Totally Mad

Ill Gotten Gaines

by Jim Bray

Broderbund Software has brought to your PC every issue of Mad Magazine from its beginnings in 1952 to the end of 1998.

What, You Aren't Worried?

You should be. In fact, you should think seriously about locking up your sons, lest their minds be warped beyond repair by this product!

As one who cut his teeth on Mad's irreverent pieces of satiric debris during the 1960's, it brings me great delight - and beaucoup déjà vu - to see the mag's 22,000 pages of madcap mayhem made available in this seven CD ROM set. "Totally Mad" brings "the usual gang of idiots" within a few mouse clicks, and its database is fully searchable so you can quickly find your favorite piece of trash - just type in keywords (like "Star Wars," for example) to see what damage the "UGOI" has done to your favorite sacred cow.

The collection also adds some multimedia content to the mix to make things even more, well, childish. There's a very funny introduction to the Madness, a history of the rag (penned by MAD writer Dick De Bartolo), and a selection of the cartoons that have been shown on MAD TV.

The software's introduction screen (called the "Mad Trash Heap") is your "Gateway to Lunacy;" from there you can access the search engine, browse the 500+ covers (a wonderful way to view the many, many incarnations of Mad's "madscot" Alfred E. Neuman), page through the multitudinous issues, or waste otherwise productive time in a variety of manners.

Speaking of manners, this collection has none - not that one would expect any. When you first load "Totally Mad" your ears are greeted by a version of the magazine's "classic" belchfest "It's a gas," a song once released on vinyl record as an insert in the magazine.

Even the Windows "tooltips," those little yellow "text balloons" that appear if you rest your cursor over certain areas of the screen, have been made Mad-cap! For instance, the "rotate" button (which turns a page ninety degrees on your screen) includes a disclaimer telling you it's easier to use the button than it is to turn your monitor on its side...

And you know, they're right!

The magazine pages themselves look very much like PDF (Adobe Acrobat) files, except that the viewer is definitely not something to which Adobe would likely admit. With it, you can pore over each deliciously ridiculous page of the magazine, zooming and dragging to your eyes' content. The zoom feature also ensures you can make out Sergio Aragones' "MAD Marginals," those little cartoons that pop up between the magazine's main panels - no matter how marginal the humor may be.

You even get the "Mad Fold-ins" that have been an inside-rear cover staple for decades, and they can be folded in and unfolded at the touch of a button.

When I first installed the package I immediately went in search of some favorite parodies from years past. If you remember their names, the search engine make them really easy to find; I located "Loused Up in Space" (the parody of the old TV show "Lost in Space") quicker than you could say "Horrifying Cliches" and chuckled all over again at the meteor shower that spelled "certain death" to the marooned family of maroons.

If you don't remember the "article's" name, the search engine does a pretty good job by topic as well, by listing potential matches.

Naturally, the "Lost in Space" parody was on a different disc from the one I had in the drive, but Mad has carefully thought that out and gives you insulting instructions on how to access the correct disc - as well as the proper way to "enjoy" Mariah Carey music.

The interface works well. The left side of the main interface screen (the "Veeblefetzer," as Mad calls it) contains controls for dragging, zooming, moving through panels, activating the "fold ins," and you can turn pages via a control on the bottom (the screen's, not yours).

The Mad Jukebox thoughtfully inflicts upon you a far-too-huge selection of cartoons, "musical" selections, radio commercials and even a slide show. In all, it's a crude, rude, juvenile collection of trash. In other words, it's a must have for Mad Magazine fans.

Who'd have thought a software package could inflict such damage onto otherwise sane human beings?

Jim Bray's columns are distributed by Creators Syndicate Inc. Copyright Jim Bray.

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