Mad About the '90s: The Best of the Decade

By MAD Magazine

Book Overview

Book by The Usual Gang of Idiots This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1401206603
• ISBN13: 9781401206604
• Release Date: April 2005
• Publisher: Mad
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.79 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 0.8" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

mad 90's

My boyfriend is a Mad fan so I ordered this for xmas. He hasn't put it down. Very entertaining for the price!

Fast and Great

The guys are fast in shipping the product is shipped as descibed

The usual gang of idiots take on Clinton, O.J., and the rest of the 1990s

Well, I guess it is a good thing that they downsized "MAD About the '90s: The Best of the Decade," because otherwise there would be little to complain about. It is not like the result is a conventionally sized paperback. Besides, if you put this up on the shelf with "MAD About the '80s," "MAD About Superheroes," and the like, it would nice if this one did not look like a poor relation. I picked up an issue of "MAD" a couple of times during the 1990s, specifically to check out the parodies of "Titanic" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (the former is here, but not the latter). Now, I cannot speak to the overall quality of the humor magazine during the decade, but when the Usual Gang of Idiots get to cherry-pick like this the results are pretty impressive and you might find yourself wondering why you wasted hours watching "Saturday Night Live" during that decade when you could have been hiding out in the bathroom reading "MAD" again. There is actually a chronological pattern to what is found within these (undersized) pages, dividing the decade into thirds. Section One: 1990-1993, offers 19 choice covers (e.g., Jack Davis' "Beverly Hillbillies 90210" a choice example), a great ad parody for the Blank Video Club of America, "Where's Waldo? For Complete Morons" by Sergio Aragones, and an ad for a whitetailed deer who has joined the NRA (to avoid being "the deer-ly departed"). For parodies we have "Buried with Children" and "Star Bleech: Deep Space Swine" for television and "The Oddfather Part III," "Home A-Groan," and "The Violence of the Hams" for movies (if you cannot figure out what things are being parodied then you clearly slept through the decade). The standout pieces would be "Superman R.I.P.," "A MAD Look at Jurassic Park," "MAD Raps U Shakespeare," and "The ABC's of Rock." But my favorite has to be "When Roadside Signs Overlap," using real company signs to humorous effect. Section Two: 1994-1996 highlights are Mort Drucker's cover of "The Clintstones," the MAD mini-poster of "Washington Cross-Dressing the Delaware," another nice Norman Rockwell painting of the 90's ("Last Parking Space at the Mall"), and a couple of nice MAD Fold-Ins. "Fairest Shlump" is the one movie parody, while the tube is done in by "Eech-Files," "SickER," and "Swinefilled." But clearly the greatest fun here is with Bill Clinton and the gang, with "Books to Make Children More Politically Aware," "Only a Republican/Democrat Could Possibly Believe...," and "It's a Blunderful Life," from the Tip of the Capra Dept. Of course, if you really want to know how much things had changed back then, then check out "If James Bond Were 'Updated' for the Politically-Correct '90s." Finally, Section III: 1997-1999 has choice covers with Kenny from "South Park" killing Alfred who is greeted by Seinfeld with the telling line "Hellooooooooo Neuman!" There are also covers for "Martha Stewart: Dying" and "Entertain Me Weakly," the Latrell Sprewell Maneuver for pretending you are a

What's with the size?

If I don't rank this book with 5 stars it's only because of the size. I don't know why the publishers who made an excellent work on Mad about the fifties trough mad about the eighties, didn't follow the same pattern and for this jewel they decided to make it short. I don't mean the number of pages; I mean the size, the height, the weight. But anyway, it is a very good compilation.