Movie reviews

Saturday Night Live: The Complete Third Season

I suppose it’s an unfair, exceptionally unseemly critical impropriety, but I have to admit that while watching Saturday Night Live: The Complete Third Season, I don’t understand how anyone could resist this stuff.

This writer – like so many other 20- and 30-somethings – grew up in a house of SNL. My dad may have been a stand-up family man 6¾ days a week, but on Saturday night, he let it loose with SNL. The show, from what I’ve gathered from him over the years, was exactly what he wanted from TV comedy and wasn’t getting. It was off-the-cuff, wild (even outrageous at points), and immediately warm and inviting.

Yet what adds to the billowing smoke of SNL’s third go-round is the sheer finesse of it. If watching the debut season was hilarious because you were literally watching these folks come up with a new rhetoric of comedy right before your very eyes and watching season two was enjoyable because of the actors’ newfound confidence in doing just that, this third installment of the show broadcasts Saturday Night Live at its shining-star best. It knows it’s that good, and the show benefits implicitly from it.

Just look at some of the skits from this season…

First, there’s the Steve Martin “King Tut Strut”. A Restaino family favorite for years, this bizarro soul/disco number featuring Martin as a googly Egyptian singin’ about how Tut had a “condo made of stone-ah” is equal parts surreal and stupid-funny (is there a better kind?). And the nerd in me was quite happy to see Bill Murray’s turn as that insane lounge singer who breaks into the funhouse Star Wars theme song – how the other people in this sketch didn’t bust out laughing at every twist and turn is beyond me.

And the list goes on. The “wild and crazy” Czech brothers (Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd) grace the cover of this DVD set, so their presence is both expected and knee-slapping. Then there are the Coneheads, Gilda Radner’s pitch-perfect turn as “Baba Wawa,” Murray’s and Radner’s classic nerds (“Shut up, Todd!”), and a sea of others. This stuff is gold, people.

Also, can you really miss when Steve Martin hosts more than once in the season? Madeline Kahn pops in as host one week, The Blues Brothers turn in a scorching musical set in one of the episodes, and even Monty Python alum Michael Palin gives SNL a shot (sure, it’s with mixed results, but it’s fascinating television from top to bottom).

I suppose you shouldn’t turn to me for a level-headed, pristinely critical analysis of anything Saturday Night Live – I’m of the mind that terrible episodes of SNL are better than pretty much everything else on TV past, present, and future. And that being said, these season- long SNL box sets are seriously excellent things. In addition to housing the show’s oft-syndicated classic moments, it gives those of us who were in diapers during their initial run a chance to soak in all the nooks and crannies of the SNL universe that our parents dug so much.

Keep ‘em comin’, boys…

The Video: How Does The Disc Look?

These episodes look as they’re supposed to, which is the good news. The bad news is that there’s a ton of inconsistencies in the original masters that don’t necessarily make the show look fantastic. But DVD is about preserving the original incarnation of source material, and these 1.33:1 transfers do that just fine. Black levels are all over the place, color quality is sometimes way off, and finely grained detail is hit- and-miss, but again, that’s how the in-studio video of the time looked. Does SNL: The Complete Third Season look great? No. Does it look like it should? Hell, yeah.

The Audio: How Does The Disc Sound?

Ditto with these mono sound mixes. The musical segments of the show sound perfectly fine, but a bit constrained by the recording format, and dialogue comes through just as it was intended. There are a couple hiccups here and there, but again, that’s how the show was originally put in the can. Leave your THX expectations behind, kick up your feet, and just laugh.

English subtitles are included.

Supplements: What Goodies Are There?

We get two, both of which are actually super-interesting. There’s an hour-long documentary one entitled Things We Did Last Summer featuring SNL cast members showing us what they do during their off-season. And there’s a featurette of a short wardrobe test for John Belushi and musical director Howard Shore.

Exclusive DVD- ROM Features: What happens when you pop the disc into your PC?

There are no DVD-ROM features on this DVD.

Final Thoughts

This is air-tight entertainment, people – some of the greatest TV comedy you’re likely to see. Saturday Night Live: The Complete Third Season is a fantastically-assembled box set; it offers perfectly legitimate audio tracks and video transfers and a pair of fascinating bonus goodies. I simply couldn’t recommend it more.

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