"Saturday Night" lives!

In 1976 I was 10 years old and the most powerful influence in my life, after my parents, was “NBC's Saturday Night.” It came on at 10:30 p.m. in Montana, and I would be there, taping the audio off the TV to my Gambles cassette recorder. I'd play the tape over and over until I'd memorized all the fake news stories on “Weekend Update.” I was Chevy Chase, and you weren't.

  So it has gone for more than three decades, pre-teenagers watching “SNL” to learn the secrets of what makes grown-ups laugh. And if the show these days is what MAD magazine was in my youth -- adolescent humor passing itself off as adult humor -- it still is television's premiere comedy showcase, just as it was that dangerous first season, when Dan Aykroyd could puree a dead fish in a blender and audiences didn't know whether to laugh or gasp.

Saturday Night Live: The Complete First Season 1975-1976 is out on DVD this week -- all 24 episodes unedited.

If you put Disc 1 in your player, the first thing you see is Michael O'Donoghue giving English lessons to an immigrant, played by Belushi, who repeats everything O'Donoghue says:

  “I would like …” “I wood like…”

  “…to feed your fingertips …” “…to feed your fingerteeps…”

  “…to the wolverines.”

  Desperate to succeed in an unproven time slot, producer Lorne Michaels had packed the show with performances by George Carlin, the Muppets, singers Janis Ian and Billy Preston and a New York stunt comic named Andy Kaufman. There was a film by Albert Brooks and several weeks' worth of taped bits.

  Yet the “Wolverines” sketch, in many ways, defined what “SNL” would become more than anything that night. It was, after all, Belushi's first memorable character, soon to be followed by many more. It was written by O'Donoghue, also known as “Mr. Mike,” who worked mainly behind the scenes, injecting his sick sensibility into “Saturday Night” and pushing it out to the perilous edge of American comedy.

  And there was this: The sketch ended on a non sequitur, with Chase wandering onstage and yelling, “Live from New York, it's Saturday Night!”

Chase owned the opening from that point on. Usually it ended with a pratfall, and when that got old, a pratfall by the President of the United States. Chase's satire of Gerald Ford was like so many other magical moments during the liftoff of “Saturday Night.” It looked a little jittery at first, then smoothed out and soared.

  I've heard commentators over the years refer to “Saturday Night” as the moment when a “new generation” of American comics took over. If I had to pick one telling sign of that, it would be the graphic that appeared on screen, briefly, the first time Chase did Ford. It explained that the show's producers had tried to book impressionist Rich Little, but he “wouldn't work for scale.” Hipsters got the in joke: If Little, one of Johnny Carson's faves, had actually tried to get on “Saturday Night,” he'd have been barred at the door.

  “Saturday Night” was about to mint its own stars. And as you watch the shows again, you could say identifying the breakout cast members was as simple as A-B-C:

  Aykroyd developed a chorus line of overamped characters: Del Stater, the king of 99-cent diners serving questionable fare; Sheriff Brody, hilariously inept at stopping the voracious “land shark” that terrorized apartment dwellers in the show's ongoing “Jaws” parody; and the zealous announcer known simply as Mr. Bass-O-Matic.

  Belushi was also full of zip, often as a maniacal samurai of various mundane trades (tailor, hotel manager, etc.) who spouted Japanese-sounding gibberish that his customers always understood perfectly. But he could also immerse himself in a tortured character, like Captain James T. Kirk, frozen in denial over his show's cancellation, even as the “Star Trek” set was being removed around him.

And, of course, there was Chase. Always it came back to Chevy. He did arguably the five most famous bits on “Saturday Night” that season: the fall, the President, “Weekend Update,” the “land shark” and the fake ad for Shimmer (“It's a floor wax and a dessert topping!”). No wonder he left for Hollywood after one season.

  His Ford character quickly evolved from a nervous Nellie who fumbled things to an out-and-out dork with short-term memory loss. It proved so effective that the White House was forced into a charm offensive. Ford's press secretary Ron Nessen agreed to host the show and his boss taped the introductory “Live from New York!” Only it came out, “live from new york,” and Ford lost the election.

  I thought some of the edge might have worn off this collection of 30-year-old humor, but what I found was that 1975 was more forgiving culturally than today. “Mr. Mike” did impressions of celebrities with long needles jammed in their eye sockets. The “Claudine Longet Invitational” showed skiers getting hit with stray bullets fired by the French singer, who was in the news at the time for shooting Spider Sabich. Carlin opened his monologue with a drug joke -- would that even be allowed now?

  Many unflattering comparisons have been made between “Saturday Night” and the “SNL” that followed. (“Live” wasn't added to the title until after ABC cancelled “Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell,” a prime time variety show that also debuted in the fall of '75.) Most often you hear that people are fed up with the show's bread and butter, those safe, predictable sketches that feature cast members dolled up to resemble famous people. Judd Hirsch's character even ranted about it during the pilot episode of “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” on NBC this fall.

  But you can't be unpredictable for long if you want a hit show. Watch season one from the beginning and you'll see popular bits being run into the ground and odd conceptual pieces being pushed to the third half hour. Even Chevy's overexposure, the result of appearing in so many running gags, became a running gag. Michaels could stand the crazy hours and last-minute changes. What he didn't want, as that sardine can of a debut makes clear, was any room for error.

