Showing posts with label Saturday Night Live. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Saturday Night Live. Show all posts
Saturday, December 7, 2024
Appalachian Hospital Emergency Room Offers a Different Kind of Holiday Spirit
We open our video vault every Saturday from Thanksgiving through New Year's Day to share a classic holiday-themed sketch from NBC's venerable favorite, Saturday Night Live (SNL). This week's sketch from 2005 offers a look inside a busy hospital emergency room in Appalachia over the Christmas holiday, which includes visits from a man with a lawn dart stuck in his hand (Jason Sudeikis), another who injured himself defiling a watermelon (Chris Parnell) and a sketchy couple whose son (Neil Young) has a drug problem. Jack Black, Johnny Knoxville, Seth Meyers and Amy Poehler also star.
Be sure to return next Saturday for another SNL holiday flashback!
It's tough to do a thorough review of American pop culture over the past 50 years without acknowledging the contributions of NBC's Saturday Night Live (SNL), which is currently celebrating its 50th season. Whether the show helped drive or merely followed popular trends is open to debate, but from the self-centered pathos of "The Californians" to Dana Carvey's recent return to the show as the failing President Joe Biden, SNL has captured a half century of cultural evolution in real time without apology. I've been watching the show since its inception and it's incredible how well it sums up the colorful road we've traveled.
While it's impossible to cite any one sketch, episode, guest host or cast member as best, one of my very favorite recurring features has to be The Sweeney Sisters, featuring Nora Dunn and the late Jan Hooks. The Sweeney Sisters first appeared during Season 12 in the Fall of 1986 as guests on the Instant Coffee Show, featuring Kevin Nealon as host "Big" Bill Smith. I've never been very impressed by Nealon, whose performance here was nothing special, but Dunn and Hooks were fantastic as two manic lounge singers committed to giving everything they had to every performance. This appearance featured what would become the Sweeney Sisters' trademark — a peppy medley of pop standards punctuated by self-absorbed banter with the audience and one another, centered around a particular theme.
Unfortunately, it was this template that makes it all but impossible to find the Sweeney Sisters on YouTube or anywhere else. Since each of their sketches typically featured at least half a dozen or more well-known songs, broadcast rights are prohibitively expensive, and NBC is notorious for quickly removing any unauthorized clips. Of the ten appearances The Sweeney Sisters made on SNL, I'm unable to find a single clip on YouTube. In fact, their only YouTube clip appears to be their performance opening the 40th annual Emmy Awards show in 1988, which is a delight well worth watching:
Fortunately, I've been able to find clips of all ten Sweeney Sisters SNL appearances over the years, several of which I digitized from VHS recordings I'd made when they first appeared on the air. Among these are two terrific holiday-themed sketches. The first, which aired on December 20, 1986, stars William Shatner who's just proposed to Liz Sweeney and brings her to a holiday house party hosted by her sister, Candy. With a little prompting by two of the guests (A. Whitney Brown and Phil Hartman) the two perform a medley of holiday tunes along with their standard centerpiece "The Trolley Song." It's their most wired and best performance, and I've included a short clip in my Intro to this year's mix at the 1:00 mark.
The Sweeney Sisters Christmas Party, Air Date 12/20/86
The second holiday sketch aired on December 17, 1988. This one finds the sisters in the slammer on Christmas Eve after they were picked up as prostitutes while waiting for their pianist outside the Lucky Leprechaun lounge. While in jail they become friendly with an actual prostitute, played by guest host Melanie Griffith. After their release, they decide to return to the lock-up to do a medley of their favorite prison songs for Griffith and the other jailbirds. This one's not as good as the Christmas party sketch with Shatner, but it's a solid performance all around.
The other eight Sweeney Sisters sketches are a mixed bag, but they boast an impressive array of guest stars, including Paul Simon, Robin Williams, Robert Mitchum, Charlton Heston and Mary Tyler Moore, who plays the third Sweeney sister, Audrey, who joins the act for their performance in the lobby of the Holiday Inn in Wheaton, Illinois. Hopefully, the entire collection will become more widely available in the future.
My 20th and latest holiday mix is complete and ready for your review via my holiday music website. It's called "I Wish It Was Christmas Today," and, like its 19 predecessors, it features an irreverent mix of aural holiday goodies you're unlikely to find anyplace else. I started making these mixes shortly after leaving Boston for Los Angeles in 1999. My first several efforts were made chiefly for my personal enjoyment, but beginning in 2005 I started recording my mixes on CD to share with family and friends each year in lieu of a traditional holiday card. Folks seemed to enjoy these mixes, and because a good portion of the material was relatively esoteric, each new mix brought requests for information about various featured songs and clips. I started this blog to share some background about the various tracks on each year's mix.
Between now and the end of the year I aim to offer at least a little background about each of the 41 tracks on this year's mix. I'll try to cover somewhere between two and five tracks at a time on those days when I feel like writing. Some days I may post on related or even unrelated topics, though I'll try to limit myself to the subject at hand. With all this in mind, let's get started with our review of the tracks on this year's collection:
Track 1 Introduction and Liberace Show Holiday Episode Opening, Liberace (1954)
This year's mix begins with a montage of sounds centered around the opening number of the 1954 Christmas episode of The Liberace Show. I often start my mixes with a selection from out of the past and there's nothing quite like a blast of Liberace to start things off in a festive mood. While his heyday occurred some years before I was born, I've had at least a dim recollection of Liberace for as long as I can remember.
Born Wladziu Valentino Liberace in Wisconsin in 1919, Liberace (known to his family as Walter and to his friends as Lee) grew up in a family of modest means. Both of his parents were musicians, and he started playing piano at the age of four. Mocked by his peers for his slight build and effeminate manner, Walter threw himself into his music and quickly developed into a talented classical pianist. In his mid teens, he began to perform publicly in various competitions, and by his early 20s he was appearing in cabarets and strip clubs. He became known for mixing different musical styles, and was cited for making classical music more accessible to popular audiences. He also developed a keen interest in fashion, adopting an increasingly colorful and flamboyant style. As Liberace himself noted, "I don't give concerts, I put on a show."
Liberace leveraged his musical talent, irrepressible personality and trademark flair to become one of the country's most successful entertainers throughout the 1950s and after. His extravagant lifestyle was legendary and nearly everything he did became fodder for the tabloid press. Liberace worked hard to become and remain successful, touring frequently, playing extended runs in Las Vegas and Palm Springs and hosting his own syndicated TV program. Bypassing the networks allowed him to keep the bulk of the show's profits, and he managed to amass a significant fortune.
To me, one of the most interesting facets of Liberace's story was his ability to maintain a wildly colorful and unabashedly flamboyant lifestyle while remaining popular with middle America, especially middle-aged and older women. While many of his fellow entertainers "knew" or at least assumed he was gay, Liberace never publicly acknowledged his homosexuality. He repeatedly denied he was gay in interviews, and sued several publications that alleged he was homosexual. He also frequently accompanied well-known women to various social functions — including Debbie Reynolds and Betty White — in an effort to demonstrate his heterosexuality.
Reynolds, who played Liberace's mother in the 2013 HBO biopic "Behind the Candelabra," was quite candid about the star's private life.
"I have never had a better time than being Liberace's
date," Reynolds explained after his death. "We all knew he was
homosexual. That was a friend: You know what they love and the people that they
love, and what they are."
"I don't want him to be remembered just for being
homosexual," Reynolds explained. "He should be remembered as a great
entertainer and loved by so many.
Here's the complete 1954 Christmas episode of The Liberace Show, the first part of which is featured on this year's mix:
Track 2 I Wish It Was Christmas Today, Cast of Saturday Night Live (2000)
The title track to this year's mix has been hailed by Slate magazine as "the only original Christmas song to even gently shake the cultural firmament" in this century — a classic Saturday Night Live (SNL) offering called "I Wish It Was Christmas Today," which first aired in 2000. The sketch stars Jimmy Fallon, Chris Kattan, Tracy Morgan and Horatio Sanz performing a notably amateurish ditty about looking forward to the holidays.
Sanz, the lead vocalist, is playing a small guitar while Fallon occasionally taps a Casio keyboard held by Kattan, who turns his head from right to left to the point of distraction throughout the performance. Morgan neither sings nor plays anything but rather seems to be jogging in place. This is one of those "so bad it's good" bits, which, of course, makes it a perfect fit for my holiday collection.
I understand Sanz was the principal songwriter of this classic, with assistance from Fallon on the lyrics. Although the words evolved with each subsequent appearance of the foursome, the original words are as follows:
I don't care what your mama says,
Christmas time is near,
I don't care what your daddy says,
Christmas time is near.
All I know is that Santa's sleigh,
Is making its way across the U.S.A.
I don't care what the mayor says,
Christmas is full of cheer,
I don't care if you think it's a lie,
Christmas will soon be here.
I don't care about the C.I.A.,
I don't care what the calendars say,
I wish it was Christmas today,
I wish it was Christmas today.
He's the original appearance of the song on December 9, 2000, with an introduction by the one and only Don Pardo:
The sketch proved sufficiently popular that Fallon, Kattan, Morgan and Sanz performed it an additional eight times on SNL over the following decade. The AV Club offers a rather thorough analysis of the song's subsequent evolution and performance history (see link below), and several of these subsequent performances are included in the following:
SNL is currently celebrating its 50th anniversary, which, as one who remembers the show's launch, is rather hard to accept. The show's obviously had a lot of ups and downs, but few media outlets provide a more accurate shorthand reflection of popular culture over the past half-century, ands this silly little tune has certainly earned its place in the holiday archive.
The Pacific Northwest has long been known as a breeding ground for developing musical styles and edgy new bands, many of which have gone on to achieve considerable success and broad acclaim. Of course, for every great success there are a larger number of terrific bands that never quite made the big time. Back in the mid-'60s, three such bands got together to record a holiday album, "Merry Christmas from The Sonics, The Wailers and the Galaxies." Released in 1965 on Etiquette Records, the album contains a total of ten tracks — four from The Wailers, and three each from The Sonics and The Galaxies. I've included two of The Wailers' tracks on previous mixes, and this year I'm using "Santa Claus," by The Sonics.
The backstory of the album is summarized especially well on the wonderful hip christmas holiday music website (see link below).
The first time I heard The Sonics' track "Santa Claus," it reminded me of the classic song "Farmer John," originally released in 1959 by the R&B duo Don and Dewey and later covered in a more popular version by The Premiers. Many other groups have done versions of their own including Neil Young, who included a version of the song on his 1990 album Ragged Glory, featuring Crazy Horse. Several of the others tracks from the three-band "Merry Christmas" collection also bore a striking resemblance to other tunes. Among these was a track by The Sonics' called "It's Christmas," which took its melody from the famous Drifters' hit "On Broadway" and added a set of Christmas lyrics. Sometime after the release of the album, the label was denied publication rights for the song, which necessitated the album's recall.
Despite the problems with their joint Christmas release, The Sonics enjoyed a measure of success in the Seattle market and have left a significant mark on the national music scene. Formed in Tacoma in 1960, the band is known for its hard-edged, garage-band style and served as inspiration for later groups including The White Stripes and Nirvana. Although they only released a couple of albums before breaking up in 1967, they have reunited a number of different times including a noteworthy performance on Halloween night of 2008 at Seattle's Paramount Theater, where they were joined by longtime fan Steve Van Zandt.
Their 1965 song "The Witch" is representative of their early work:
In 2015, The Sonics performed live in the studios of KEXP in Seattle:
I'm pleased to report that my 20th annual holiday mix, "I Wish It Was Christmas Today," is now complete and available for your listening pleasure. It runs a little over 75 minutes, contains 41 tracks and features my typically divergent mix of good, bad and ridiculous holiday tunes and other sounds. I'm especially proud to have it completed before Thanksgiving for the second year in a row, which allows folks to play it during dinner tomorrow should the conversation turn to politics.
This mix opens with an excerpt from the 1954 holiday episode of TV's "Liberace Show." Noted for his colorful and flamboyant style, Liberace's weekly program made him one of the country's most successful performers in the 1950s, and his schmaltzy, enthusiastic style is immediately apparent in this year's opening number. It's followed by the title track, "I Wish It Was Christmas Today," which should be familiar to fans of NBC's "Saturday Night Live" (SNL). This track features SNL cast members Jimmy Fallon, Chris Kattan, Tracy Morgan and Horatio Sanz. The song was first performed on December 9, 2000, and was sufficiently popular that the foursome returned to do it on 10 additional episodes of the show over the subsequent decade. SNL is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, so it seemed like a good time to feature this classic number.
(L to R): Horatio Sanz, Jimmy Fallon, Christ Kattan and Tracy Morgan.
Information about the other 39 tracks will be posted in this space between now and the end of the year in groups of around two or three per day. My aim, as in previous years, is to share at least a little background about every track. Many if not most of the cuts will probably be unfamiliar to you, so I hope this background will be of some interest. I will also include a number of posts about holiday music in general, and each Saturday we'll once again feature a vintage SNL holiday sketch as part of our SNL Holiday Flashback series.
For more information about this year's mix, please visit my holiday music website via the link below. The website also contains links to my previous mixes and other holiday-related material. It's hard to believe I've now been doing this for 20 years, but it's been worth it if I've managed to help make your holidays even a little brighter.
This One's About Cowbells, Not Sleigh Bells, But It's One of the Best SNL Sketches Ever
Every Saturday from Thanksgiving through New Year's Day, we open the vault to share a classic Saturday Night Live holiday-themed sketch to bring some fun and laughter to your holiday season. With Christmas now over and New Year's Eve just one day away I tried to find a funny SNL New Year's sketch, but there aren't any. Maybe that's because the show is typically on mini-hiatus from mid-December to sometime in January. Anyway, rather than run yet another holiday bit, I thought I'd share what to me remains one of the best SNL sketches of all time, the fabulous "Behind the Music" spoof of the recording of Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper" from Season 25 (2000), more commonly known as Christopher Walken's "Cowbell" sketch. It stars Walken as fictional music producer Bruce Dickinson, who repeatedly prods band member Gene Frenkle (Will Ferrell) for "more cowbell." Chris Kattan, Chris Parnell, Horatio Sanz and Jimmy Fallon are also featured. Enjoy!
Alec Baldwin Reprises His Famous Sales Role Motivating Elves in Glengarry Glen Christmas
Every Saturday from Thanksgiving to New Year's Day we like to crack open the video vault to share a vintage holiday clip from Saturday Night Live. This week's clip is from SNL Season 31 (2005) and features Alec Baldwin reprising his role in the powerful 1992 film Glengarry Glen Ross. In the movie, Baldwin plays a sales pro who was brought in to motivate a group of salesmen played by Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, Alan Arkin, and Ed Harris. Here, he plays "an elf from the home office" sent by Santa to motivate a group of surprisingly lackadaisical elves. Watch for the moment when Baldwin mistakenly repeats one famous line from the original movie instead of the Christmas line in this holiday adaptation. The film was based on a successful play by David Mamet but despite boasting one of the most incredible ensemble casts ever assembled, was a commercial disappointment. Today, however, it's widely regarded today as a truly first-rate work, and this SNL sketch really measures up, too. Check back next week for our final SNL Flashback of the 2023 holiday season!
Saturday, December 16, 2023
Weekend Update's Stefon Offers Tips for a Thrilling New York City Holiday
This week's Saturday Night Live Holiday Flashback features popular Weekend Update City Correspondent Stefon (Bill Hader) with tips for holiday travelers looking to have fun in the Big Apple. Host: Seth Meyers.
Vincent Price Welcomes Classic Hollywood Stars to His 1954 Christmas Special
This week's Saturday Night Live Holiday Flashback features Vincent Price (Bill Hader) welcoming a lively group of Hollywood celebrities to his holiday variety show, including Katherine Hepburn (Kristen Wiig), James Dean (James Franco) and Liberace (Fred Armisen). Two of the guests have an especially festive time. Can you guess which two guests have an especially festive time together?
Saturday, December 2, 2023
That SNL Holiday Clip with Two Hillary Clintons and a Sarah Palin
Once again this year I'll be posting a vintage holiday clip from NBC's Saturday Night Live every Saturday during the month of December. Our first clip of the season is from 2015 and features two different versions of Hillary Clinton: Amy Poehler as the 2008 version and Kate McKinnon as the "new and improved" 2015 version. The sad truth is that both versions lost, which was OK in 2008 but a very bitter pill eight years later. Tina Fey was also on hand a
s the 2015 version of Sarah Palin, who was every bit as awful as the earlier one (we're talking Palin here, not Fey, of course!).
As the curtain comes down on 2022, many of us will be making resolutions with an eye toward improving our lives in 2023. SNL personality Drunk Uncle (Bobby Moynihan) has some resolutions of his own, which he tries his best to describe to Weekend Update's Seth Meyers:
Saturday, December 24, 2022
SNL Goes Home for the Holidays with Eddie Murphy, Maya Rudolph and More
It's Christmas Eve, and we know that many families across the globe are enjoying time with their families and trying to stay positive in the face of what might be described as challenging circumstances. In this sketch from 2020, Eddie Murphy, Maya Rudolph, Kenan Thompson, Mikey Day, Chris Redd, and Ego Nwodim gather around the holiday dinner table to reflect on the holiday experience.
Strong's exit follows the recent departures of a number of other talented cast members, including Pete Davidson, Kate McKinnon, Chris Redd, Aidy Bryant and Melissa Villaseñor. Sadly, most of last night's show was on par with previous shows from this season, which is to say it sucked. Cecily will be missed.
Every Saturday from Thanksgiving through New Year's Eve we dig deep into the vaults of NBC's Saturday Night Live and select a classic holiday sketch to share. Tomorrow is the first night of Hanukkah, and in honor of the festivities this week's SNL flashback is a collection of clips about Hanukkah. Best wishes to all those who celebrate this holiday.
We'll be back with another SNL clip next Saturday on Christmas Eve!
This week's SNL Holiday Flashback is from Season 40 of Saturday Night Live (2014) and features Cicely Strong, one of my favorite SNL cast members, in a parody of the investigative podcast Serial. In this clip, Serial looks at the story of Kris Kringle, who, according to legend, circles the globe each December 24 to leave presents for hundreds of million of children. But what evidence is there to back up this longtime story?
As luck would have it, tonight's episode of SNL will be hosted by Steve Martin and Martin Short, whose successful Hulu series Only Murders in the Building features its own parody of the Serial podcast stylized as "All Is Not OK in Oklahoma" with Tina Fey playing the role of Serial host Sarah Koenig that Cicely Strong plays in this week's flashback. I've just about given up on this season of SNL but as a longtime fan of Martin and Short I'm planning to tune in at 11:35 tonight. Whether I'll still be awake by the time Weekend Update begins is anybody's guess!
For this week's SNL Holiday Flashback we had to dig way down in the vault all the way back to Season 2 and a sketch that ran on December 11, 1976 featuring guest host Candace Bergen as a stoic consumer reporter interviewing toy company executive Irwin Mainway (Dan Aykroyd). It seems some of the toys Mr. Mainway's company produces have been found to be just a little unsafe:
One of our little holiday traditions has been to dig into the vaults of NBC's Saturday Night Live every Saturday from Thanksgiving through New Year's Day to find a vintage holiday-themed sketch we can all enjoy together. While this season's incarnation of the show seems to lack the popular appeal it formerly enjoyed, we've been through more than a couple of SNL rebuilding seasons, and, besides, we're looking for vintage sketches and after nearly 50 seasons on the air we're confident we can find some decent material. Our first clip this year is from Season 39 of SNL (2013) and features 1860s critic Jebidiah Atkinson (Taran Killam) reviewing several classic holiday movies:
On Saturdays during the Christmas season we typically rummage around our video vault to find an old holiday-based sketch from Saturday Night Live to share. Today's sketch is from December 15, 2012 featuring guest host Martin Short and musical guest Paul McCartney, It's immediately followed by Paul McCartney performing "Wonderful Christmastime," which, in my opinion is one of the worst holiday songs and wost Paul McCartney songs ever. The sketch is pretty good, though. Enjoy!
Plans for the annual Saturday Night Live Christmas show were scrapped just hours before air time last night due to concerns about exploding COVID infection rates in New York City over the past several days. All but two of the show's regular cast were sent home along with musical guest Charli XCX, many of the crew and the entire studio audience. In its place, the show's producers cobbled together a replacement show featuring Tom Hanks, Tina Fey, scheduled host Paul Rudd and regular cast members Kenan Thompson and Michael Che.
In place of the sketches the cast had been working on all week, the show ran videos of the dress rehearsals of several sketches, an improvised "Weekend Update" featuring Tina Fey and Michael Che, and clips from previous shows selected by special guest hosts Fey and Hanks. The two guests were on hand to recognize Rudd for joining SNL's Five-Timers Club, which consists of those who have hosted the program five times or more. Rudd was scheduled to host the show for the fifth time last night. Fey has hosted SNL six times and Hanks, who founded the Five-Timers Club in 1990, has hosted ten times.
As his selected sketch, Tom Hanks selected a clip from a show he hosted in 1990 — that's 31 years ago, folks. It was the Global Warming Holiday Special, in which Hanks played the favorite artist from my latest holiday mix, Dean Martin. Unfortunately, the grinches at SNL have taken the sketch down, so I've posted a sketch a fan subsequently posted that describes the sketch as best they can. The truth is, I didn't think it was all that funny anyway.
As in previous years, I'm planning to dig back into the video archive each Saturday during this festive season to feature a classic holiday bit from NBC's Saturday Night Live. This year, let's start off with a sketch that aired on December 20, 1975, starring Chevy Chase portraying President Gerald Ford celebrating Christmas in the White House:
