Here, the MadTV rips off public domain artwork web comics in which generic looking people say things they look like they should not be saying. And not especially well. The internet is better for this because it has no restriction on content –not just profanity-wise, but also Rupert Murdoch ideology poisoning; Mad TV will never suggest President Bush is anything worse than a lovable befuddled scamp– and material can be delivered rapidly. If you don’t like one, zippidee-doo, clickety clibbledy, there’s another! The sequence this came from took about thirty seconds to display, including a graphic announcing what it was, and it led into a commercial break at its closing.

The main thing television people have going over a single pseudo cartoonist is that they can, without embedding a big ugly rectangle or redirecting me to another page, employ motion and sound, and in this case they do neither because all they’re doing is ripping off and they seek to do no better, like that guy who copies other people’s mediocre mass marketable misanthropic merchandising morons plus whatever else and puts them on his own tacky overpriced Hot Topic dumpster destinators (though he’s supposedly a phillionaire and Mad TV’s lack of a budget is legendary).
Ehhh, the only thing worse than bringing legitimacy to the please-be-offended rabbit’s rubbish through buying it is making your own.

Also, instead of giving the clip art segment any sort of a name to be known by, like “Jerk City” or “Hi and Lois”, M. Tiv just calls it “fun with clipart,” so you know exactly what’s coming. Mad TV has no respect for its audience, and never lets them not know what’s coming. I tell you all these things because I trust you to have the sense to not watch television like this. I’d suggest you be glad I don’t watch professional wrestling anymore, but I should have to work harder than that to impress you, shouldn’t I?

Mad TV does not rip off well, in general. When it started trying to rip off Saturday Null’s cartoon segments, in particular the ones which themselves ripped off actual cartoons, it did that poorly also. In part because rather than trust some writers to work with what really just passes for an animation studio and deliver cartoons at occasional intervals, Mad TV had a production assistant download a bootleg copy of Macromedia Flash 5 and toss some virtual popsicle stick puppets together the week they needed it* because they saw on the internet that it’s possible to get by with less. The mad also does poorly creating royalty-free music for song parodies and having child actors pretend to cry over things actual kids would just sort of stare at in disbelief and dubbing ridiculous applause over the sudden appearance of recurring characters who were already hyped before the ads. It makes me mad. It should be Mad TV, not Mad ME, am I right? I’ve already reserved that for the letters I get from addresses containing ME that make me mad.

*true! Probably. Also, as a bonus for seeking out my asterisk before completing that sentence, I’ll tell you: do not look at that link.

It should have occurred to me that most of the audience reactions are faked; –not just prompted responses to light up signs, but 100% Harry and the Hendersons-issue absentee spectator laugh track– but it didn’t really sink into my mind muck until a show aired during the writer strike, comprised entirely of pre-taped material that was originally intended to appear between stage sketches or perhaps not be used at all. That’s sleazy enough, but somehow these all had laughter and spontaneous applause in them, which means the fox people either brought in an audience to look at a screen, or there was no audience. They just think I’m that dumb I won’t realize the show that’s usually meant to be funny is still meant to be funny if I don’t hear invisible ghosts guffawing the whole time, and that I don’t know there’s a strike going on. Whatever benefit this served the network, to have an “ALL NEW!” Mad TV in the midst of a very obvious writer walkout which had already seen three months of reruns was pointless because once the new guild contract was made, it was another six weeks after the three “new” episoids before the simple sketch show could return to air, because in addition to whatever else, its entire backup sketch arsenal needed to be replaced, having already been used on nights when no reasonable person would have expected to see it. If November buffoonery would have seemed “dated” by March, it was dated in February, too.

And those weren’t even full episodes. They had “classic” sketches filling space, too. I mean, what is this, Season 5? Oh snapadoodle. I want to go to sleep.

I’ve been watching Thundarr the Barbarian, too, but if I have complaints about that they generally don’t involve apathetic imitation of the internet.

Ah gomp, I’m turning into Emu-Lmao!