I have to admit that I was heavily influenced by MAD in my young days. My next door neighbor & good friend, Johan, was a fanatic and had all the magazines, books and other published material from MAD (Swedish version). We penetrated all the stuff, to make sure that we caught all the small details and sometimes it was hard to really understand the fun part, but we didn't really wanted to admit that. For example, when they made satiric cartoon versions of some new movies, we laughed a lot without having seen the movie. Later on, when the movie finally appeared on the local cinema in our village (years later!!), we were very disappointed, since the movie was no fun at all. So MAD actually destroyed many films for us. In Kvänum, we could watch one film every Wednesday evening and a childrens matiné film every Saturday afternoon. It didn't matter what film it was, we more or less went every time. It was a nice happening during the week and always an exciting challenge to manage to get in when the age limit was 15 years. I had my contacts and was tall already then, so I was OK most of the times. I remember going to a Danish soft porno movie at the age of 12-13, which was a bit of a shock for me. I had new strange dreams that night ;-)

My Grandparents, Elvira & Arthur, were involved in the pioneer days of the cinema in Kvänum. Grandpa as a machinist, changing reels etc and Grandma taking care of the localities. Probably more news programs & state propaganda, than porno and action movies.

Back to the crazyness in MAD. The Swedish MAD magazine closed down in 2002. Probably on request from George W, who I think is a close look-a-like of Alfred E Neuman. I can't watch Bush on TV, without associating to MAD. Some other people claimed that it was a fatter copy of a young Prince Charles and also that the Prince actually was fighting to get that image taken away. Who knows?

I might put up the complete MAD story on DVD, on my Xmas wish list. Totally MAD.