Sketches are rated on a scale of 1-5 stars
COLD OPENING
JOB dumps recovering CHC out of his wheelchair
— Looks like Chevy’s returning tonight. Not for long, though; I know he ends up leaving SNL for good very soon.
— Jane, on Chevy’s return: “That probably means I won’t be doing Update anymore…” Oh, don’t worry, Jane, your day as a regular Update anchor will be coming sooner than you think…
— LOL at Chevy’s overdramatic entrance in the wheelchair.
— Great unexpected shove out of the wheelchair by John.
— There seemed to be a technical error when no lights turned on at Chevy while he said LFNY.
Not only did it look strange only seeing his silhouette during his LFNY, but right before he said it, you could hear an off-camera voice audibly saying what sounded like “Billy, turn it on”.
STARS: ***½
MONOLOGUE
host introduces her son Hunter [real] & narrates a history of mothers
— A host making their monologue entrance while holding a baby? I don’t think that’s ever happened any other time on SNL.
— The various pictures are kinda funny, but not anything great.
— Haha, the baby is stealing the show, grabbing at Karen’s chest while she’s trying to go on with the monologue. Was the baby thirsty?
STARS: **½
BABA WAWA AT LARGE
Indira Gandhi (LAN) defends antidemocratic policies
— Pretty funny hearing Laraine say “dear Ms. Wawa” in that Indian accent.
— The “free ewections” bit was good, but I kinda wanted them to go further with it.
— Funny moment with Baba pointing out the “pimento” on Laraine’s forehead.
STARS: ***
DEBATE ’76
Gerald Ford (CHC) & Jimmy Carter (DAA) inspire diffidence
— I like the needle sticking out of Chevy’s arm, especially how it’s not even being addressed within the sketch.
— Chevy trying to “name that tune” when they played the National Anthem was hilarious.
— Dan’s sexual comments to Jane are great.
— Not really liking Karen much as the moderator. Her performance has been strange and feels out-of-place. Lily Tomlin did a much better job in the first debate sketch.
— Funny bit with Ford and Carter both making their closing statements simultaneously.
— The ending credits of this sketch are re-using the exact same jokes from the ending credits of the first debate sketch. Only difference is this one is displayed in a different font and color, for some reason.
STARS: ****
MUSICAL PERFORMANCE
WEEKEND UPDATE, PART 1
— The opening camera angle on Chevy is quite different tonight.
— Chevy making the Jiminy Cricket face while singing “When You Wish Upon A Star” (first screencap above) is something he would later do again in his 1995 monologue.
— The Swine Flu Deaths joke was very funny.
TRIPLE TRAC
— Oh, come on, if you’re gonna rerun a commercial, at least do one from this season! But then again, it feels like there’s barely been any pre-taped commercials so far this season; the only one that comes to mind right now is Lily Tomlin’s Ernestine commercial.
— For some reason, they added in new goofy sound effects during the animation of the razor blades tugging at the hair.
WEEKEND UPDATE, PART 2
— Chevy doesn’t seem to realize he’s looking at the wrong camera during the mafia joke. (first screencap above)
— Ha, and now he finally realized. His reaction was pretty funny.
— No Update guests at all tonight.
STARS (FOR BOTH WEEKEND UPDATE HALVES): ***
GREEN CROSS CUPCAKES
truth in advertising laws allow Green Cross claim of cancer-free cupcakes
— The short scene of the two scientists just slowly walking by with a stretcher of cupcakes in the red-flashing lab was strange, but made me laugh.
— Funny visual with John slowly shoving a whole cupcake into his mouth.
— Overall, I feel like I kinda didn’t get this sketch. Its randomness does have somewhat of an appeal to me, though.
STARS: **½
A*M*I*S*H
crime-fighting Mennonites are slow to react to a bank robbery
— Looks like this has suddenly turned into an Amish version of typical 70s cop shows. I can tell I’m gonna like this concept.
— John’s character just being named “Churn” is pretty funny.
— Nice background music throughout this. Again, very accurate to typical 70s cop shows.
— Overall, not sure how I feel about this sketch as a whole. I get what it was going for, but I dunno, I kinda wanted this to go in a bit of a different direction.
STARS: **½
LOVE RUSSIAN STYLE
stressed Catherine the Great (host) & equine lover
— There are a few funny little details like Dan’s deep-voiced vocalizing during John’s long story, but where exactly is this sketch going?
— What was with Karen’s “Off with his pants… I mean, head” line? I can’t tell if that was a genuine flub or a random joke.
— What’s with the coughing during Gilda and Karen’s conversation?
— Oh, never mind, the coughing is part of sketch.
— The horse’s Mr. Ed-esque voice is cracking me up.
— I also like the reference to the Mr. Ed theme song.
— Overall, strange sketch, but got better towards the end. The entire first half felt overlong and unnecessary.
STARS: **½
PIPS
by Gary Weis- nightclub owner George Schultz [real] tells anecdotes
— Oh, that was Chevy doing the horse’s voice in the preceding sketch!
— This nightclub owner guy seems funny, but aside from some little chuckles, I haven’t been finding myself laughing all that much at his stories. I don’t know what to make of this short (I feel like I’m saying that about a lot of stuff tonight).
STARS: **
MUSICAL PERFORMANCE
REUNION
high school nerd (DAA) reunites with cheerleader (JAC) at a lunch counter
— Oh, man, we’re two minutes into this sketch, and I have not cared much for anything in it so far.
— I’m usually not a fan of whenever SNL does this type of sketch. In fact, this one is kinda reminding me of a dreadful Bar sketch that Seth Meyers would later do with Paris Hilton in 2005.
— Overall, I wanted to like this, considering how much I’ve generally been loving Dan Aykroyd sketches in the episodes I’ve covered so far, but this was a huge misfire.
STARS: *½
MR. BILL GOES TO A PARTY
by Walter Williams- Mr. Bill attends Vance Degeneres’ [real] party
— Haha, this is pretty hilarious so far.
— What the hell? What’s with all the screen jumping and the abrupt cut to the party? The screen jumps almost made it look like a whole bunch of stuff was sloppily edited out.
— Great ending.
STARS: ****
KAREN BLACK: “TEN CENTS A DANCE”
host performs “Ten Cents A Dance”
— Another instance of a host doing a serious musical performance…
AMERICAN COINAGE
GAM, CHC, DAA, JOB pay musical tributes to American coinage
as JOB sings “One More For The Road,” on-screen scroll lists thefts
— The preceding Karen Black song has now segued into the cast doing a musical tribute to American coinage. At least this looks like this will be an actual comedic segment.
— Garrett sounds like he’s doing his so-bad-it’s-good Sammy Davis Jr. voice from the Nixon’s Final Days sketch.
— What was with Chevy beginning to say Dan’s lines before realizing his mistake? Again, that’s something I can’t tell was a real flub or an intentional joke.
— This tribute is kinda funny so far.
— Another mid-song disclaimer scroll, which seems to have become a semi-common thing in this era of SNL. I’m liking all the anecdotes in this one about John stealing things.
— What the hell? Why has the disclaimer suddenly started scrolling by so fast? That’s making it hard to read what it says, which is killing the joke.
STARS: ***
GOODNIGHTS
— Much like the Rob Reiner and Dick Cavett goodnights from last season, this is just still photos of the opening credits while the goodnights music plays. I guess SNL once again ran out of time before they could do a real goodnights segment. I wonder if the show running out of time is the reason they sped up the last half of the Belushi disclaimer scroll in the last sketch.
_______________________________
IMMEDIATE POST-SHOW THOUGHTS:
— Strange episode. And honestly, it left me kinda cold. I dunno, I just wasn’t crazy about it. There were some individual highlights, but as a whole, the episode came off as a letdown compared to how well this season had been going before this point.
— Something else I wasn’t crazy about: Karen Black’s performance as host. I’m having a hard time remembering most of what she did, I wasn’t all that impressed by her, and her performance in the debate sketch was actually kinda bad. From what I read, she does a better job in her next hosting stint a few years later, in an episode that’s usually considered one of the better ones from the infamous 80-81 season.
HOW THIS EPISODE STACKS UP AGAINST THE PRECEDING ONE (Eric Idle):
— a big step down
My full set of screencaps for this episode is here
TOMORROW:
Steve Martin makes his hosting debut
Before the show, when Black was breath feeding her son, Belushi said “I’m next”
Green Cross was written under the influence of pot by O’Donoghue and Davis. It was considered a colossal failure, partly, I think, because the rats didn’t eat the cupcakes.
Marylin Miller wrote the lunch counter sketch.
That’s Ellen’s brother Vance in the Mr. Bill film. He would later sue Walter Williams over credit for Mr. Bill
Another reason this episode felt off: NBC had temporarily moved “SNL” so NBC News could use Studio 8H for 1976 election coverage. This and the next two programs originated from NBC’s Studio I in Brooklyn, which meant cast and staff had to commute from their offices in the RCA Building to the Brooklyn facility. This forced move didn’t sit well with much of anybody (Weingrad and Hill’s “Saturday Night” goes into this a little). To the viewer the stage area looks a lot like 8H, but in audience shots you can see the guests are seated in a traditional riser-style configuration (versus the floor/wraparound balcony of 8H) and you’ll also see some structural framing near the ceiling that 8H didn’t have.
It appears SNL is back in 8H by the Dick Cavett program of November 13.
The Pips nightclub in the film is the same one Steve Landesberg would awkwardly reference almost 10 years later during his standup spot in the Hulk Hogan-Mr. T episode
RIP John Prine. COVID. Any screen grabs from this episode?
Prine’s songs start at 17:48 and 47:40
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6g7zle
“Any screen grabs from this episode?”
At the end of each of my reviews (including this one, if you look above), I leave a link to a full collection of screencaps I made for that episode. The full collection of screencaps contains many screencaps that I don’t include in my reviews. My reviews don’t start containing a screencap for each musical performance until the middle of season 4.
You’ll find screencaps of John Prine’s musical performances here:
https://onesnladay.com/screencaps/season-2-1976-77/october-16-1976-karen-black-john-prine-s2-e4/
Yeah this was a weird one. Karen was the cause for a lot of it.. she was usually very solid around then and was excellent in Family Plot that year but she was so out of sorts on this night. Don’t know if she was very sleep drained or high on something but he acted really weird for the first half of the show. The debate skit is just painful to listen to her talk with that weird voice. That being said I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think she was hot on that monologue.. she was stunning. She had a very bohemian style going and she rocked it hard.
Her son went on to be an actor; his dad was Kit Carson who wrote Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. He was the orginal Bud Bundy for the pilot but they replaced him. He was also in the movie Paris, Texas.
SNL seemed to be hard into folk singers then which is weird. Only one I liked was Freidman the next show and he just had one song sadly.
The end of this is just as weird as it was for Reiner’s show. They were trying to troll John and the text got so sped up that it ruined it.
The lunch counter sketch seems a fairly polarizing one–there’s definitely a large chunk of people who think it’s a highlight of the show (one of the SNL history books devotes a decent amount of time to it), and a representative piece of the slice of life “realism” style of sketches. It’s not my favorite sketch, and it’s something that probably plays better as a live theater piece than anything, but both performers are very good…it seems like a more mature version of the type of sketch you might see on a different variety show.
This episode seems loaded with technical gaffes. The lightning speed scroll over Belushi in the final sketch was obviously because they realized time was running out. And the meaning of the Green Cross Cupcake sketch? Your guess is as good as mine.
I liked Karen Black more than most, it seems. Her voice during the debate sketch is certainly a play on upper crust East Coast and I rather enjoyed her unflappability in it. She was quite a skilled singer, but there is a nasally quality to her voice that probably prevented her from developing more with it.
I also really enjoyed the Russian sketch, especially the ridiculousness of Aykroyd and Belushi’s interplay. But it, like the AMISH sketch, does not land big jokes and instead succeed, at least in part, by virtue of the performances, which are indeed quite funny (Chase is terrific in AMISH).
The lunch counter sketch doesn’t work, as much as I want it to. It is a slice-of-life, think piece as mentioned, which is something I really loved about this cast (one of my favorites is the Tape Store from the Fred Willard episode). As such, it’s not designed to be laugh out loud funny, but instead relatable and therefore humorous, even bittersweet, on that level. This IS a relatable premise, but Aykroyd, alas, is perhaps too over-the-top and there’s no real arc (a shift is suggested by the Vietnam reference, but it never quite develops; a bit of profundity would have helped).
In re-watching these, I’m consistently impressed with Larraine’s accents. She’s more versatile than I’ve given credit. It’s no wonder she forged a prominent voice career later on.
And John Prine was a genius. Like Dylan, his songs were often way better than his delivery allowed for, but he’s worth acquiring a taste for. And what’s with the folk singers? The movement was really a cornerstone of this counterculture generation. Remember that rock didn’t get topical and edgy until elements of the folk scene crept their way into it. Sure, SNL could have had Starland Vocal Band on if they wanted, but they represented something different, more underground.