Manic Expression

Hey buddy! You're off work, the chores/homework is done, your friends are busy (if you have them), nothing but you and all the time in the world before you have to go back to the # Level of Hell you call your job. So what to do with that free time? Well...

Live From New York It’s… 19 minutes of a SNL Episode?

OK, my history with SNL is kinda odd. The years I seem to love the most are the mid 80’s to early 90’s which, I was still going to bed at 8 O’Clock even by the time guys like Dana Carvey and Phil Hartman and Mike Meyers had left the show. My introduction to SNL has an exact date. I know this date because it was written on the VHS tape my dad recorded it on. November 24th 1991, it was a Sunday an… Aerosmith Sunday. You see back in the day MTV used to actually show Music Videos (what a fuckin’ concept right?) and sometimes they’d dedicate whole days or weekend or even a week to a particular musical artist. But that’s going off topic.

That day I saw for the first time, my first SNL sketch. It was beautiful, it was hilarious it was… THE MOST EXCELLENT THING I’D EVER SEEN IN MY ENTIRE LIFE! It was Wayne's World with Aerosmith and if you prompt me I will give you that entire sketch verbatim. (NEEERRRD!)

So yeah that was that until reruns started on Comedy Central in the mid 90’s. My God, it was like I’d never seen TV before. Now I don’t have cable anymore, and it seems that most reruns of SNL seemed to be from the past 10 years if they’re even still being run. So my delight when I saw that SNL had actually popped up on my Netflix I was so excited I thought I might hurl.

Well I hurled for completely different reasons. Upon scrolling the selection of episodes I found many episodes cut down from their original length. I would expect to not see some or even all musical performances because of music licensing issues. What I did not expect was to see some shows whittled down to 30 to even 15 minutes. And for one I can’t figure out why. So I went on the hunt for information and got… dick. Popular songs can easily be replaced with some god awful stock music, look at WKRP In Cincinnati for a terrible example of that atrocity. And parodies of popular songs for sketches are covered under well… parody.

While I didn’t watch a lot of episodes I noticed that on some of the reviews that some other episodes are missing famous sketches, opening monologues and even all sketches with the host of the show. William Shatner’s episode which has been cut down to 19 minutes is apparently missing one of the most famous sketches of all involving Mr. Shatner at a Trekkie convention. I even noticed while watching an episode that parts of Weekend Update had been cut. Bitch, you don’t cut on Dennis Miller.

My advice if you wanna waste your precious free time watching Saturday Night Live I’d go looking for tape trades...

Party on Wayne and Party on Garth.