Monday MADness! TV Ad Shows!

Television executives weren’t always the entertainment geniuses they are today, where they either endlessly mine comic books and graphic novels for ideas for shows, or just steal ideas from other shows ideas for ideas for shows… or pretend a completely scripted and carefully calculated program is an “unscripted reality show”. As recently as 2007, some TV executives actually thought it was a good idea to create a show based on characters from TV ads, specifically the Geico insurance “cavemen” (psst… it was NOT a good idea).

Never one to restrain themselves from shooting fish in a barrel, MAD jumped on this dogpile with the feature “When Other Advertising Characters Get TV Shows”, written by Scott Maiko and illustrated by moi. Here are the initital comps (and as you can see quite a few changes were made prior to finals) and the final artwork from this article in MAD 483, November 2007: