All 45 seasons of SNL coming to Peacock Streaming

This sketch is currently available on the show’s official YouTube channel, so we can at least say they’re not trying to sweep that one under the rug.

 

I'd be amazed if some of these episodes were not heavily edited.

There's a whole litany of "politically incorrect" stuff in there.

 

Indeed. One would think a title card at the beginning of episodes with spicier content would be sufficient. That way those who still enjoy their racial slurs can loop it to their heart's content and the rest of us more evolved Earthlings can enjoy the comedy.

 

Netflix, way back had the some of the seasons during the '90s. Every single musical guest without fail was chopped. I watched them mainly for the Weekend Updates with Norm Macdonald and even some of those where heavily edited if they were included at all.

So what I guess that I'm saying is best of luck on getting unedited shows. Licensing, unPC content aside they were brutally hacked in the most random and nonsensical manner.

 

Will the Milton Berle episode be available?

 

Back when Netflix started streaming content (as “Netflix Instant”), they offered some of the episodes from the infamous 1980-1981 season. It might have even been all of them, but I don’t remember exactly. But the episodes were severely cut down, with no musical guests. I watched the Elliott Gould show there (the season opener), and Netflix’s stream was about 20 minutes.

 

I believe Comedy Central rebroadcast the entire show in either the very late 90s, or early 2000s - all of which contained both musical performances in each episode.

File sharers captured these broadcasts and shared them online, but unfortunately this was before the advent of modern codecs and capture technology, so what you have are a ton of low bitrate DivX/XviD and MPEG1 files.

They are watchable, but kind of rough quality by today's standards.

 

Humor is a funny thing (ha!) in that it tends not to age well to subsequent generations. My parents like to watch old tapes of Red Skelton (which is even before their time), and I could not find anything humorous about that.

SNL from the 70s? I respect a lot of the performers (less so Chevy Chase, who not only seems fairly untalented but apparently is a major dick), but it's hard for me -- coming from 90s/millennial perspective -- to find it funny. The humor is sometimes so politically incorrect that it becomes distracting (I don't mind some off-color or envelope-pushing humor at all, but making fun of gays for being gay or the like is a bit much), and the pace is too slow for me.

Then again, "my" SNL will always be the c.1990 to 1994 era. I love everything in that period. Once Norm MacDonald took over Weekend Update and that God-awful 'Goat-Boy' sketch started reoccurring, and when they suddenly fired Sandler and Farley, I checked out and I've never really got back into it. But I'm sure that when my toddler son is about 16 and I show him 'Gap Girls' from 1992 or whatever, he'll be like, "Yeah... this blows."

 

Honky honky!

 

I thought everyone loved Goat Boy.

 

I watched from the beginning until the end of the Eddie Murphy years, and loved the first seasons at the time, but except for a few skits - Bad TV Playhouse, Fred Garvin: Male Prostitute, Little Powdered Donuts, they haven't held up at all.

 

This post proves a couple things.
SNL is “of the times” topically, musically and in presentation. With those criteria, some stuff will age well, some stuff definitely will not. And it’s true that one aligns themselves with the cast they’re watching at a young age.
I agree that the original cast shows had a slower energy, but times were slower in general!
Personally I would’ve kept watching had the second cast been at least somewhere near as vital as the first cast. But I stopped. Which is too bad because I missed most of Eddie Murphy, and the great renaissance casts of the early 90s. (But I was also performing a lot as a professional musician on Saturdays during those years so had I been interested I probably would’ve missed them anyway as I rarely used the VCR timer, haha!)

 

I shared your opinion of Mr. Chase — until I read the following in a Washington Post article a couple years ago:

Chase’s parents divorced early. He loved his father, Ned, an influential book editor and one of the funniest people he ever met. But he lived with his mother, Cathalene, who would wake him up in the middle of the night and slap him repeatedly in the face without explanation. Once, at 14, he got into trouble at school. She locked him in the basement for several days, with only a pitcher to use as a bathroom.

“I was shocked,” says Paul Shaffer, a close friend who has known Chase since Shaffer joined the SNL band in 1975. “I thought he had gone to Bard, and it turns out it was the school of hard knocks.”

In a society desperate for confession and redemption, [the 2007 Rena Fruchter biography] offered Chase a perfect out. He could peg everything — his occasional outbursts, his bad career decisions, his battles with painkillers — to the horrendous way he was treated. Except Chase would prefer the book just disappear.

“Chevy Chase hiding in a closet from his mother?” he says. “Good God. Take me for who I am now.”

Jayni Chase, his wife of 36 years, thinks the difficult childhood is an important piece of understanding Chase. It drives how he treats people and also how he responds when he feels attacked or ignored. The pain he’s felt from being hurt over the years — by friends who don’t call, by former collaborators who blast him, by Will Ferrell quotes — has made him grow more cynical and critical.

“Chevy is an abused kid,” Jayni says. “One of the things that most of us have is, we know that our moms loved us, and some of us are lucky enough to be able to say that our fathers also loved us . . . there’s layers of lucky and grateful, and things that give you a good start in life, and a foundation and self-confidence, and give you a capacity to live without fear. And Chevy doesn’t have those things.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/lifestyle/chevy-chase-cant-change/

 

Of course,
I realize that it's not about what I like.

My ultimate question is:
Why would the publisher refuse the usage
or expect a boatload of money?

Wouldn't a low reasonable fee
be more profitable than $0 ??

 

Interesting about Chase. Never new that, but beyond knowing he's been married to the same woman for a long time (truly a rare thing, even outside of the entertainment business), I never knew much about his personal life. I am disappointed that he has been such an ass to people he worked with. But I can't agree at all with Panther's assessment above that he wasn't talented. I think he really was great on the show and in many of the movies he's done. That he is (or at least was) so talented and alienated people to the detriment of his career truly is frustrating from the perspective of a fan, like myself.

 

One thing to keep in mind is that Chase had prior experience in front of the television camera, having done Public Access television before. The rest of the cast came from Second City or the Groundlings. Chevy on SNL immediately played to the camera while everybody else played to the studio audience. That alone gave him a leg up in the first season.

 

Yep,He had televisual experience prior to the show.

Great American Dream Machine
Channel X with Ken Shapiro which used TV screens in a theatre setting.
The Groove Tube
And Lemmings which was filmed on Video.

He was pretty seasoned by the time SNL rolled around

 

And they are chopped to ****

 

I had a feeling that they would be.

 

1994...
NBC Says `SNL' Host Broke Promises on Monologue

 

Whaaaa...?

 

I wonder how many shows will be censored because of changing culture aka political correctness.

 

But that's the thing. That's not why they're chopped to pieces for the most part. It doesn't seem to follow a logical pattern. There's not that much un-PC/offensive content to whittle an episode down to 20 minutes.

 

I watched the infamous episode from 1981 featuring Charlene Tilton as host--it had been edited to 39 minutes and the musical segments with Todd Rundgren and Prince had been cut out (although both were mentioned in the show's opening credits). The f-word at the end had not been edited out, though. A half-hour of my life wasted.

 

The William Shatner episode from 1986? 19 minutes.