Monday MADness: The Wizard of O!

This week’s Monday MADness is a look at the complete parody of “The Wizard of Oz” from MAD #505, Oct. 2010, written by Desmond Devlin. with the increasingly poisonous partisan dialogues of the political talking heads of the time as a target (little did we know). This was a really fun but exhausting one to work on, considering I needed to do caricatures of dozens of political pundits as either munchkins or other characters. It’s always challenging to try and incorporate both a caricature likeness and some other recognizable visual identity like the Tin Man, Scarecrow or the Cowardly Lion into the same character. Here are the other pages:

Interesting enough, this was not the first parody of “The Wizard of Oz” that MAD ever did. Back in issue #300, Jan 1991, Writer Frank Jacobs and artist Sam Vivano did a spoof of the movie with “yuppies” and the selfish, vain, wealth-obsessed late 80’s-early 90’s culture being the target. As you can see, in Des and my parody, Barack Obama was the Wizard. You’ll never guess who ended up being the Wizard behind the curtain of Fran and Sam’s 1991 parody… Donald Trump. Another case of MAD being prophetic.

BTW the original art of this parody is part of the permanent collection at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum.