MADness #64- Advertising Character TV Shows!

Get out your credit cards folks! American television producers can’t tell the shows from the advertisements in this week’s episode of our relentless run through my work for MAD Magazine. Believe it or not, there was a time when TV creators actually thought a television show based on characters from a series of insurance commercials was a GOOD IDEA. The folks at MAD did not agree. Thus, we had this three page farce called “When Other Advertising Characters Get TV Shows”, written by Scott Maiko and appearing in MAD #483, November 2007… Whoops. Apparently back in 2007 the “R” word was still acceptable to use.

This little three page job might hold the record for the most changes asked for by the art department in a single piece. Usually I know what it is the editors want and there is rarely any major changes, but in this case I did quite a bit of redrawing. I had to make a change of some kind in every single panel. Above is the original pencil sketch I sent in for this first panel. I don’t have any of the correspondence with the art direction saved, so I do not remember why they decided they wanted the setting changed to an academy-type school with young students. The text in the intro didn’t suggest that. But, that’s what they wanted so here is the revised sketch, which also required a “pull back” to a longer shot:

Here’s the initial pencils for page 2:

Again, I don’t have the original back and forth, but I suspect they wanted Heather Locklear to be leaning in to the scene rather than standing upright as it would focus the panel on the gnome character and better move the eye from left to right… quite correct on that.

The second panel was maybe too close to the first one in terms of composition. Same sort of camera angle with characters balanced the same way. I thought it best to put the “inanimate product character” in a different spot in the panel, but they wanted Mrs. Butterworth between the two other characters like the first panel:

That seemed to make it even more similar to the one above to me, but I don’t get paid the big bucks like the art directors do, so the revised sketch above is what we went with:

Finally, page three:

I guess they felt we had too many close ups of faces, and they wanted a longer shot in the first panel:

That allowed me to put the Keebler Elves Snap, Crackle and Pop the Rice Krispie elves in as a sight gag. The last panel even had a change, apparently after the longer shot in the previous panel they wanted to go back to close ups:

Toon in next week when we go back the wise guys of New Jersey and the world of gabagool, cigars, and really lame endings to television series!