Monthly Archives: July 2019

I'd start packing for this year's con but I'm not sure I ever unpacked from last year's con. Anyway, this would be a good time to check out the Programming Schedules for Friday and Saturday. Tomorrow, they'll have Sunday's schedule up and I'll be posting here the list of all the stuff I'm doing there.

In other news, I suppose it'll be announced more formally at the con but the San Diego Union Tribune is reporting that Comic-Con International has now signed an agreement that will keep the convention in their fair city through 2024. As you may know, there have been rumors from time to time that it would move to Los Angeles, to Anaheim, to Las Vegas and I believe there was even a time someone ran for Mayor of some mid-western city on a pledge of stealing Comic-Con away from San Diego. And as you know, I have been predicting that it will remain right where it is for a long, long time.

What could change is the size of the convention center. Next March, the voters of San Diego will cast ballots as to whether there should be an increase in the hotel tax which would pay for, among other things, making that building about 50% larger. I am not hearing about anything that might make 50% as many hotel rooms appear. We would however probably get 50% more people in Stormtrooper and Harley Quinn suits.

Anyway: The weather in San Diego for the last few weeks has consisted of daytime highs around 75°, nighttime lows around 67° and mostly clear skies. That's probably what it'll be when we're there. For those of you who have lobbying for the con to move to Las Vegas, it'll be around 110° there, which should be enough to make anyone in an Iron Man costume feel like they're cosplaying as an Instant Pot.

A reporter who called asked me, "If you had to summarize in one sentence why MAD is going all-reprint, what would it be?" I said, "It's been losing money lately and the folks in charge of it didn't have a good idea how to stop that." That's kind of why most things in business end.

But of course, MAD is not going to disappear. It's too valuable a name to allow to disappear. It's a corporate asset. In a world where "branding" matters like just about nothing else, it's a brand that's very well-known and which has mostly-positive feelings surrounding it. If tomorrow, you and I were starting a new humor magazine, we'd kill to have a name for it with the notoriety and good reputation that MAD still has.

The problem is that the Powers That Are don't know how to get people who love MAD to actually purchase MAD. That's a very different problem from if you, let's say, were saddled with a failing business that nobody ever liked and would never miss. There's very little point in trying to save that business.

I'm going to guess that whoever made the decision about MAD didn't anticipate how big a news story it would be…and that a decision that to them was "Let's slash the budget for a while until we figure out what to do with it" has been viewed as "Let's kill a beloved national institution forever." That only serves to devalue that precious brand name. As I said in this piece, "It ain't good for them to tell the world that the name of MAD is of such low value that it can't even sell MAD."

I will further guess that within the vast Time-Warner empire, there are people at this very minute trying to formulate a plan whereby they can be the hero that rescues that beloved national (and merchandisable) institution.

And I'll bet there's some outside company — probably many outside companies — inquiring as to whether Time-Warner would sell or license MAD and Alfred to an outside publisher. The corporation probably won't make any such deal but in the past, outside interest has often caused someone to say to someone else, "Hey, if they think they can make money off this, we should be able to figure out a way to make money off this."

I'm not saying they'll find it and I'm certainly not saying I know what it is. I'm certainly-certainly not saying it — whatever "it" turns out to be — won't be worse for the collective experience known as MAD. It may slip into the hands of someone who doesn't "get" what was magic about MAD for 67 years and, in search of a similar business model where there isn't one, will say, "Gee, Game of Thrones is real successful now. Is there a way to make MAD more like Game of Thrones?"

But they're already talking about an annual issue of new material — a plan unmentioned in the letter they sent out last week to longtime contributors telling them the mag was going all-reprint. That's a start and I don't think we've seen the finish. Far from it.

My pal Stu Shostak is interested (some would say "obsessed") with preserving television history, both on networks and local stations. We share a special interest in KTLA, Channel 5 in Los Angeles. It's now a CW outlet but when Stu and I were growing up, it originated a lot of programming for the local market, including kids shows and game shows and sports and news and variety shows.

Last Wednesday on Stu's Show, Stu had on Joel Tator, a veteran director and producer who worked a lot at KTLA and knows every inch of its history. They did a show about it full of fascinating talk and some very rare, impossible-to-see-anywhere-else clips. The result was such a good, important program that Stu is making it available for free to all and I have a link to it embedded below.

