Tonite I finished watching the last episode of the fourth season of Saturday Night Live. The multiple DVDs chewed up several slots on my Netflix queue but it's been so worth it.Season 4 was John Belushi's last and in my opinion, was probably one of the best seasons ever. I remember really being devoted to staying up late on Saturday night to watch this and though Mom and Dad were slow to warm up to this show at first, this was the year they started watching too. My mother was too stupid to understand much of the humor and I think my father got off on the innuendo jokes and the rather blunt language for TV in those days (ie: the whole "Jane, you ignorant slut..." recurring line during Weekend Update) and his hero John Belushi as the punky, cocky everyman.
Some of the guest hosts in this season really were impressively "Hollywood A-List" for the time, and by getting them Lorne must have started to realize how big SNL had become.
What a hoot to see things like Al Franken portraying a mudslinging candidate for Congress and the steadily escalating controversies he and his opponent were disclosing in their respective commercials.
John Belushi ranting as a Weekend Update commentator complaining about the soon-to-de-orbit Skylab and the talk by some that if it crashed into the World Trade Center it would knock it over.
Buck Henry playing a middle-aged bachelor uncle happy to babysit his two pre-teen nieces and take pictures of them in their panties. I doubt today's audiences would take too well to pedophilia humor.
This was the season a lot of references both during monologues and skits were made about the Not Ready for Prime Time players' use of drugs. Especially Belushi. It was common knowledge he was heavily using. One joke even predicted he'd be dead in a few years. Eerie.
This was the year the Olympia Cafe switched to Coke after a slick sales pitch from Walter Matthau.
Todd DiLamuca and Lisa Loopner were going on to college now and starting to think about sex with one another. Of course they were still ultra nerds.
And Father Guido Sarducci talks briefly about a planet on the other side of the sun, an exact mirror of Earth except that there they eat corn-on-the-cob vertically rather than horizontally as we do.
Ah the long lost days of classic SNL!