MADness #29- American Idol!

Hold onto your butts! It’s another edge-of-your-seat episode of our chronological wandering through my work for MAD Magazine! This week’s stop is a two pager poking fun at “American Idol”, written by Greg Leitman and appearing in MAD #440, April 2004.

This piece features a couple of inside jokes and cameos. First, the names on the blackboard Pete Rose is putting the betting odds on are the names of my four kids as well as Max Korn and Brady, the daughter of a couple of good friends of ours, Keelan and Barbie Parham:

Speaking of Keelan and Barbie, they make a cameo here as well:

In between them is a tiki idol. The MAD staff (and readers of the magazine) probably thought that was a reference to the “idol” in “American Idol”. Not so. Keelan and Barbie vacationed with The Lovely Anna and I in Hawaii shortly before I drew this, and we took turns hiding this very tiki around the condo where each couple would find it staring at them unexpectedly. It was a Brady Bunch thing. Anyway that’s why it’s in between them and Barbie looks freaked out.

Finally the ventriloquist is MAD art director Sam Viviano and the dummy is production artist (at the time, someday to be full fledged art director) Ryan Flanders:

You do what you have to do to entertain yourself when the subject matter of a piece is boring… like “American Idol”.

Toon in next week for a return to the world of TV parodies, spoiled rich southern California kids, and people who thought it was cool to have their show spoofed in MAD!