WARNING: It's four-and-a-half hours long. I watched all of it over about four sittings because I have, as I say, a special interest in this history. You might get a lot out of it even if you didn't grow up in Los Angeles. The first hour is mostly discussing Joel's long, amazing career that earned him something like two dozen Emmy Awards. Stu could probably do another four-and-a-half hours just talking about and showing clips from Joel's work with Tom Snyder on The Tomorrow Show. The clips from KTLA start mostly about an hour in…

I'm not suggesting you watch the whole 4.5 hours but if you randomly pick a section and watch ten minutes, you just might go back to the beginning and commit to the show in full…

That one, I felt. Doesn't seem to be any damage around here but we're quite some distance from the epicenter.

Hmm. Seems like Trump's big 4th of July rally in D.C. wasn't the smashing success he wanted it to be nor quite the humiliating disaster his detractors wanted it to be. It almost doesn't matter because neither side would ever have admitted it wasn't what they hoped for.

Yeah, he said something stupid about airports. He says something stupid about something in every speech and it's never his fault. In this case, his authorized representatives — the ones who shouldn't be listened to when he changes his mind about what he said — are blaming the TelePrompter in some way. Maybe it was at fault or maybe Trump, as many have suggested, is just a guy who doesn't read so well or sometimes has no clue what he's saying.

I wish there was some Fair Play Law where, for example, if you were an Obama-basher who heard him make his famous gaffe about campaigning in "all 57 states" and said that proves he's stupid, a liar, a moron, etc., you had to either apologize or apply the same insults to your guy when he says Revolutionary War troops "took over the airports." They're about the same level of mistake. I don't think either man actually believed what came out of their mouths.

For that matter, didn't a lot of Trump fans once insist that the fact that Obama used a TelePrompter sometimes was solid proof that he couldn't utter a coherent word without one?

To those who've never used a TelePrompter: They're not as easy to read as you might think. There are basically two approaches, one being to try to read the words slavishly and never depart from the text that's there. The "up" side of that is that the guy or gal operating the prompter knows exactly when to advance the copy to the next lines so they're right there when you need them. The "down" side is that he or she winds up controlling the pace of your delivery a little more than you might like…and if you stray a bit from the script, you both may get confused about where you are.

Trump is real big at playing to the crowd. If you watch him when he's not "on prompter," when he's rambling, it seems like he'll suddenly sense "I need a big applause line here" and he'll jump to some non sequitur that does the job, then try to get back on topic. I doubt he follows the prompter closely, preferring to use the second method, which is just to use it for key words and phrases. The precise script may be there but he doesn't try to follow it exactly. And that's where he gets into trouble.

I don't think very many orators have ever used that second method successfully. It's like having your brain draw from two sources to deliver one speech. I never knew a great stand-up comedian who would try that. If they're being prompted, it's by cue cards with key words and not precise verbiage. If Donald Trump wants my advice — and you just know he's eager for as much of it as he can get — he'll try one or the other. And if he goes with the TelePrompter, he might try reading the script in advance.

This is a post I put up here on June 19, 2013. Hey, if MAD can go reprint at the age of 67, I can go reprint at the age of 67…

I think I was off on my date when I first posted it. In it, I said the main story, which is how I made my first real sale as a professional writer, happened almost 44 years before to the day. But I hadn't looked up when exactly I graduated high school and it turns out that occurred on June 19, 1969. It was around two weeks after Graduation Day that I made what was for me a scary-but-important journey to an editor's office with submissions in my trembling hands…so the 50th anniversary of that event was probably some day last week.

It doesn't matter exactly when it happened. All that mattered was that I managed to sell some articles to Laugh-In Magazine, which was more or less an imitation of MAD Magazine. I don't think there's any significance that fifty years later, MAD shut down, the guy on one of the covers of Laugh-In Magazine died and Southern California experienced a big earthquake. This is what happened…

This is a Tale of My Father but it's also the story of how I broke into the profession which I've now been in for…well, it's 44 years, almost to the day.

I got out of high school in June of '69 and said to mine old self, "Okay, if you're going to become a professional writer, now's the time." I was 17 and I'd actually submitted a few things to comic book editors before then…but only because they'd asked me.

