Customer Reviews

Saturday Night Live - 25th Anniversary

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Amidst the perennial criticism of _Saturday Night Live_, it's easy to forget just how big an impact the show has had on our national artistic identity. This retrospective is a great place to begin that (re)discovery. Through its vast collection of clips from the show's 25-year run, one gains a real appreciation of the hundreds of colloquialisms, impressions, and comedic commentary this program has added to our national identity.

What makes this show uniquely satisfying, however, is that it has significant original programming, including remarkable new material from Billy Crystal, Tom Hanks, Bill Murray, Mike Meyers, Robert Smeigel, various "Weekend Update" anchors, and the Eurythmics.

There's also a fascinating montage on the production of a typical episode of SNL. True, this segment is in some ways cleverly-edited eye candy, but to my knowledge, it's the only SNL-produced filmed exposition of the backstage process at SNL. (There are three press bits on the DVD-version of the product which greatly amplify one's appreciation of the show, but SNL itself has still not produced a significant exploration of its own machinations.)

It is a difficult thing, I would imagine, to make an anniversary show where so much material already exists. The temptation for Lorne Michaels was probably to air many more clips than his staff ended up including. For every bit that was included, there were at least five that I personally might have included as well. What Michaels and company were going for, though, was not an anthology, but an anniversary party. And that's what they ended up with. The show is in no way like the "Best of [insert performer's name here]" series that SNL has recently been releasing. You won't find this to be a exhaustive record of any aspect of the SNL experience. You won't even find that many complete sketches here. And you certainly won't discover anything but oblique references to the show's colorful off-screen history. Rather, _SNL 25_ very much feels as though they've gathered a few hundred of their closest friends (some of whom pointedly refused to show up) and have said "Hey, remember when we did this?"

Happily, not only do we remember how good they were, this anniversary special lets us see how good they still are.

How many Saturday Night Live alumni can you think of right off the top of your head? How many of their skits can you remember? How many movie-spin offs? If you are like many Americans, you can probably rattle off many of these figures. After 25 years, it is quite an impressive resume.

This 25th anniversary retrospective is filled to the brim with star power. From Chevy Chase to Molly Shannon, all generations of SNL personnel were represented in person, along with frequent guest-hosts like John Goodman and Steve Martin.

You won't find your favorite skits in their entirety in this compilation, nor will you see the same tired episodes of the famous recurring characters. Instead, there are five extended montages of each five-year period since SNL's initial broadcast. The skits are edited down, but in many cases, that is a blessing - we all know that some of them go on a lot longer than they should.

Along with these montages come the memorial segments. For each departed cast member, a skit highlighting his/her work was presented in its entirety. They were truly funny people. Also included in this retrospective were highlights from "Weekend Update" and some of the most memorable commercials.

The funniest new moments of the evening came during Bill Murry's lounge style introduction, and Billy Crystal's "mavalus" chit chat. It is hard to work an audience of your peers, and they did it better than the rest.

If you missed this when it was aired last fall, this is a must see.

After seeing most of the Saturday Night Live 25th Anniversary Show, including some of my favorite clips, I thought this would be a great DVD to have. I was somewhat surprised when I received my order that it contained only 1 disk. I wondered how a 4+ hour show could be condensed to one disk, but since it was DVD, anything was possible. The content on the disk is NOT the complete show. Many of the clips shown in their entirety where greatly shortened. While this is a nice remembrance of the 25th anniversary show, don't buy it thinking all of your favorite clips will be there whole.

Being a semi-regular viewer of SNL, and having missed this when it was broadcast, I jumped at the chance to get it. It is classic SNL, from the begining with Bill Murray as a host at an Indian Casino, to the intro by Chris Rock who has the funniest line about SNL and movies, this is non-stop laughs. The show is broken up in 5 year segments with cast members from those years introducing them. There are retrospectives of the deceased cast members with touching intoductions, the best by Jon Lovitz, followed by a favorite skit. The Weekend Update with all the anchor's was great. The audience is star studded. A well done very enjoyable program. A fitting tribute to a show that has been on the air for 25 years. Billy Crystal is hilarious interviewing audience members.

All that I can say is buy it now if you love SNL. So many greats made appearances such as Steve Martin, Dan Ackroid, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Sandler, Spade, and the list goes on. It's a SNL fans dream. Throw in numerous guest appearances, one from Jerry Seinfeld, and you definately get your money's worth. But the Icing on the cake would have to be the Beastie Boys/Elvis Costello combo on the song Radio, Radio, of course reinacting the original infamous incident. The Beasties start out on Sabatage, and Elvis comes out, stops the show once again, and you know the rest. Go Buy it now!

