The Crane Pool Forum

Who is the Met from this MAD Magazine paperback?

It kind of looks like Yogi, but kind of not (the ears are right, but the nose is wrong). The book is from 1979, but I think the artwork is repurposed from earlier, after the style of the poster for It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and is apparently from the same artist, Jack Davis. It may even be from shortly after the film was released, possibly because the magazine was doing a film satire.

If so, that would support the Yogi theory, as the film was 1963, and Yogi joined the Mets in 1965, and his image in Mets gear would have had an automatic and current comic novelty.

But still, I'm unsure. The likeness just isn't quite working for me.

From the horizontal dive, is it supposed to be Ron Swoboda?
Later

I'm pretty certain the illustration debuted in 1965.

100% that's Yogi Berra.

You can't beat 100%. Yogi it is.

I was thinking swoboda

The cartoonish ears suggest Berra.

It's Yogi. And there's not a shred of doubt about that. And the artwork is from about 1965. By the time I was in Junior High School, I owned practically every single Mad paperback anthology, including that one. And Yogi was on that cover, featuring the same exact artwork, even back then. I even vaguely recall a story whereby the original artwork draft featured Yogi in a Yankee uniform, but then Jack Davis updated the art to reflect the Mets recent acquisition of Yogi.

BTW, that artwork was for the paperback anthology only, and not for a cover of a Mad magazine featuring new material.

batmagadanleadoff wrote: ↑Sun Oct 13, 2024 9:43 pm It's Yogi. And there's not a shred of doubt about that. And the artwork is from about 1965. By the time I was in Junior High School, I owned practically every single Mad paperback anthology, including that one. And Yogi was on that cover, featuring the same exact artwork, even back then. I even vaguely recall a story whereby the original artwork draft featured Yogi in a Yankee uniform, but then Jack Davis updated the art to reflect the Mets recent acquisition of Yogi.

BTW, that artwork was for the paperback anthology only, and not for a cover of a Mad magazine featuring new material.

I'm probably a little off when I wrote "Junior High School ' I probably owned just about every single Mad paperback anthology there was by the time I was in the 5th grade.

Check out this thread at the July 7, 2016 mark.

archives/23800/f2_t23852.shtml

batmagadanleadoff wrote: ↑Mon Oct 14, 2024 2:16 am Check out this thread at the July 7, 2016 mark.

archives/23800/f2_t23852.shtml

Thanks, I felt certain we had visited Adams before, but hadn't underscored the presence of the Met at the front of that unending crowd. When I first encountered the illustration in 1979, it made all the sense in the world to see a Met there, as a Met and a Peanuts character would have been at the top of the list of cultural figures in my relatively tiny cultural microcosm. Why not? I had little notion of how irrelevant the Mets were to the rest of the country, and how someone in Indiana would be about as puzzled by the inclusion of the Mets figure as I would have been had he been a Kansas City King or a Hartford Whaler. And hell, at least the Whalers had a 100-year-old Gordie Howe in 1979.

But then I stumbled across it recently and noticed his almost-Yoginess and I figured (correctly, it seems) that the illustration was re-purposed from 14 years earlier, when the Mets were just as bad, possibly worse, but far more culturally relevant.

batmagadanleadoff wrote: ↑Mon Oct 14, 2024 2:16 am Check out this thread at the July 7, 2016 mark.

archives/23800/f2_t23852.shtml

Thank you.
If in the future the young CPF-ers ever want to know what we were like, that would be a great thread to show them.
Later

Mort Drucker’s version of Yogi the Mets icon, September 1969.

https://50yearoldcomics.com/2019/09/14/ ... mber-1969/

I don't recognize the first guy, but after that, it's Yogi, Sinatra, Tony Bennett (?) and Dean Martin.

Vince Lombardi is the first guy.