MADness #41: Pimp My Ride!

It’s time for another pitstop on the pot-hole riddled road that is my work for MAD Magazine. This spoof of MTV’s “Pimp My Ride” was my 13th TV show parody for MAD. It was also my second collaboration with MAD editor Dave Croatto as writer… and my last with Dave. I guess he thought enough was enough. This feature appeared in MAD #456, Aug 2005.

This is unusual but I have scans of the final pencils of this job as opposed to the “roughs” I usually save. Ordinarily I would do rough sketches of the pages on drawing paper or later digital done at print size to send to MAD for review, then I’d enlarge those sketches to 200% of print size, transfer them to bristol board via a light table, then tighten up the pencils and ink the finals on that same board. I seldom would bother to scan those final pencils. I’m not sure why I did in this case, but the splash and page 3 are final pencils. Page four is the “rough”.

If you are not familiar with the show, “Pimp My Ride” was a reality show kind of like “Extreme Home Makeover” but instead of taking someone’s house and making it fancy, they do that with a person’s car. It was hosted by rapper Xzibit. The guy whose car is being “pimped” in this parody is illustrator/animator/caricaturist Joe Bluhm. I think I did that just for fun, but Joe might have lost a bet with me. Can’t remember.

A lot of the gags Dave wrote were about the ridiculously impractical things the car customizers would add to the cars they worked on for the show. On page three they added four plasma TV screens as mudflaps. Later, in an actual “Pimp My Ride” episode, metal mudflaps with little LCD monitors were installed in one car, with Xzibit mentioning the MAD parody giving them the idea!

These final pencils were done on boards sent to me by MAD, with the panels and word boxes already drawn in pencil on them. They did that for a few years after I first started with them, but eventually I had to start doing that part myself. Despite having “retired” in 1995, Lenny “The Beard” Brenner used to come into the offices and do the movie/TV parody boards when I first started with the magazine. I think he was still at it in 2005 when we did this piece, so these would have been laid out by Lenny.

Now that last pencil is definitely the “rough”. I’d just print out the mechanicals on drawing paper and draw within the panels. That was usually all MAD needed to see for approvals.

Toon in next week, when we look at another of those “A MAD Peek Behind the Scenes of…” features. This time of an animated TV show!