Previously, I'd written a lot of letters to comic book letter pages. This was back when comic books actually had letter pages and I've given up on my long-ago pledge that all of mine always would. But most of them had them then and I think about 90% of the letters I sent in were published…some rewritten a lot by the editors not because I hadn't said what I'd said well but because I hadn't said what they wanted the letters they published to say. Like, I wrote a letter in to Wonder Woman saying I hadn't liked the latest issue and someone — perhaps the book's editor, Robert Kanigher — had omitted a "not" here and there and completely rewritten one or two sentences so suddenly, I liked that issue. Heckuva thing to do to a 14-year-old kid who isn't being paid.

Still, I was proud to have so many of my letters published and my father, when I showed him the issues, acted like I'd just sold my first novels to Random House for a huge advance. You could see the faintest glimmer of hope in his eyes: Hey, maybe my son isn't destined for a life of poverty and heartbreak if he tries to become a professional writer. That kind of glimmer.

Little did either of us know. Getting into a comic book letter page back then wasn't as great a feat as it seemed. All you had to do was construct sentences with nouns and verbs in them and get the punctuation vaguely right. As I would learn when I got into the industry, very few letters were received and most of them weren't far removed from a Crayola® scrawling of "I LIKE YOUR COMIC" with the "E" backwards. Still, I felt a little closer to my beloved comic books since I was in them, albeit by a technicality…and my father had that glimmer. And my letters led to three separate editors — Mort Weisinger and Jack Miller at DC, Dick Giordano at Charlton — encouraging me to write and submit scripts for their books. That sure made all that letter-writing worthwhile…or looked like it might.

Weisinger had me write some Jimmy Olsen stories, rejected them all, then suggested I do a Krypto story for the back of Superboy. Miller had taken over Metal Men and wanted me to take a crack at that book. Not only would that have been a nice credit but I might have displaced Robert Kanigher as writer, thereby exacting some revenge for him rewriting my letters. Giordano needed ghost stories.

I had more or less written-off comic book writing as a job. Today, thanks to the Internet and Federal Express, folks who write comic books can and do live anywhere. Back then in every interview I read in fanzines, editors insisted you had to live in New York or reasonably near their offices. Born 'n' bred in Los Angeles, I had no intention of migrating, especially after I was accepted by U.C.L.A. So I just thought, "Okay, so comic books, as much as I love 'em, aren't something I'm destined to write." I could live with that but as it turned out, I didn't have to. The industry in its odd way came looking for me starting with those invites from editors.

They led to a lot of scripts being rejected but then in rapid succession, each of those three editors did the same two things in this order…

1. He accepted a script I'd submitted and congratulated me on making my first sale and then…
2. Before he processed the paperwork to pay me for that script, he got fired.

Well, to be technically accurate, Mr. Giordano wasn't fired. It's just funnier to say all three got fired. After telling me he wanted to buy a script I'd submitted for The Many Ghosts of Dr. Graves, Mr. Giordano quit Charlton to accept a position at DC where one of the editors he replaced was Jack Miller, who had just told me he was going to buy a script I'd written for Metal Men. But Giordano didn't get Metal Men and that writing assignment was filled, not by me.

I was not disappointed or discouraged at all. I'd written-off comic books, remember. This was all bonus stuff to the career I expected to have. It was like someone had told me, "You may have won the lottery" and then called back to say, "No, you didn't." I was back where I'd started and since I regarded the scripts as batting practice, I'd suffered no real loss, especially since I'd been wise enough to not tell my father what I was doing.

(I was not, however, wise enough to not tell my friends at the Comic Book Club. For months thereafter, every time a new issue of Metal Men, Superboy or Dr. Graves came out, a couple of members would heckle me, "Hey, when are these alleged scripts of yours coming out, liar boy?" If you are an aspiring writer and you learn no other lesson from me, learn to keep your mouth shut until you actually have the check. Even when it seems 99% certain, wait until you have the check…and to be real safe, wait until it clears.)

All of that happened before I'd graduated from University High (rah!). Once I did, I had to figure out what would be my next…really, my first step. I didn't like submitting to editors in far away cities. I decided that at least to start, I wanted to try and sell an editor in the L.A. area so I could go in, talk to the guy and learn more about what I'd done right or, more likely, wrong. I scanned the newsstands and discovered that Laugh-In magazine, based on the then-popular TV show, was published in Los Angeles. In fact, its offices were right up there on Highland Avenue in Hollywood, not far from the comic book shops I visited via bus about once a week. So I bought the current issue, went to the comic shops and found a few back issues to buy, and studied them that evening. Then I sat down and wrote six articles in the style of the magazine, which resembled a low-budget MAD more than it resembled the TV series.

The next day, I took the bus up to Hollywood and Highland with my six articles and walked a few blocks to the building that housed Laufer Publishing Company. I stood outside for a few minutes, steeling up my unsteeled courage to go in and try to sell my writing cold to a total stranger. That was the first time I'd ever done that and it was darn near the last.

Finally, I went up, found the receptionist, cleared a hot tub of phlegm from my throat and said, "Could you tell the editor there's a struggling young comedy writer here who'd like to see him?"

Without missing a beat, she picked up the phone, pressed a button and said, "George, there's a struggling young comedy writer out here who'd like to see you."

I could hear most of what he said through the receiver and then she repeated it for me: "He said if you come back in an hour, he'll give you all the time you need." I thanked her, went out and got a slice of pizza, then came back and sold the editor three of the six articles I'd written the night before. He said, "If you don't mind waiting about twenty minutes, I can have them cut you a check right now." I said I didn't mind waiting twenty minutes for that and I wondered to myself how he'd manage to get fired before those twenty minutes were up. Somehow, he did not…and I walked out with his urging to submit more and an impressively large check.

It was way more than my father was making per week and he didn't understand. He thought I was selling drugs or something. Was the check even real?

As it turned out, it was but it was the last money I'd make from Laugh-In magazine. The editor wasn't let go twenty minutes after deciding to buy something I'd written but he was, two weeks later. In fact, they not only fired him, they fired the whole magazine, shutting down production. It was so unexpected that the editor hadn't even gotten around to reading the second batch of material I handed in…so none of it was purchased and the material I'd sold him that first day never saw print.

Still, it was a definite step up in my career. This time, at least, I'd gotten a check before my editor was fired…and I did wind up writing other things for Laufer's ongoing publications which were mostly in the area of teenage fan stuff and movie star gossip.

My father couldn't understand my "salary" — and he kept using that term, which was part of the problem. I'd made a lot my first week working for this company. I made nothing the next week. I made something in-between the week after. He understood the concept of a freelance writer but he had a little trouble with the concept of freelance pay. I wrote things every week but I didn't get paid every week…so weren't they cheating me those weeks? It all averaged out to a decent income, a notch higher than his…but what the hell was my salary? And how come I was home so much instead of going into an office every day like he did?

I mean, that's how jobs worked, right? You went into the office all day, worked from 9-to-5 or 8-to-4 or some set hours…and then on payday, they gave you a check for a fixed amount, less deductions. My checks also didn't have any deductions. What was that all about? (He worked for the Internal Revenue Service, remember…) And when he asked me when payday was, I had to say, "I don't know. I think they pay me whenever they get around to it."

I was actually doing rather well as a professional writer. My first six months, I made more than he was making…but it all seemed very suspicious and unKosher to him. And unsteady. He was right about the unsteady part…but as I began to sell to more and more markets, I got fairly confident that I could keep it up for a while, maybe even the rest of my life. Now, I just had to convince my father. One of these days when I write one of these, I'll tell you how I did that.

Earlier today, the strongest earthquake to hit Southern California in 20 years was felt from Las Vegas to Orange County. It had a magnitude of 6.4 and was centered near Ridgecrest, which is 150 miles north of Los Angeles, which is where I live. We didn't feel a thing here and I didn't know it had occurred until I read about it online.

The unbelievably-busy folks who run Comic-Con International have posted the programming schedules for Preview Night and for Thursday.

Those of you who complain that Comic-Con is all about TV and movies and not at all about comics, go to those pages and count the number of programming items that are wholly or at least partially about comic books. Go ahead. Do it. You may be surprised.

That's a photo of Joe Raiola, a writer of very funny things who was a member of the editorial staff of MAD for 33 years. This morning, he posted the following to Facebook. I'll be back after it to add on my thoughts but I only disagree with two things Joe says…

During its long run, MAD Magazine inspired many second-rate imitators. There was Cracked and Sick and Crazy and so on. Oddly enough, the latest MAD imitator is MAD itself. The MAD published out of Burbank since the spring of 2018, which is being shut down, is an imitation of the real thing.

I say this not as a shot at the new MAD staff, which was thrust into an impossible situation. Not a single member of the editorial staff had any previous MAD experience, except as readers.

From 1952 to 2017, MAD had a remarkable continuity of talent. DC, which took over after Bill Gaines died in 1992, is a comic book company specializing in flying caped aliens. The former MAD staff offered sufficient resistance to remain editorially independent. And, to its credit, DC came to respect the MAD staff, even if the suits didn't fully understand the mechanics of creating a humor magazine.

When DC moved to California in 2014 and the MAD staff refused to go, DC wisely decided to leave MAD in New York. In November of 2017, Rolling Stone wrote: "Operating under the cover of barf jokes, MAD has become America's best political satire magazine."

Bottom line: For MAD to have had a chance to survive, it needed to remain in New York and the editorial reins been passed on to the "junior" staff, which had been in place for nearly two decades. That did not happen and this is the predictable result.

On a more positive note, I just found out that in 15 minutes I can save 15% on my car insurance.

Some might dismiss Joe's words as grapes of the sour kind but I don't think he's wrong except that I liked the new MAD, at least in its first issue or two, more than I think he did.  Secondly, I think it's conceivable MAD could have benefited from the right "new blood" inserted into (but not displacing) the old structure and that didn't have to happen wholly in New York. I think what went awry here is much the same thing I see as a problem with just about everything that comes out of DC Comics these days…

If you talk to anyone who works there these days — anyone! — they will tell you this: That you come to work each day wondering who's going to get fired. Eventually, inevitably, it will be you…but until that time, you won't be sure who'll be above you next week. I would imagine the decision to suddenly and unexpectedly amputate most of the MAD division has only contributed to that environment. The answer to the question "Who's in charge?" is "I dunno.  What time is it?"

Now, to be fair, MAD Magazine has long faced a problem that even the former staff could not make go completely away: It's a magazine. Magazines don't do that well these days and every danged one of them that's been around for a while is selling a fraction of what it once sold. On a percentage basis, Playboy hasn't fared much better than MAD and it's not because Americans are getting sick of looking at beautiful nude women. People just don't read magazines of any kind the way they used to.

The easy assumption is that this is the result of that new-fangled "internet" thing but it's actually a trend that began before any of us had handles or e-mail addresses. The eruption of online communication and entertainment merely turned a trickle into a waterfall.

I'm going to pause my add-on to Joe's essay here and insert one by my pal Paul Levitz, who ran DC Comics (and therefore presided in a business sense over MAD) for many years. Paul also posted what follows this morning on Facebook. Take special note of the one passage I have highlighted…

Culturally speaking, MAD Magazine is probably the most powerful print entity to emerge from the comics industry. At its peak (ironically, the Poseidon Adventure parody issue…only MAD could crest with a story about sinking)…MAD had a circulation over 2 million copies an issue, a pass-along readership that was a multiple of that, and was the magazine sold at the largest number of outlets in the U.S. and Canada. Its impact on the broader popular culture, spreading a snarky, borscht-belt, NY Jewish sense of humor and cynical attitude towards advertising, government, big business and human behavior, is immeasurable.

Founders Harvey Kurtzman and Bill Gaines, and editors Al Feldstein, Nick Meglin and John Ficarra who built on the foundation and made it a towering institution shaped the Baby Boom generation, inspiring movements from underground comix to Vietnam War protests. And the Usual Gang of Idiots — the incredible, long serving writers and cartoonists who filled the magazine — brought styles that even the most art-blind kid could recognize, they were each so distinctive and personal.

I've been proud to be a friend to some of the gang since my adolescence, and to have served as MAD's publisher for 17 years. I can't say I contributed much to its glory: I never found the business model to help it adapt to the changes in our culture, to kids' reading patterns, and technology that has accelerated the cycle of snark. But we tried, again and again.

MAD the magazine may be gone, but its legacy lives on in our conversations and our attitudes. I wrote about how the different editors' world views shaped the magazine (and our mindsets) in Studies in American Humor, Vol. 3, No. 30, a few years ago — using the vehicle of an interview with Al Jaffee, the then only "Idiot" to have worked with all of the MAD editors. There's an academic press book version of that issue coming out eventually, and much will be written about the fading of this American institution.

But today, I'm just sad.

Paul, one of the humblest guys I know, is shouldering way too much of the blame in the highlighted passage. Everyone at or around MAD for decades struggled to find that business model that would allow a magazine to thrive in a declining market for magazines.

A lot of what they did helped for a time. Purists shrieked when MAD began accepting advertising again — yes, again. Those who moaned that it was a betrayal for MAD to contain ads for "the first time" were unaware that it once had. But that move in 2001 kept the publication in the black as did upgrades in the area of interior color and print quality and various reprint projects.

What really kept MAD alive in perilous times though were (a) its tradition and (b) its content. As I've written here several times, I thought its content was really, really strong the last decade or two. There was some brilliant comedy writing in its pages.

If MAD had been the product of a small publisher working out of a low-rent office somewhere, that might have been enough. The hefty overhead of being a Time-Warner project — and their overall business model of seeking to monetize every property in every medium — caused MAD to fall short. I do not think it's gone forever. I'd bet my complete collection of that publication that the brand is too valuable to not be relaunched before long.

I just think they don't know what to do with it now…and that I blame a lot on that "Who's running the store?" problem I mentioned earlier. Since MAD was wrested from its New York crew, the answer to that question has been "Everybody" and when everyone's running the store, no one's running the store. My pal Bill Morrison was editor for a time and if you absolutely had to have someone with no MAD experience running MAD, you couldn't ask for a better pick. The problems there were that to the extent Bill was able to run it, it was in an unstable environment…and that it was still, when you got right down to it, a magazine.

I do not have a solution to that not-tiny problem. My gut tells me there is one but what the hell does my gut know about marketing? I just don't think giving up and abandoning MAD's long-established spot on newsstands and killing the "tradition" is a solution. Once those outlets stop making room for MAD on their racks, it'll be ten times as difficult to get them to clear a spot for it ever again.

Creatively, what MAD needs is a stability that I don't know is possible in the current corporate structure there. I know that the new MAD may have claimed to be the output of "The Usual Gang of Idiots" but it wasn't. The "idiots," such as they are, were not in any sense "usual."

When I fell in love with that publication in 1962, every issue was the work of more-or-less the same people: Mort Drucker, Don Martin, Antonio Prohias, Dave Berg, Frank Jacobs, Larry Siegel, Stan Hart, Al Jaffee, etc. They didn't even have Sergio Aragonés when I started buying the thing but he came along shortly after and quickly became a star there, a highlight among many in every issue. The last true star I think MAD added to its roster was Tom Richmond and that was around the turn of the century.

In the new MAD, you have a few holdovers from the previous regime like Sergio, Jaffee, Richmond, Dick DeBartolo and one or two others.  But most of the magazine has been filled with transients…folks who look like they're auditioning even though no ongoing positions seemed to be available.  The folks running MAD lately haven't found the new Don Martin, the new Jack Davis, another caricaturist besides Richmond worthy of occupying the space Drucker once did, etc.  I don't believe it's because such people don't exist.  I just think that's the way Time-Warner operates these days.

No one person among the mob of those who work on them can say what's right for Superman or Bugs Bunny or Batman or Tweety or any of the wonderful properties they've accumulated over the years.  None of those folks created the properties.  None of them has the overriding say as to what's right or wrong for them.  And not one of them can reasonably expect to be associated with that property for long.  All those legendary characters are being raised by baby-sitters, not by actual parents. Not even foster parents.

The demise of MAD is a failure of marketing and distribution and promotion; of no one finding that elusive business model that Paul mentioned.  But even a sound business model needs a sound product to sell and I'm not sure it's possible to create that in a workplace where even the highest-ranked exec is really a well-paid (for now) office temp. Joe Raiola was right. The less MAD was controlled by corporate overlords, the better it was.

The folks at Playbill have posted some great photos from the original Broadway production of the musical 1776. This is a good day to do that.

And while you're over there, be amazed by how many productions Neil Simon had on Broadway. And I don't think their list is even complete.

Contributors to MAD Magazine received an e-mail today telling them that after two more issues of mostly-new content, MAD will become a reprint title. It will have new covers but inside, there will be naught but old, recycled material. It will also no longer appear on regular newsstands but will be available only via the direct market, which means comic book shops and a few other kinds of outlets. The letter said that all subscriptions will be honored but didn't mention anything about new subscriptions.

So what do I think about this? I think it sucks and I think it's a huge mistake, especially for a company like Time-Warner that is so into the concept of branding and expanding everything they own into all possible forms — TV shows, movies, video games, dolls, t-shirts, etc. It ain't good for them to tell the world that the name of MAD is of such low value that it can't even sell MAD.

The letter to contributors blames low sales and I assume they are indeed poor…but just because the marketplace isn't buying the MAD they're currently being offered doesn't mean it wouldn't sustain a different MAD, one that is true to the working premise of the publication in different, more timely ways. I have to think that someone there is pondering what MAD 2.0 might be like. At least, I hope someone is.

Around fifty years ago — actually, not "around" fifty years ago; fifty years ago — I used to poach in the hallways of NBC Burbank and visit the sets where shows like The Dean Martin Show, The Tonight Show, Hollywood Squares or various Bob Hope Specials were rehearsing and/or taping. A fun place to be was the Laugh-In stage so I got to see Arte Johnson performing as his various characters.

In rehearsals, he used to mouth gibberish instead of the actual punch lines, the idea being to wait until tape was rolling to speak the real lines. That way, maybe actual crew and onlooker laughter might get on the air. (There was no studio audience there but there were an awful lot of folks like me hanging around on the set.)

Mr. Johnson's refusal to speak the actual dialogue sometimes frustrated his co-performers or directors and camerafolks who needed to know on what line to move the camera. But they all thought he was worth the trouble…because when he did do the lines in the script, he delivered them better than anyone else could have.

He would also deliver a lot of lines that weren't in the script. After he and Ruth Buzzi had taped a dozen Gladys/Tyrone skits, the director would just roll tape and they'd improvise a half-dozen more, including some of the best ones that you saw on your TV. He really was a very clever actor. No, I didn't know him but I saw enough of him to see how good he was. There were a dozen reasons that show was so memorable and he was several of that dozen. Here's a good obit that will tell you more.

• Trump Administration spokespersons say they're giving up on putting the citizenship question on the census forms. The press quotes them accurately. Trump is now saying that's FAKE NEWS from the lying media. In any other country, this is insanity. Here, it's Wednesday.

This is the latest in a series of what I call my Cranky, Rambling Rants. Cranky, Rambling Rant #1 was here, Cranky, Rambling Rant #2 was here and Cranky, Rambling Rant #3 was here.

#4 is about how weary I am of arguments which may be about almost anything but they're really about someone who is angry that the world is not like it was when he was 24 years old…or whatever age he now believes was a happier time for him than Right Now.

Generally, these are not someone longing for a time when his or her health was better or they were in a better relationship, though either of those can be an underlying factor in the underlying factor. I recently have had to "mute" a couple of people in my lives who cannot seem to talk about anything other than how everything was better Way Back When. If you mention to them you had a good hamburger somewhere, you have to listen to how hamburgers were better back in the seventies.

No, they weren't. Maybe there was a restaurant back in 1974 that made better burgers than the place you went to last Tuesday…but all hamburgers then weren't wonderful and all hamburgers today don't stink. When you say that to me, what I hear is "My life was better then than it is now" — and that may be so. You can certainly make it so if you're set on viewing everything new as another damned reminder that time passes.

And hey, I'm not saying some things weren't better way back. My knees certainly were. But complaints like that rarely reverse the calendar. I know one guy who seems to feel that if he bitches enough about how lousy The Tonight Show is under Jimmy Fallon, we'll get Johnny Carson back. I don't disagree that Johnny was better than Jimmy but, first of all, not that much better and secondly, that was then and this is now. A lot of entertainment is of its time. I think this fellow was just plain happier with his life back then. In fact, I know he was.

I was happy with a lot of things when I was younger but I've accepted that almost none of them are coming back, at least in the same form. You need to find them in their new form or, more often, appreciate totally new things around you. In my experience, this bitching and moaning about how everything has changed for the worse is always a self-destructive act. If you want to destroy yourself, that's your right but don't try to make me an accomplice.

This has been a Cranky, Rambling Rant against Cranky, Rambling Rants. You know, they were better when I was a kid.

It's the Voctave folks singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow"…and singing it quite well. Have I ever written here about how I think the whole ending of The Wizard of Oz is wrong? I mean, I know most everyone loves the film but it always bothered me that in the second reel, Dorothy sings this beautiful "wish" song about finding a better place and a better world and then the rest of the movie basically proves that there isn't one and you should just stay in Kansas where they have tornadoes and old ladies seize your dog and take it off to be put to sleep and you'll never amount to anything better than what you've achieved by age 13 or so.

And yes, I know that it's a classic and none of this matters to the people who love the movie. But I think of its strange logic every time I hear the song, even when performed as elegantly as these folks…