'Mad' Magazine Gets Animated for Cartoon Network

Read more in "Beloved 'Mad' Artists Sergio Aragones, Mort Drucker and More to Be Featured on Cartoon Network Series."

Imagine that you're given the opportunity to turn a legendary humor magazine, something that you grew up reading, into a television show. Then imagine that you're asked to develop the show for prime time on a television network that caters to a rather young audience. This is the case with Mad, the new eleven-minute animated program based on the magazine that has pushed the limits of parody for over half a century. Mad will make its Cartoon Network debut on September 6 at 8:30 p.m.

Shannon Cottrell

Peter Girardi and Kevin Shinick of Mad

​ Recently, we paid a visit to Warner Bros. to talk to Kevin Shinick, producer/story editor, and Peter Girardi, Senior Vice President, Series & Alternative Animation, Warner Bros. Animation, about the series.

"In many ways, a lot of the shows that are on now take their cue from Mad, they're inspired by Mad or in some way they pay homage to Mad," said Shinick, citing The Simpsons as an example. "It's just so funny that considering that it is the inspiration for so much that there is no show on the air that really represents it."

Shannon Cottrell

Mark Marek

​ The first and most obvious challenge is how do you turn a magazine into a television show? With one medium, you can flip through it at your leisure. The other has a set number of minutes to grab your attention. With a magazine, particularly Mad, you have not just multiple stories in single issue, but a wide variety of visual styles represented. Your typical TV show does not.

In order to represent the diversity within the magazine, Mad will feature animation ranging from photo collage to stop-motion to Flash. In addition to the in-house team at Warner Bros., the show will be utilizing numerous animators and studios, including Devin Flynn, who will be tackling the classic "Spy vs. Spy," and Titmouse, whose work you might recognize from Metalocalypse.

"It was like curating a show almost," said Girardi. "Like, I would love to see this artist's take on 'Spy vs. Spy.' I would love to see this artist's take on 'Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions.' It's great, between Mark Marek, who is the animation director on Mad, and myself and other people in the studio, we're able to go out to a wide variety of animation studios and artists and illustrators and get their takes on these classic Mad bits."

Shannon Cottrell

Alfred E. Newman in the Warner Bros. office

​ Some of Mad's famous gags, though, aren't so easy to translate onto the small screen.

"The fold-in is a great example," said Girardi. "It works great in print because it's part physical and it's part conceptual. On television, it's completely conceptual because there's no physicality to it. So we tried a lot of different versions and it was never as satisfying as just folding a piece of paper. We came up with another homage to the fold-in."

Structurally, the team found a way to tackle the magazine's format. Each eleven-minute episode is broken down into ten to twelve segments, some as short as five seconds in length.

"Like with the magazine, you're going to start with a movie parody, end with a TV parody," Shinick explained. "You're going to have a commercial parody, you're going to have a fake promo and you're going to use that as your structure and your anchors. You know in between there are going to be short little bits...'Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions' or just little short sketches. Once you put your anchors in, it's just a matter of time before you fill the gap with all the other sketches, fake news reels and other gags we came up with."