Monday MADness: SoBe Nascar Cameo!

Back in the early 2000’s Warner Bros had MAD was doing some kind of cross promotion with SoBe, a subsidiary of PepsiCo, and a new chocolate drink they had called “Love Bus Brew”. There was promotional artwork done by Sergio Aragonés, “What Me Worry” printed under select bottle caps (send in three of these “MAD” caps to SoBe and get a free SoBe/MAD branded T-Shirt), etc. I actually drew caricatures at a SoBe booth at the X Games in Cleveland at one point.

They also did a sweepstakes where the “grand prize” was to get drawn into MAD with Alfred E. Neuman. I was given the ignoble duty of doing this, drawing the unlucky winner into the art for “MAD‘s Proposed Rule Changes for the Upcoming NASCAR Season” in MAD 427, April 2003. See the guy in the lower left hand corner, holding the bottle of Sobe?:

That’s the “winner”, if you want to call it that. MAD did a number of bizarre advertising related things like this back in the early part of the century, but this was the most intrusive, IMO.

Here’s the opening spread of that article, written by Desmond Devlin: