Saturday 16th September 2000
Ebony the Hamster reports on the use of hamsters in the MAD magazines


[Editor's note - As noted in the first article, this series of articles were completed shortly before Ebony's untimely death but we felt that we should still print them after a 'cooling off time']

Having set the scene for these next articles in a previous article in the pages of the RW, all I really need to note here to remind readers is that I intend looking at the role of hamsters in the MAD magazines which ran from 1952-1998, all of which are included on a seven CD set which my owner, Lee, purchased with some money that he was given on his fortieth birthday.

I shan't be using 'those' two pictures, however, which are particularly awful - in June 67 and Sept 93's editions. Mind you, some of the ones I'm using should make it obvious to the reader that MAD are far from sane...well, that's obvious, huh, with a name like that?! What I meant was that there really should be some things left unwritten or unsketched - but I guess that some of these sorts of things sell, don't they? Wonder who would complain if we published the same sort of stuff about humans in the RW that they can do in MAD, huh?! Just goes to show you the levels to which the human media can stoop - and I'm already persuaded that the Sept 93 inclusion may have seen the light of day because certain corridors of power were beginning to worry about the continuing speed of growth of rodent rights and the rise to full view of the now famous Hamster Presidential Campaign which was inaugurated around those formative years.

Anyway, I digress.

The first hamster ever to appear on the pages of MAD was a small sketch of one 'Fluffums' in April 55's edition and reproduced here on the right. Why this hamster ever let itself be duplicated gouging a human's finger is far from certain but some such bribe of sunflower seeds or walnuts may well have sufficed in those days when rodent rights weren't a major political issue. Certainly, hamsters were well-known even back then for occasionally testing the flesh of whatever was waved in front of the face to see if it was edible and the advert went largely unchallenged by the rodent world.

It was a full eleven years before another hamster appeared, however, and subsequent history now echoes with the testimony that, so taken aback by the horror of their first article, they opted to hide such sketches away from the general public until they might present an altogether better view which appeared in the March 66 edition in a cartoon story entitled 'Voyage to see what's on the bottom' - a satirical look (as I'm sure you're aware) at the tv program 'Time Tunnel'.

In that article, our well-known trait of running on an exercise wheel and prolific breeding rates was exploited for some cheap joke when the submarine needed extra power to help it out of a crisis (reproduced on the left). George has already noted the hamster's ability to take upon itself the diving skills of a fish in his hamster history entitled 'Voyage to the bottom of the Duck Pond' and one can't help but think that this article was a direct steal from the already well-known rodent story, handed down from generation to generation for decades and probably told to one of the cartoonists who worked at the magazine.

At least they portrayed us hamsters in a more positive light but worse was to come in the Sept 67 article on the inside front cover in an internal advertising page about the availability of MAD books in the shops. Lee recalls having bought numerous of these books when he traveled to see his great grandmother in Henley-on-Thames as a child but he never recalled seeing this advert which...well, you can see for yourself - I've reproduced it on the right hand side of this page.

This was just a small graphic about two thirds of the page from the bottom on the left hand side and I can't find any relevance to the sales of the books at all - it was probably a meaningless piece of doggerel which the artist came up with. I don't think they were too serious with the label that was written on the mug, either, but I'll get the Presidential Team onto it as soon as I can to investigate - what with Hamster rights being ever increasingly a sensitive issue, this is something that may support the new legislation which is currently traveling through Congress to make it a right of every hamster to have a minimum weight of food per day and adequate fresh bedding on a weekly basis.

This is where we'd got up to by the close of the sixties - just four mentions in 18 years (if one includes that one from June 67, which I'm omitting) and the last three of these occurring within 15 months of each other, a clear indication that a hamster must have infiltrated the MAD offices as a pet of one of the writers' kids.

In the next article, I'll continue by looking at what changes the seventies brought.

Ebony the Hamster writes for the Rodent Weekly.
This article appears courtesy of that paper.




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