Photo Illustration and Article Source: The Daily Beast
It's been 20 years since I cared. It's been almost as long since I last saw this publication on the stands. Apparently they only stopped publishing here in 2009 and where I've been living for 15 years it probably had no target market. I always assumed that it went the way of many magazines that I grew up with.
A childhood institution. It probably taught me more about how to look at things in a critical way than it made me laugh. Advertising and the government controlled media were taken as gospel back then. If a magazine or TV program told me that an actor was good, they were and so were their movies. Enough hype and a product or service was good. MAD made me see the ridiculousness of many thing I took for "cool" because everyone else said so.
The first thing I of course did whenever I got my hands on a copy, was to do Al Jaffee's back page fold-in. As I grew older, I could see the outcome without having to fold it, but I folded every single one because that was part of the experience.
My point in all of this is about classic brands having been bought up by big corporations to add a famous brand to their portfolio and then apply their ham-fisted and horribly misguided strategies and market positionings, only to cheapen and dilute it down until it has nothing in common with what it once was. Just a sad remnant.
It's value lies in recognizability only and they will milk that dry. Buying a brand name is like buying likes or tweets. Get to as many people as possible. Bait and switch.