Look, I know I trash Saturday Night Live on a semi-regular basis, but it is what it is, and over the past 30 years it has given me a a great deal of joy. Sure the show sucks every now and again (mainly now), but the comedic memories it has generated more than make up for any current suckitude. But despite it's raging popularity and time capsule-ish quality, Saturday Night Live is the most tinkered with, tampered with, edited, changed and mangled show in television history.
The reason the show is live is because someone thinks that the anything can happen quality is appealing. The thing is though, if anything happen, it'll usually be replaced with the dress rehearsal version both when the show is fed to the west coast and in all subsequent airings. Then there are the reruns that first aired on Comedy Central and then on E!
. Some bonehead decided to sell those networks on the idea of hour long reruns instead of just using the full 90 minute shows, which leads to all kinds of stupidity in the editing room, including the omission of monologues and even taking the opening sketch and moving it to the middle of the show and lopping off the Live from New York..
. But I ran into something this weekend that absolutely made me furious. If I could meet the executives in charge of this decision I'd go Ron Artest on them.
Now I'm archiving my library of SNL tapes, because I know that for whatever reason this show will never be released on DVD season by season. Often this means I'm stuck with the hour long rerun versions, since that's all I've had access to since I've been taping things religiously. However, NBC has been running full length classic SNLs overnights on Saturday, which has allowed me to upgrade both the quality of my old tapes as well as regain the missing footage.
Usually it just seems like some kid in the tape vault is picking these shows at random, because they rarely seem to have any relevance to anything going on at any given time. But a few weeks ago, it seemed to make sense. It was the weekend before the 2004 election, and the rerun was from the same time period of the 1984-85 season.
Michael McKean was the host, and it was the weekend before the '84 election. The show had been entirely restructured and re-edited, including the total omissions of TWO political sketches as well as a commercial parody and the second musical number from Chaka Khan. In their place were classic Eddie Murphy sketches (who was not even a cast member that year) and other moments from the 84-85 season.
So what was the point? Where was the relevance? Why seemingly show an episode with a direct relation to current events and then delete all mention of said events?
Is Walter Mondale suddenly a taboo topic? To make matters even more infuriating, two of those deleted sketches appeared in the Comedy Central rerun of the show. So you can't argue that maybe the sketches were offensive or just flat out terrible.
.. they were approved to run in the mid-afternoon Comedy Central one hour best-ofs.
No, this was just someone at NBC going all George Lucas with something that they really have no right to dick around with. They even recorded and edited in a new introduction to the open with Don Pardo saying with special appearances by Eddie Murphy . The weekend after the 2004 election, NBC aired the subsequent episode from 1984-85 (George Carlin/Frankie Goes to Hollywood).
This time the political sketches are kept, but the second musical number and two other sketches were cut, again replaced by Eddie Murphy sketches and other 84-85 season bits. Each episode of Saturday Night Live is a snapshot of the culture and hot topics of the time. If NBC is going to rerun them and continues to choose rather insignificant episodes, then they should show some principles and air them in their original form.
If NBC would rather highlight the best of SNL during this time slot, then put on one of the thousands of Best of SNLs that are already in the can. This constant meddling is completely and totally unnecessary. Posted by dvdguy at 11:19 AM in SNL Rants Look, I know I trash Saturday Night Live on a semi-regular basis, but it is what it is, and over the past 30 years it has given me a a great deal of joy.
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