Saturday 30th 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']

I have given a reason for this series of articles previously and all I really need to note here to remind readers is that, at the outset, I intended 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 in July. In this article I will be looking at the use of hamsters from the inception of the seventies while, in the previous one, I dealt with the period 1952 through to the close of the sixties.

The seventies were largely quiet when it came to hamsters in the MAD magazine and, had you blinked, you may well have missed them. I noted just two such inclusions and one can't help but think that the activity of rodents within the offices largely went either unrecognised or was completely ignored. But did no sprog of the artists actually keep us? Didn't the writers breed us? Obviously, these were barren years for the MAD writers and ones which history will bear witness to - that the editorial staff largely failed to move with the flow of the rodent movement which was to gather pace throughout this decade.

In Jan 75, seven and a half years after the last mention, we find a shred of information in an article about Hannibal under the overall title 'If the world of yesterday faced the conditions of today' - reproduced on the right.

The surprising thing about this article is that nowhere are hamsters actually mentioned as existing - all that seems important to the writer is the mention of our food. And neither do we read of the importance of the hamsters of Carthage who sent help to Hannibal not once but repeatedly when his provisions ran out on that long and arduous trip across the Alps in his attempted conquest of Rome. Why, as George the hamster has made mention in a privately published article, Hannibal would have failed in his alpine crossing had not the hamsters resident in the elephants' ears not sought out a fresh supply of water daily to feed all his troops and animals of burden.

MAD magazine ignores this, however, and consigns Hannibal to the pages of 'what might have been', putting it down to 'computer error' - no doubt, in their opinion, that the operating system Windows 218BC was to blame.

From a misunderstanding of history, MAD turned its attentions in Oct 77 to a two-line piece of doggerel which, again, wasn't exactly edifying. Supposedly a rhyme from the publication 'The Daily Rhyme', it showed a poorly drawn sketch of what was reputedly a hamster (have you ever seen a hamster that looks like this? Which hamster sat for the sketch, for goodness sake? Couldn't they afford a proper model?!) with the verse directly underneath (reproduced on the left).

It's hardly any wonder that Sinatra has never been well received by rodents the world over - and not just because his voice has been known to vibrate the water out of a bottle and cause fresh cucumber to become stale. It would appear that his assault on one of our descendants is more or less to blame for our deep-seated fear of Italian Americans who sing duets with Bing Crosby and pose as reporters to the rich in Hollywood films.

In this ten year period, therefore, hamsters appear but twice - once in the context of food and the other as a two line piece of doggerel. One can't help but wonder at the reason for all this - but ignorance towards the hamster was soon to change in the eighties where we find three references and, even better, come the nineties there are five, a singularly important statistic when one remembers the popularity to which hamsters rose and the vast spread of the availability of Habitrail and Rotastak into even uncivilised parts of the world such as Scotland.

In my next article I will continue apace into the exciting eighties.

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



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