In 1974, there was an attempt to turn the content of MAD magazine into a weekly (I guess) TV series. Some online sources say it was done for ABC and some say it was for NBC but the show, as you'll see if you dare click, has a spot in the opening to insert the name of a sponsor and that would suggest syndication. Whatever the market for it was, it wasn't buying and the sorta-official explanation was that no one wanted to sponsor a show that made fun of advertisers.
My suspicion is that nobody who might have bought it thought it was a very good show. It's kinda impersonal with no host, the music doesn't grab your attention and the laughter on the show feels excessively canned and phony. But it is kind of a curiosity and one of the things I'm curious about is where it was done. MAD was based in New York and the voice cast is all New Yorkers. Some of the artists credited with adapting the material from MAD — Gray Morrow for one — were based in New York but most of the animators seem to be Los Angeles people.
Most of the folks at MAD who I asked about it didn't know much. Larry Siegel, one of MAD's best writers, seemed pretty angry about it. In '74, Larry was a pretty successful writer of TV comedy — he had a few Emmys for The Carol Burnett Show — and didn't like the idea that material he'd written for the magazine was being repurposed for TV without him getting paid more.
I would guess all the MAD writers whose material was or would be used felt the same way and so did some or all of the MAD artists.
Mediocre video copies of the show have been circulating for some time but my buddy Douglass Abramson alerted me to this really good copy on YouTube. Watch as much of it as you can stand…