Let me start by stating that I am a huge fan of SNL. The DVD is funny, at times very funny, but there are some problems. The skits that they show mainly last about 15 seconds. Just when you get rolling with your favorite skit, and start remembering it they shoot to the best scene of another skit, not giving you a chance to enjoy them. Another problem is that this was taped in front of a large audience of today's stars (Tom Hanks, Sarah Michelle Gellar etc.) and when they are playing the clips from past episodes the laughter from the audience TOTALLY drowns out the sound of the skit resulting in alot of missed words and "what did he say"'s. This in my case is very dissapointing, especially due to the fact that as I mentioned earlier the skits last 10-15 seconds, and when you miss 5 seconds of a skit due to laughter it doesnt leave much more to enjoy. When making the DVD they should have surpressed the live audience track alot, but I am not sure if thats possible. All in all its not a bad DVD, but surely not what I expected. I dont plan to watch it again :-(

This disc boasts an impressive collection of highlights from the SNL archives, joined together by (for once) some actually funny links. Tom Hanks is the foil of a tried-and-true SNL convention--the host interrupted by audience members--that brings out the comedic best in Jon Lovitz and Christopher Walken. (By the way, if you missed this year's Walken-hosted show, be sure to catch it in rerun. It was the best of the season so far.) The show even contains some sentimental tributes to departed performers. The beauty of these is that they are all done tastefully and they are, if you are old enough to appreciate them, quite moving. The live musical performances are quite good, particularly Elvis Costello backed by the quite intent Beastie Boys. So good, in fact, that by the time this lengthy (but never long) show ends, you might not even realize that the DVD does not include the musical highlight segments that were part of the original telecast. Too bad, otherwise this would be a five-star disc. There is one segment included in the program that did not make it to air--an interesting behind-the-scenes look at the creation of a show. This may not be a disc you'll watch often, but it's an excellent sampling of what is now--gasp!--a TV institution. And that's not a put-down.

The studio needs to stop releasing the best of SNL and give us what we want complete seasons. Stop teasing us with this crap Best of SNL and give us the hole freaking season, so we can truely enjoy the show.

This DVD functions more or less as an advertisement for the other SNL DVDs that have been and continue to be marketed by NBC. The 25th anniversary special on this DVD lasts 2.5 hours, which sounds like a long time, but it's not long enough to do justice to the talent that appeared on the shows over such a long period of time. As uneven as the show was from week to week and year to year, there was still a lot of great material--far too much to cover in this format in any satisfying way. As a result, the clips that are shown are soundbites of soundbites--often, just enough to cover a famous quote ("wild an crazy guys," etc.) with a touch of lead-in. This may be enough to evoke a smile of nostalgia from someone who's seen the skits, but that's about it. When the skits were originally aired, they usually went on too long, but here the DVD's producers err by going way too far in the opposite direction. I'm not sure how you could do a worthwhile retrospective of 25 years worth of programming that would fit on one DVD, but if it can't be done... maybe one shouldn't do it.

The DVD comes with three "extras": an interview of Lorne Michaels by Tim Russert, which is mildly interesting; the "day-after" coverage of the 25th anniversary show by a heinous TV show I never heard of, "Access Hollywood"; and promotional TV coverage by some other NBC news show, which featured clips that mostly overlapped with the special included on the DVD. Again I ask: Why put this material on a DVD? The so-called extras bring nothing to an already lackluster party.

All in all, disappointing.

By the way, for those who care, the Beastie Boys don't actually perform a number on the DVD. They play a couple of measures of one of their own songs before getting interrupted by Elvis Costello, and then they end up playing back-up for him.

A show like "Saturday Night Live" definitely deserves a special like the one it got for its 25th anniversary special. Stars from all walks of comedy showed up that night, bigger stars appeared and the late greats were payed tributes.

Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Will Ferrell, Molly Shannon, Kevin Nealon, Mike Myers, David Spade, Tom Hanks, Christopher Walken, Garth Brooks and Chris Rock are just a few of the big stars on hand to celebrate the festivities this evening. Of the show's big stars, only Eddie Murphy and Dana Carvey are absent.

There are touching tributes to Chris Farley, Phil Hartman, John Belushi and Gilda Radner included. Gilda's is the best, as Cheri Oteri and Molly Shannon present the classic "Nerds Make Out" skit.

Also, there are great montages each representing a five - year period in the show's hsitory, as well as a hysterical "Weekend Update" montage.

The only thing not so good is the musical performances. I didn't like any of he oerformers. They could've had someone like Aerosmith or Billy Joel or Paul Simon perform or include the montage of msuical performances (there was one included when this was aired on television).

Other than that note, this is a great look at "Saturday Night Live's" first five years. Let's hope that a big bash is in store for the show's thrirtieth anniversary special.