I just got my copy of “Mad About the Movies: The Director’s Cut” the other day and I’ve seen it in stock at my local Barnes and Noble, so it is officially released and “in the wild”.

It is a hardcover, just as advertised. I was a little surprised to see it was in black and white only, but given the crazy low sale price of $9.98 I guess I should have expected that. Actually it’s great to see the old stuff printed just like it originally appeared, and seeing the later color work in black and white makes me wonder what it would have been like to have worked at MAD during the era of cheap(er) paper and B & W content. Not all the color pieces translated well to black and white, though… some of mine and Hermann’s definitely look too dark and muddy. That’s just the nature of taking something that was intended as color and making it grayscale. Given a lot of time I could have manipulated the original files to alter values and contrast and make it work a little better in black and white (maybe) but what they did works fine enough.

There is a forward by Roger Ebert and the book is dedicated, appropriately so, to the great Mort Drucker. It also features a whopping 62 movie parodies, ranging from “The Sound of Money” (The Sound of Music) by Stan Hart and Drucker from MAD #108, Jan. 1967, to “Spider-Sham 3″ (Spider-Man 3) by Arnie Kogen and Hermann Mejia and “BOO!” (300) by Desmond Devlin and Drucker, both from MAD #481, Sept. 2007. In between are 60 other parodies from the intervening 40 years.

There are a number of other features as well, including a number of “Scenes We’d Like to See”… a feature that recurred a number of times in the late 50′s/early 60′s written and drawn by various artists. There is also a Sergio Aragonés feature entitled “A MAD Look at Movie Making” and a lot of “Drawn out Dramas” throughout by Sergio and other little tidbits as well.

I’ve got seven movie parodies in the book: “Traff-Ecch” (Traffic), “Barebutt Mountain” (Brokeback Mountain), “$-Men 2″ (X-Men 2), “Spider-Sham” (Spider-Man), “Harry Plodder and the Lamest of Sequels” (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets), “Spider-Sham Too” (Spider-Man 2) and “Harry Plodder and the Torture of the Fanbase” (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix).

This book is available exclusively thorugh Barnes and Noble, again at the crazy price of only $9.98. You can get it both online or at your local store. You can’t beat the content for that price.

Not the sequel… the “Directors’ Cut“.

Back in 1998 MAD published MAD About the Movies, a collection of movie spoofs from over the years. It was in part to celebrate the 75th Anniversary of Warner Bros. (WB owns DC Comics which in turn owns MAD) and all the movies in the book were Warner Bros. films.

10 years later MAD is coming out with a new version of the book featuring parodies of films from other studios as well as some from WB. MAD About the Movies: Director’s Cut weighs in at a whopping 400 pages and contains not only SIXTY movie parodies from films of the last 60 plus years, but other goodies as well. Here’s a short list of some of the included parodies:

• Gone with the Wind
• Bonnie and Clyde
• A Clockwork Orange
• Brokeback Mountain
• Spider-Man
• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
• The Lord of the Rings (all three films!)

Obviously there are both black and white and color pages in the book. I was told I have several parodies in it myself, although I don’t have a full list. I’m pretty excited about being in the book, as it will be the first book I really have a presence in. My parody of “Traffic” was in MAD About the Oscars, but I believe that is my only contribution to a MAD book.

The book is part of an exclusive agreement with Barnes and Noble, so that is the only place you’ll be able to get a copy. It’s dirt cheap at only $9.98 for an online price.

I have not as yet seen a copy, so I have no idea what kind of stock it’s printed on. It’s listed as a “hrdcover” but at less than $10.00 I htink that might be a mistake. Still this would make a great stocking stuffer. It’s supposed to be released tomrrow, according to the Barnes and Noble website.