Ellen: Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah

Ellen: Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah
ABC
May 7, 1997
Sitcom
DVD
B+

While this is less famous than the previous episode, it's still a very good and very important one.  Ellen comes out to her parents and surprisingly it's her father who has more of a problem with it.  Not that her mother is ready to give up on the hope of Ellen meeting Mr. Right, but her father doesn't even want to talk about her orientation.  They both come around in the end again of course, but along the way there is more pain and sadness than is typical for this series.  The scene with her father's "Morganville" train set is funny but also makes some points.  And of course her mother wants to fix her up with a single female doctor.

Juliana Morgan, here the Lesbian's Daughter, earlier was a Latte Customer.  Waiter James Hong looks much the same as he did as a nameless Man on The Bob Newhart Show a quarter century earlier; he was also Peking Tom on Soap (the character name typical of the lame humor of that series' last season) and Thomas Ping on Who's the Boss?  (But he must've been the only Asian-American actor of that era not on M*A*S*H.)  Laraine Newman is instantly recognizable as the Over-Supportive Parent, but I didn't realize till the credits that the moderator was a still female-identified Chastity (later Chaz) Bono.  Joan Jett rocks out in the title sequence.  Jan Nash, the writer of this episode, didn't work on any other of my shows.

Saturday Night Live: Elliott Gould & Gary Numan [Condensed]

Saturday Night Live: Elliott Gould & Gary Numan [Condensed]
NBC
February 16, 1980
Variety
VHS
B-

This is one of the hour-long (I think they were called Best of Saturday Night Live) editions that were syndicated later in the '80s, in this case '87.  The highlights here are Kramer vs. Godzilla and the Wizard of Oz parody, although the latter does have regrettably racist casting of Morris as a flying monkey.  (Poor Garrett was in tears a few days afterwards, after five years of mistreatment.)  Numan sings "Cars."  The running joke of Father Guido Sarducci waiting to interview Nixon live outside his new apartment building gets tedious, until there's an unexpected pay-off right at the end.

And, yes, the jokes about candidates Carter and Reagan are pretty ironic of course, especially the one about Reagan being senile.  (He had recently turned 69, which is right between the ages of current candidates Clinton and Trump, although at the time he was definitely the oldest American presidential candidate ever.)

Saturday Night Live: Julian Bond & Tom Waits

I'd have been happier watching an hour of this.

Saturday Night Live: Julian Bond & Tom Waits
NBC
April 9, 1977
Variety
VHS
D+

This is the hour-long (counting commercials) version that aired on Nickelodeon in the late '80s, but honestly I've mostly kept it for the Bad Cinema sequence.  The rest ranges from mildly amusing to dull and unfunny, with the Dr. X sequence not working at all.  This is a good example of how the idea of the "golden age" of the early days of SNL seems false to me, although I haven't watched any recent episodes in years (just segments on the Internet), so hypothetically it may be worse now.

Saturday Night Live: Episode 19 [excerpts]

Saturday Night Live: Episode 19 [excerpts]
NBC
May 8, 1976
Variety
VHS
B

SNL was originally one of those shows that the high school and college students watched when I was a little kid, and it wasn't till 1980 (at age 12) that I started to catch up with it, watching the mostly rotten first post-Lorne-Michaels season as it aired, as well as the earlier episodes in edited down form.  When I revisited it as an adult, including the original "classic" years, I felt like it was over-rated, but still with good moments.  This episode has not only the "slumber party" sketch written by Marilyn Suzanne Miller (who voices the offscreen Mother), with guest host Madeline Kahn and the female regulars doing a nice job of playing preteens trying to figure out sex (Gilda is not surprisingly the most believable as a little girl), but also Chevy playing the "you" of "You're So Vain," in apricot scarf and accompanying Carly Simon on the cowbell.  There was originally a lot of other stuff of course (it was an hour and a half after all), but this is what I recorded off Nickelodeon in the late '80s.