MADness #81: Shark Tank!

Welcome to Monday, and another edition of the least inventive ongoing blog series ever, a chronological crawl through my work at MAD Magazine! Speaking of inventions, this week we look at another another uninventive TV show about inventors and investors, “Shark Tank”. It’s uninventive because it’s based on the Canadian show “Dragon’s Den” which is in turn a rip off the the Japanese show “Money Tigers”. This spoof was written by MAD‘s MADdest writer Dick DeBartolo and first appeared in MAD #529, Oct 2014.

In a rare turn of events, I have a saved scan of the finished inks on this splash, before coloring…

For those new to this series, these are inked with traditional media with pen nibs (Hunt 102, Gillott 303) and brush (W&N Series 7 No. 2 and 4) and Pelikan’s Drawing Ink A on Strathmore 400 3-ply bristol vellum surface.

I have to say I hate doing these reality TV shows. MAD seemed obsessed with doing spoofs of reality TV and, even weirder, HGTV “home improvement” series, while ignoring many other top rated shows. “NCIS”, “The Blacklist”, “Blue Bloods”, “Castle”, “Criminal Minds”, “How I Met Your Mother”, “Person of Interest” and several other shows were ratings hits and never got spoofed… but we did “Shark Tank!” Go figure.

Actually it was around this time that MAD got on board with “binge” TV shows from non-network sources… more on that next week.

Just to entertain myself I made The Lovely Anna and I the “entrepreneurs”, trying to hawk our product “Great Granny’s Great Fruitcake”. The first entrepreneurs are spoof writer Dick and his costar from his show “The Weekly Daily Giz Whiz” Chad “OMGChad” Johnson.

Not much else to say about this one. There were very few jobs I did for MAD that I genuinely didn’t like doing, and this was one of them. Lucky for me this show is so predictable and repetitive I only hade to watch two episodes to know everything I needed to know to do the art. The guys at MAD really made it up to me with my NEXT assignment, which remains one of my favorite things I ever did for the magazine. What was that, you say? You’ll just have to toon in next week to find out, you putz!