Remember These? 'MAD Trick-or-Treat Reading' Packs

Longtime MAD readers will remember this ill-conceived product from 1987. Warner Books packaged five copies of Howling MAD and five copies of Monster MAD — each 16 pages — with the hope that people would distribute them to trick-or-treaters instead of candy. (Evidently Warner Books thought it was okay to rot kids minds, but not their teeth!) We have no idea if the Halloween giveaway was successful or not, but since we didn’t do it again the following year, we suspect Warner Books lost a bundle on the deal. Anyway, we unearthed a bunch of them in our recent move and since we couldn’t find a single listing for them on eBay, it appears the public’s demand for these classics remains somewhere around nil.