the edge of your seat for yet another fascinating episode from our weekly chronological crawl through my work for MAD Magazine. This week’s episode features a spoof of the TLC home improvement show “Trading Spaces”, written by MAD‘s Maddest writer Dick Debartolo, and appearing in MAD #435, November 2003.

This was the first of what would be four home improvement/HGTV “reality” show parodies I would draw for MAD, and I believe they did a couple of others drawn by other artists. This always made me scratch my head a bit. There were many really popular TV series that MAD never did spoofs of that seemed to make a lot more sense to do as it related more to your typical reader of MAD than a show like this did. I certainly get doing one to make fun of the genre as much as the specific show, but multiple spoofs of what are basically the same show over and over? I suspect someone on the MAD staff watched a lot of HGTV. Anyway this was a show I’d never seen, so I had to recruit some help in doing my research.

Our neighbor Kim Gerkin loved this show, so I recruited her to fill me in on insider knowledge of the program. Of course I watched a couple of episodes, but as these were just a repeat of the same show over and over with different people as the “space traders”, I didn’t need to watch a full season or even more than a handful, as long as I had a fan of the show telling me what idiosyncrasies and typical elements of the show to include.

Some of the things Kim pointed out was that the main carpenter Ty Pennington was as much eye candy to female viewers as he was an actual carpenter, that main host Paige Davis was ridiculously high energy and “perky”, and that one of the main designers Genevieve Gorder was kind of a hippy character and never wore shoes. I incorporated several gags around these observations.

Another aspect of the show is that two “regular people” couples appear on each show and swap spaces in each other’s homes and redesign those spaces. So, I needed two couples to appear throughout the parody. Since Kim was such a big help, I asker her and husband Craig to be one couple, and another set of neighbors, Don & Julie McNeil, to be the other. The Lovely Anna and I had both couples over to the house for pizza and wine, and I took a bunch of reference pictures of them. That’s them in the spoof! Kim and Craig are in the yellow shorts, and Don and Julie in the red. That was 18 years ago now, and they just started talking to me again.

A few months ago show star Paige Davis posted an instagram story about appearing in MAD in this parody, and Genevieve responded accusing us of making her ditzy because she was a “blonde with big boobs”. Apparently she doesn’t know much about MAD magazine. If you appear in a spoof in MAD, you are going to be made to look stupid whether you are a blonde with big boobs or something else completely. Besides, Dick didn’t particularly write here as ditzy or dumb. Most of his gags with her were about making ridiculous design choices, which is pretty much what she did on the show. Plus she definitely played up the hippy-dippy persona. I did put “DIM” on her shirt in one panel, but that had nothing to do with her being blonde. :P. Ah well, not everyone has a sense of humor… or shoes.

Stay tooned for another groundbreaking episode next week, when we enter “The Matrix” and answer that age old question… “what happens if we swallow BOTH pills???”