TIME Publishes Year-Old Unflattering 'Outtake' Photos of Paul Ryan Working Out

Watch Thursday's vice presidential debate live on TheBlaze TV and get instant reaction and analysis immediately after from the "Real News From TheBlaze" team. It all starts at 9pm ET. Get the details here.

--

Ahead of tonight's vice presidential debate, TIME magazine published a set of unflattering photos of GOP V.P. candidate Paul Ryan that are nearly a year old.

"This was a photo session we did with him last year for 'Person of the Year,'" said Richard Stengel, managing editor of TIME, on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" today. "He was a runner-up for person of the year and he obviously is a fiend about working out and he was showing his workout and this was pictures from that photo session."

The show's host, Joe Scarborough, compared the photos to a 1980s sitcom. "Look at the picture of him with the baseball hat," he said. "The close up with the dumbbell. It looks like a 1980 sitcom. 'Saved By the Bell' or something."

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Four of the five photos have captions that label them as "outtakes" from last year's session, though it's likely all of them are.

The photos appear in this week's issue of TIME, accompanied by the latest story in an apparently never-ending series of stories about Ryan's P90X workout routine.

The photos also come one day after AP published a controversial photo of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

You can see a couple of the pictures below:

The rest of the photos can be viewed here.