  One valid criticism comes out in sharp relief as you watch these DVDs. “Saturday Night” back then was not aimed at my age group. A lot of jokes, I now realize, sailed right over my head. “Weekend Update” usually began with Chase on the phone with his girlfriend, saying things like, “Honey, you don't actually blow on it …” By the time I got the joke, I was too old for the FCC to care.

  Perhaps the real reason “SNL” isn't regarded as highly as Comedy Central these days is that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert write jokes for people their age -- fortysomethings -- which teenagers also happen to find funny. Or, like me when I was their age, want to find it funny because so many smart, sophisticated people in the media do.

  Another criticism could be made, which is that the role players on “SNL” aren't as good anymore. (NBC must have agreed: This summer, Michaels was forced to reduce his cast size.) The meteoric rise of Chase, Belushi and Aykroyd came at the others' expense. By January 1976 there were already jokes about Garrett Morris, the cast's lone black member, not getting into sketches and when he did, not getting lines. Laraine Newman was supposed to be a dim-witted “Weekend Update” reporter, but when that was dropped, so did her visibility.

  Yet the lesser lights were often just as brilliant. You can tell just from her Emily Litella character (“Never mind!”) that Gilda Radner is one cast defection away from stardom in season two. Jane Curtin is unflappable. She improves everything she's in. Morris and Newman were solid, never leaning on their cue cards -- could that be said of “SNL” bench players today?

  The DVD has few extras and doesn't need them; the real extras are the parts of the show you forgot. Like how much people smoked on camera. Or the in-show commercial every week for the Polaroid SX-70 camera, which cast members took turns doing. Or Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Grey Panthers, saying the s-word on the air, no doubt stunning the NBC censor who had insisted a few weeks earlier that guest host Richard Pryor be put on seven-second delay.

  “The Complete First Season” DVD completes a long line of remembrances of the early years of “SNL,” dating back at least as far as Belushi's death-by-overdose in 1982. That event opened the floodgates to Bob Woodward and everyone else to write salacious accounts of the backstage life of the “SNL” cast and crew. Even Michaels has authorized NBC to make documentaries of that period, noting for the record who was sleeping with whom and who was unhappy with their roles on the show.

   There's none of that here, thank heavens. For the first time in 31 years, the first season of “Saturday Night” will appear on your TV just as it did then. If you have any memories of that time, I guarantee they will come flooding back.

Comments

[Joe Coughlin]

Good review, Aaron, of a set I've wanted for a long time. The worst thing, though, is that it comes right before Christmas and I have to wait until then to see if someone got it for me!

I hope this is the first of many such sets. I just wonder how well the Doumanian shows will sell?

[Greg Argendeli]

Nice to see that they haven't edited the shows down / blurred logos, unlike some other recent TV releases.

Now, lets all push for ABC (and one or two cast members....) to release Fridays!

-arg

[Mark Jeffries]

I believe that FremantleMedia ("Idol," "The Price is Right") owns the rights to "Fridays." If they could put out a "Match Game" DVD, they could put out "Fridays."

And if the live Polaroid commercials are left in, do the local breaks play out in full with the cover slide accompanied by Howard Shore and the boys (and Cheryl Hardwick)? Since I believe Don Pardo was doing live network promos and IDs leading into the station breaks back then, are they included?

[Aaron]

No. Everything fades to black -- it's not THAT geeked out.

[Brig C. McCoy]

It took me forever to warm up to Saturday Night Live... I was such a big fan of Weekend with Linda Ellerbee and Lloyd Dobbins which SNL's popularity killed.

Here's the shark's take on the show:
http://www.jumptheshark.com/w/weekend.htm

...brig

[roy]

The Richard Pryor SNL was not on a delay. It's such a great urban myth of the show that even some of the SNL people are believing it.

Someone in L.A. saw the show on the delayed west coast feed that night, and indeed there were two audio deletions. No one ever checked out the full story, so factoid became fact. The real fact is that the show aired live-live in the eastern half of the US with no deletions.

Director Dave Wilson confirmed in Tom Shales' book that the show was never delayed on his watch. Sometimes NBC feigned the show would be on delay with Lorne's ok.

[Aaron]

Ah. Well, the DVD doesn't help matters, with Lorne appearing on the "Tomorrow" show and saying that George Carlin would be on delay.

I forget what year the Book of Lists 2 came out, but the Richard Pryor ep is listed as one of the "10 Most Outrageous Moments of TV Censorship" and that the monologue was bleeped twice.

[roy]

The Book of Lists was the probably the first mass disseminator of the Richard Pryor SNL delay rumor. Again, based on a an account by someone who watched on the west coast. Those books (fun tho they were), and its companion The Peoples Almanac, were fraught with errors, conjectures and just plain weirdness.

[Aaron]

Hey Roy, you might want to pull up that Dave Wilson quote at Amazon. My article's factually correct regardless -- NBC did insist on a delay, and seven seconds was the standard -- but Wilson is not nearly as definitive as you make it sound on whether the network was rebuffed.

[Deniel]

No. Everything fades to black -- it's not THAT geeked out