‘MAD’ Comes to Cartoon Network
For those who missed it (including us, to be honest), on Labor Day, a funny thing happened; at 8:30 PM, Cartoon Network aired a ‘MAD‘ cartoon. And guess what? It wasn’t a one-time fluke! Our friends over at HeroComplex snagged the new animated sketch show’s producers Mark Marek (of Crank Yankers fame) and ‘Emmy winner’ Kevin Shinick (of Robot Chicken) and sat them down for an interview. For those who are too lazy to click that link and read their awesome interview, allow us to give you the 411:
The show is a 15 minute sketch cartoon show meant to carry the programming of Cartoon Network’s normal schedule to it’s [ironically bumpered] Adult Swim block of shows. Taking a ‘film festival’ approach to presentation, the MAD cartoon show will feature short cartoon sketches in a variety of styles. Mimicking the work and look of long time MAD contributors like Sergio Aragonés, the late Don Martin, and Al Jaffee, as well as including anything animated ranging from photo montages, flash animation, to stop motion sketches all in a single episode. Crediting the writing to “the Usual Gang of Idiots” means the material featured will provide wonderfully skewed takes on current events… targeting an audience that’ll range from the ‘kiddies about to say goodnight’ crowd to the ‘college frat kids just waking up’ demographic.
The show comes as a welcome surprise, as the last “MAD” penned show, Fox’s MADtv did little to take the real MAD brand to the masses. For those who tried to forget, we implore you to recoil in horror as you remember that the show provided the world with a sub-SNL quality sketch show with even more annoying repetitive characters (The UPS guy! Ms. Swan!), and literally no material ever gleaned from the pages of the long-running magazine. OK, that’s a bit of a lie. The show did feature a ‘Spy vs. Spy” cartoon, but it was cut after the second season, we assume because the average Fox viewer at the time was too confused by the high brow humor and subtle racial undertones of ‘Spy vs. Spy’.
Well, let’s wash our minds of that dreck, and check out ‘MAD’ on Cartoon Network… Mondays at 8:30 CST. I mean, if the show is as good as we think it’ll be, dare we say it… “What, Me Worry?”
Check out Cartoon Network for a short sneak preview.