Saturday Night Live's Seventh Season

I just finished watching Saturday Night Live's seventh season, which I downloaded from Demonoid. The video quality isn't that great. It was recorded on a VCR, and then made into a torrent, so the picture has downgraded a bit. There're even parts where the tracking isn't done properly.
But overall it's watchable, and the seventh season is probably my favourite. This was the season where the show came back from the dead. Some may argue whether that's a good thing, but that's not what I want to talk about.
The sixth season of SNL had been very bad. There was a new cast, new writers, and a new producer that managed to run the show into the ground in only eleven episodes. Dick Ebersol was brought in to produce one final show and then shut it down until the next season.
The only survivors from that series were Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo. Ebersol wanted to hire John Candy and Catherine O'Hara away from SCTV, but Candy turned him down and O'Hara backed out after meeting Michael O'Donoghue.
O'Donoghue, a writer from the first five seasons, basically returned to kill the show. He wanted to give it a Viking funeral, and tried to instil "danger" back into the writing process. His volatile personality guaranteed that his tenure would be short-lived.
The fourth show was the nadir. Donald Pleasence was the host, and he featured in a sketch that highlights an amputation and gallons of spurting blood.

The musical guest was a punk rock band called "Fear." Their performance reminded me of the episode of SCTV's "Mel's Rockpile," where he had a punk band perform. Mel, the lamest host ever, announced that there would be a "slam dance." All the dancers slammed into each other with great ferocity, and Joe Flaherty screamed, "Have you no consideration for the women!"
That was funny, but "Fear's" performance was not. They were booked on the show at the insistence of John Belushi, who also made a surprise cameo that night. It would be his last appearance on the show before his death the following spring.

There were, however, a lot of great musical performances that season from The Kinks, Rick James, The Go-Go's, Meatloaf, the Allman Brothers, Lindsey Buckingham, and John Mellencamp. Elton John sang his John Lennon tribute, "Empty Garden," and the Charlie Daniels Band did "The Devil Went Down To Georgia." Johnny Cash did a selection of his greatest hits.
On the Christmas show, Bill Murray hosted, and made a midshow announcement about the Polish government's crackdown on "Solidarity." An interesting bit of social commentary thrown into a comedy show. But then, SNL always prided itself on its satire of America's fools and their foibles.
There was a lot of fun made of Ronald Reagan, depicted as the clueless idiot he was in real life. His administration was shown to be the "Bizarro World" from Superman comics. This was the beginning of the end of the cold war, but the times were still pretty tense. They even did a Dr. Strangelove sketch.
The comedy could be very sharp at times, sometimes too sharp for comfort. Towards the end of the season, they conducted a phone-in poll to decide the fate of a lobster dubbed "Larry." Callers voted whether to spare the lobster or boil and eat him. At first, it looked like he was for the pot, but the final tally spared his life.

Then, on the next week's show, Eddie Murphy read a letter from a woman in Oklahoma who doubted that Larry had survived the show, especially the way Murphy was "waving him around." She also commented, "I thought those people didn't like seafood."

Murphy's response to her racist comment was to reveal Larry's boiled body, announced that his stay of execution had been revoked, and ate him.

The last show of the season was my favourite. Olivia Newton-John was the host, and she sang some hits from her "Physical" album. I was hot for Olivia at the time, I'll tell you.

But the best part was when Graham Chapman interrupted a sketch as the Colonel, telling them it was "too silly," and obviously ripped off from Monty Python.
Chapman was on the show to promote the film "The Secret Policeman's Other Ball." An NBC station had recently refused to air the trailer for the film, saying it was "too objectionable, even for [SNL}."
They then played the trailer, and invited Chapman to comment. Chapman read NBC's objection, which said that the American flag displayed in the ad was "rumpled" and "defaced in one corner." While the flag was a bit wrinkled, it wasn't defaced. There was a birdcage in front of it, and the censors might not have gotten a good enough look to see it.
I think what really cheesed them off was the poking of fun at the Moral Majority and the fact that Chapman was wearing a tutu, nylon stockings, and a garter belt.
Chapman made an eloquent apology, saying he never meant to offend anyone, or do anything to break the strong bonds between Britain and America by defaming the flag.
He then stood up to reveal he was wearing a star-spangled g-string.
It was an hysterical moment, typical of the humour of that season, which marks it in my memory as one of SNL's best.
At the end of the show, when everyone was waving goodbye, Piscopo announced that Eddie was going off to San Francisco that summer to make a film with Nick Nolte. This film was, of course, "48 Hrs," and it made Murphy a big star.
In fact, the shows in this torrent were re-presented on Comedy Central with the subtitle "The Eddie Murphy Experience," and include a few taped reminisces from him about his time on the show.
Well, it wasn't the first time that a cast member grew larger than the show, and it wouldn't be the last. Murphy's success overshadowed that of Piscopo and fellow cast members Tim Kazurinsky, Mary Gross, Christine Ebersole and SCTV alumni Robin Duke and Tony Rosato. It's too bad, as they all helped make the seventh season one to remember.