"Once upon a time, in the Age of Innocence, children really believed that all adults were good, that all Presidents were as honest as Abe Lincoln, that the adult world was in every way bigger and better than their own world, one which children knew well was full of savagery and danger. Children were expected to give up their seats in public conveyances to adults, to reserve strong language for the company of their peers and in every way to treat adults with respect. No single cultural force of the past 25 years better illustrates the changes that have occurred since those old days than Mad Magazine. Mad began as an offshoot of comic books. But while the comics of earlier years ran the gamut from cute Disney to the gruesomely violent Tales from the Crypt that aroused parental ire and even Congressional investigations, they all nevertheless fell into the category of fantasy, long an accepted adjunct of childhood. Mad was the first satirical magazine for children, a sort of an easy-to-read Junior Swift, the first to deal with children's reality -their parents, schools and the general adult culture around them - in a mocking way. As Al Feldstein, editor of Mad for the past 25 years, says, What we did was to take the absurdities of the adult world that youngsters were facing and show kids that the adult world is not omnipotent, that their parents were telling the kids to be honest, not to lie, and yet they were cheating on their income tax. We told them there's a lot of garbage out in the world and you've got to be aware of it. Everything you read in the papers is not necessarily true. What you see on television is mostly lies. You're going to have to learn to think for yourself."