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.

Thursday, July 21st

It's been an interesting week here. On Monday, my brother arrived from Texas. He drove from there to here in four days. He is a driving machine. He travelled from San Marcos to Salina, Kansas (about 800 miles) his first night of driving. I say night, because it was too damn hot to drive during the day, so he would wait until mid-afternoon, and drive until 3:00 the next morning.
I remember driving down to Texas with him a few years back. We took a little more time, because I wanted to make some stops along the way. We visited the Little Bighorn Battlefield site, Mount Rushmore, the Crazy Horse Memorial, and Dealey Plaza (my second visit). One night, he drove about 500 miles in one shot.
He is up here to do a little business. he takes down old barns and sells the wood for people to make rustic decor. My brother also uses some of the wood to carve artworks or make boxes. He took up carving about eight years ago, and has gotten quite good at it. Right now, he's in a mermaid phase, but he also does rattlers, buffalo, and these kind of fishhook type necklaces.
This year, I'm helping him market his stuff by offering it for sale on Kajiji and maybe Craig's List.
On Tuesday, my mom came home for the first time since her accident. Her glasses were broken in the crash, and she's been seeing double, so she came in to see an optometrist. She then spent the night before going back to the Red Deer hospital the next day.
She's been slowly improving. She was even able to climb the stairs into her house. She has to walk with a walker, of course, and spends most of her time in a wheelchair, but she is definitely improving.
Mom has expressed a lot of frustration at the slow rate of her recovery. When we try and tell her just how far she has come, sometimes she sits still for it, but she can get pretty low at times. It's a job to keep her spirits up.
Today I mailed the last bit of paperwork I needed to turn in for my application to university. I just need a letter of reference and a description of my work in the classroom from a colleague in Korea. He's taking his time about getting it in, so I may have to prod him a bit.
I may be foolish trying to get my Education degree since Alberta has been firing teacher's left and right, but I guess we will see once I have it, eh? Maybe European employers will find me more attractive. I sure hope so.
I watched a movie called "Ironclad" this evening. It was recommended by a friend in Korea. It's set in England just after King John signs the Magna Carta. Pissed at having to kowtow to the barons, John (played by Paul Giamatti)raises a mercenary army and begins slaughtering anyone who signed the charter.
One of the barons, played by Brian Cox, hires some mercenaries of his own, including a Templar played by James Purefoy, and holds a strategic castle until the French arrive to drive John and his mercenaries off.
In reality, the castle fell to John, and the struggle raged across England for another year before John died of dysentery while fleeing the French. It wasn't until much later that John's son Henry finally succeeded in driving the French out and claiming the throne for himself.
But the movie was fairly entertaining, not the least for it's gory battle scenes, in which limbs are chopped off, blood sprays everywhere, and one man is nearly split in two by a broadsword. The movie's depiction of the savagery of battle, the mud and the blood prevalent during those times, and the struggle between people fighting for freedom against a tyrant was well done.
Tomorrow, our family is meeting with the doctors to discuss our mother's future. The whole family will be together for the first time in four years.

The Thing From Another World

I stayed up late last night and watched the original movie from 1951. I remembered it as a tight little movie that moved the story along at a brisk pace. This version, presented on the Turner Classic Movie channel, had some extra scenes added. They dealt mostly with the characters and their development. They weren't bad, but their quality varied wildly from the other scenes, and they kind of slowed the action down a bit.
The movie is based on a novella called "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell, Jr. In this story, the Thing is a creature that can assume different forms, a device that was used in John Carpenter's 1982 remake.
In the '51 version, the Thing was a manlike creature played by James Arness, who later gained fame as Marshal Matt Dillon on the long-running TV series "Gunsmoke."
The action takes place in an isolated science station in the Arctic, which the military men take over in order to fight the Thing. One of the themes of the film is the opposing views on how to handle the Thing. The military wants to destroy it before it destroys them, while the scientists want to reach out and make friends with it. Think of what we can learn from it, and so on. The head scientist even uses the station's blood supply to start growing a new crop of Things in the lab.
The Thing's description as more vegetable than animal causes the reporter in the story to call it a "super carrot." Mad Magazine's parody took this and ran with it. The Thing is drawn as a large carrot with arms and legs and big sharp teeth.
That the Thing's vampiric nature doesn't seem to phase the scientists makes it easier to side with the soldiers and their efforts to kill it.
Many later science-fiction movies would swing the other way, making the military the villains, and the scientists who want to make contact more sympathetic. Easy to do when the aliens look like Michael Rennie or a wrinkled teddy bear, but more difficult when they arrive with heat-ray equipped tripods or burst out of your chest.

The '82 remake, as noted, is more faithful to the original story. The action is still in an isolated science station, but this time it's located in the Antarctic.
There's no science vs. military subplot, just the paranoia that overtakes the men as they wonder who's human and who's a Thing.
The special effects, by Stan Winston and Rob Bottin, are spectacular. Since the Thing can adopt any form, the transformations it undergoes highlight its alien nature. It can imitate a man or a dog, or attributes of both of them in one body. It can shift to avoid an attack, and grow as many mouths or claws to defend itself as it needs.
It's a classic film, despite some aspects to the character of MacReady, played by Kurt Russell. The post's helicopter pilot, he spends a lot of time drinking liberally from a whisky bottle, even just before a flight.
Don't drink and fly, MacReady!
Also, not much attention is paid to the consequences of breaking windows in the station or going outside improperly dressed. The subzero weather'd finish them off pretty quickly.
Still, it is a classic, and both films are an excellent way to add some tension and genuine fright to your late night viewing.