Absolutely MAD, Every Issue of Mad Magazine on DVD-ROM: Review

Let's all kiss the feet (or at least be obsequious) to the people who managed to create the CD and DVD-ROM. Now that one little disc can store an entire encyclopedia set and are as easy to acquire as videotapes once were--we don't have to worry about taking several hours out of a day off to go into a storage room to drag out boxes of those old, musty magazines that we loved so much and want to read again. If your family had a sense of humor rather than only collecting old Saturday Evening Posts or fashion magazines in past decades--you'll likely find boxes containing collections of old Mad Magazines in your attic...probably rotting away or mangled to pieces from so much handling (because of the fold-ins in the back).

I started buying them when about eight years old and barely into third grade...which might not bat an eye now--but it sometimes brought on derision then (1979-1980) due to the sometimes bawdy content. But I and my friends (who usually read them in groups) understood satire from the get-go it seems. We'd guffaw at every morsel of each article or movie parody. Of course, I became addicted and kept buying them regularly through the 80's and 90's--right up until I finally stopped when a lot of the talent (particularly late publisher William S. Gaines), writers and artists either died or retired from the mag. It used to be a rite of passage every few years to go and take out all the stored-away issues and read through a decade's worth of them to look back at old movie parodies and get a laugh or ten as it never failed to do.