MAD About Star Wars
is a lot more than your typical MAD magazine anthology. The author, Jonathan Bresman, was a Lucasfilm employee before he became a senior editor at MAD, so there's a really great sense of how Lucasfilm and George Lucas (a legendary MAD Magazine fan) reacted to each of the many spot-on, hold-your-gut parodies MAD ran over the years. The book is liberally sprinkled with sidebar anaecdotes telling stories of MAD and Lucas's relationship to each other (for example, the Lucasfilm legal department sent a threatening letter to MAD about one of their parodies; the same parody generated a personal fan-letter from George Lucas — MAD simply sent copies of each letter to the other sender and the problem went away), including the many times a MAD parody about tatty Star Wars merch or franchising was outdone by actual licensed products and sequels. Bresman also pokes fun at MAD's own propensity for cheap shots, counting all the limp light-saber jokes and other repeated gags that show up in each new parody.
Thirty years of Star Wars generated thirty years of great material for MAD, and this volume collects the very best of it, annotating it with background and inside info. It's just the thing to remind yourself of why MAD rules — or to turn on a young Star Wars fan to decades worth of loving lampoons.
Update: Bonnie Burton sez, "We did a lot of interviews with the authors and the old MAD magazine crew:
It's a MAD MAD MAD MAD Galaxy (Interviews with Mort Drucker and Dick DeBartolo);
The Usual Gang of Jediots: MAD About Star Wars
(Interviews with David Shayne and Jonathan Bresman)"
