Ted Danson

Two years after placing Ted Danson on the back half of his wraparound cover for MAD's "Hot TV Issue" (#266, October '86), Mort Drucker featured him alongside Three Men and a Baby co-stars Steve Guttenberg and Tom Selleck for the front cover of MAD #280 (July '88). Angelo Torres, who had caricatured Ted Danson in the first of MAD's two parodies of Cheers four years earlier, handled the art chores for the Stan Hart four-pager "Three Morons and a Baby," which ran in MAD #280 (July '88).

Arnie Kogen wrote two separate parodies of Cheers in the '80s, both entitled "Beers," under two different names. Kogen used his own name for the first installment (MAD #249, September '84) and went with the pen name Debbee Ovitz for the "second round of Beers" in MAD #285 (March '89). By this point of the series, it was Kirstie Alley and not Shelley Long that was sparring with Ted Danson. Mort Drucker caricatured Alley and Danson for this fifth-page panel.

Writer Russ Cooper and artist Sam Viviano concocted a different direction for the ill-advised Three Men and a Baby sequel Three Men and a Little Lady, which saw Ted Danson, Steve Guttenberg and Tom Selleck reprise their roles from the original. Surprise guest Phil Donahue barged into this portion of "Reel Vs. Real," which originally ran in MAD #307 (December '91).

I thought Ted Danson's CBS sitcom Becker was a workable show with a few laughs - no more, no less. So imagine my surprise when Dick DeBartolo turned in a classic MAD TV parody script with his five-page spoof of the series. Appearing in the "DANSON IN THE DARK DEP'T" of MAD #408 (August '01), "Bicker" was illustrated by Mort Drucker and remains one of my personal top-ten favourite TV satires to ever appear in MAD.

Latter-day Ted Danson, who put in a cumulative five seasons playing D.B. Russell on CSI, CSI: NY and CSI: Cyber, made a cameo appearance in the splash panel for MAD's True Detective parody. Artist Tom Richmond and writer Arnie Kogen teamed up for "Two Defectives," which originally ran in MAD #528 (August '14) and is one of my favourite MAD television parodies of the past five years.