Saturday Night Live: Dexys Midnight Runners, "Come On, Eileen"

Saturday Night Live: Dexys Midnight Runners, "Come On, Eileen"

NBC

May 14, 1983

Variety

VHS
B+

This is also on a WLIIA tape the ex made for me the late summer going into early fall of '94.  Anyway, again there's nothing visually dazzling here, but I love this song and I still got chills.  The host, Mayor Ed Koch, introduces this segment.

Saturday Night Live: Dexys Midnight Runners, "Celtic Soul Brothers"

Saturday Night Live: Dexys Midnight Runners, "Celtic Soul Brothers"
NBC
May 14, 1983
Variety
VHS
B

Wow, I'm not even sure I knew this was tucked away on a tape my by-then ex-husband made for me of 1994 Whose Line Is It Anyway? episodes, the summer after our divorce.  In any case, there's nothing visually dazzling here, just a plain, hard-rocking bunch of "Celtic Soul Brothers" doing one of their best songs.  ("Come On Eileen" being the main fave, and we'll get to that later.)  It looks like the ex taped it during an Eddie Murphy marathon on Comedy Central and it was a delight to watch it again, probably for the first time in over twenty years.

Saturday Night Live: Deee-lite

Saturday Night Live: Deee-lite
NBC
February 16, 1991
Variety
VHS
B-

Host Roseanne introduces the band, featuring Bootsy, twice, as they perform the title track from World Clique, as well as "Power of Love."  This is the 2200th show I've reviewed.

Saturday Night Live: 15th Anniversary

Saturday Night Live: 15th Anniversary [fragments]
NBC
September 24, 1989
Variety
VHS
C+

Jumping the gun by over a year (but not as badly as Sisbert with their "500th anniversary"), this is a self-back-patting salute that I was so enthralled by that I taped two of the Timothy Dalton Jane Eyre episodes over part of it.  I've got the first couple minutes and then the last half hour or so.  None of it, even Robin Williams teasing the celeb-filled audience, is particularly funny.  Also, I'm not thrilled that I have to tag, blech, Bruce Willis.  But Paul Simon sings "Still Crazy After All These Years," and that's always good.  This is the 2000th show of mine I've reviewed, and no, we will not hit 3000.

Saturday Night Live: Aykroyd, Simon & Simon, et al.

Saturday Night Live: Aykroyd, Simon & Simon, et al.
NBC
December 19, 1987
Variety
VHS
B

This is from the Paul Simon and Linda Ronstadt episode, apparently taped at another time and on another cassette.  First we see Pat Schroeder (Nora Dunn) hosting a Republican debate, and there's a reference to her crying in public, as she famously did in September of that year.  The scene-stealer here is Dan Aykroyd, in his first appearance on SNL since he was a regular over eight years before.  He plays Bob Dole and every line delivery is golden.  The runner-up is future senator Al Franken, as Pat Robertson.  Dana Carvey's George Bush then had room for improvement, which it got.

The next sequence is Simon and his namesake the senator, both expecting to be hosting that night.  They're adorable together of course.

Saturday Night Live: Paul Simon and Linda Ronstadt

Saturday Night Live: Paul Simon and Linda Ronstadt
NBC
December 19, 1987
Variety
VHS
B

Simon and Ronstadt harmonize sweetly on the former's "Under African Skies," another number off the Graceland album.

Saturday Night Live: Williams, Goldberg, Simon clip

Different clip

Saturday Night Live: Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, and Paul Simon clip
NBC
November 22, 1986
Variety
VHS
B

OK, I was thinking this was more '88ish, but whatever.  Host Robin and his buddy Whoopi banter as they introduce Paul Simon, who performs the lovely song "Graceland" with Ladysmith Black Mambazo.  I must've taped this when it ran as a rerun, since the then-future-ex had not yet bought the Veece in the Fall of '86.  Note that I have now reviewed over 1800 shows, although admittedly not in strict chronological order, and some are, like this one, not full episodes.

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.