MADness #57: The Best Damn Sports Show Period!

What embodies America’s obsession over professional sports more than this Sunday’s ultimate sports spectacle, the Super Bowl? Why, a bunch of former athletes, comedians, and talking heads sitting around on camera talking about sports, that’s what! In MAD #475, March 2007, I did the art for another installment of “MAD Deconstructs TV Talk Shows”, this time roasting “The Best damn Sports Show Period”, written by my CLAPTRAP cohort Desmond Devlin!

This is another MAD job where most of my pencils and other process stuff have mysteriously disappeared, so I have almost none of that to share. I do remember two things about this job, however.

The first was that I got into a little bit of trouble with the MAD staff over my sharing some sneak peeks of this job here on my blog. I had just started the blog in June of 2006, and one of the things I would do it tease future MAD projects by posting pencil sketches with no explanation or info about what they were about. These are the three images from the above job I posted in January of 2007:

I still have these because they are still on my server from Jan 2007. A day or so after posting those images I got a call from MAD art director Sam Viviano telling me not to post any images from my work at MAD in advance of the publication of the issue. This wasn’t really about keeping it a secret… it was more about the PR department at DC working on doing exclusive sneak peek deals with entertainment related websites. Personally I thought it would be more advantageous for us to tease upcoming jobs and maybe get some people interested in actually buying the magazine than to make some deal with Entertainment Weekly Online to post the finished piece, which would mean no one needed to buy the magazine if they wanted to read that feature. They were the bosses, though, so I took down the post and never posted any sneak peeks of MAD work again until after the official newsstand release date.

The second thing I remember about this job was the hosts of the show loved having been spoofed in MAD, and did a short segment on show about it:

These guys were good sports… pun intended.

Toon in next week when we return to the world of TV parodies with spoof of what is essentially a spoof of Hollywood and its trappings!