MADness #59: Dog the Bounty Hunter!

Hold it right there, brother! We’re taking you in for another bail jumping episode of our criminally inane rampage through my work at MAD Magazine. This week we have a look at MAD‘s spoof of the reality TV series “Dog the Bounty Hunter” that first appeared in MAD #478, June 2007 and was written by Dennis Snee.

This was one of only two pieces I ever worked on with Dennis as the main writer. I call him “Dennis” even though I never met him because if I try calling him “Mr. Snee” I have to do it in a Captain Hook voice, and that gets annoying. So “Dennis” it is. The other piece of his I did was the spoof of the TV show “The O.C.” back in MAD #442 in 2004. Dennis was an infrequent but long time MAD writer, having contributed over 50 articles for the magazine from the late 70’s through 2009. Although only appearing in 2 to 4 issues a year, Dennis none-the-less wrote some iconic movie and TV parodies including “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”, “Who’s the Boss?”, “Married with Children” and others you’d immediately recognize. Although as I said I never met Dennis, I had seen his name on many MAD features I really liked over the years, so I looked into his career. It was an impressive one.

Dennis started his comedy writing career while still in college, submitting jokes to comedian Rodney Dangerfield. Dangerfield bought some and eventually hired Dennis as a regular writer, beginning a long collaboration together including writing the story for Dangerfield’s movie “Back to School”.

Dennis did a lot of writing for TV, including “The Tonight Show”, “The Simpsons”,” In Living Color”, “The Wayans Brothers”, “Third Rock from the Sun”, “Empty Nest”, “Family Matters”, and many others. He also wrote material for other notable comedians like Bob Hope and Joan Rivers.

This spoof would turn out to be his last for MAD, although he contributed to another piece with several other writers a couple of years later. Dennis retired around this time, and passed away in 2019 at the too early age of 68. It was an honor to get to work on a couple of his scripts.

Honestly this was one of those shows I never could figure out why MAD did a parody of. I think someone on staff was fascinated by reality TV and we did several spoof of cable TV shows that not that many people really watched. This show ran on the A&E network, and while it was popular enough to go for eight seasons cable TV networks just didn’t have that big of an audience. This show never cracked the top 30 Nielsen rated shows. I’d never heard of it before getting this assignment.

The only other notable bit of story about this parody is that the original art for the splash page was stolen!

Well, not really stolen but loaned out and never returned to me. Back in 2009 I was a guest at a comics art festival in Cali, Colombia. My trip there was sponsored by a cultural organization the name of which I don’t remember, and part of the deal was I brought a piece of art for a comic art gallery show and do some interviews and meet and greets while there. I brought the splash page from this spoof with me, after printing out and pasting up the text and graphics. After hanging it in the show the person who was my main contact with the cultural group who paid for my trip (this was NOT the people who organized the comic festival itself) thanked me for donating the piece to them. I told him I did not donate it, that I expected it to be returned to me. He apologized and said that after the exhibit closed in a few weeks it would be sent back to me. It never was. I never pursued getting it back because frankly it was a small price to pay for what was a wonderful trip where I met many incredibly talented south american cartoonists and had a lot of fun. But, I like to say it was stolen just because that’s a more interesting story. In reality they were welcome to it.

Toon in next week with a return to the magical world of movie parodies, cloaks, wands and teenage angst!