Remembering a time when 'Saturday Night Live' was something special

I literally cannot remember the last time I turned the television on to watch a new episode of "Saturday Night Live."

I'm almost certain it wasn't a year that started with a "2," and I would probably have to go back some in the 1990s to find one. When I look at Wikipedia's timeline of who was on the show and for how long, I would probably guess it was in the first half of the '90s, when Dennis Miller, Dana Carvey and Mike Myers were regulars.

It's hard to remember for certain. With YouTube and Hulu and all the others, it's easy to watch stuff piece by piece at your leisure, and I did watch a lot of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler during the 2008 presidential campaign.

But I watched it in 1975. We all did. Back then, in those last years before VCRs, it was a phenomenon. When we went out on Saturday nights, all across the country people were cutting their evenings short to be home by 11:30 to watch.

It wasn't called "Saturday Night Live" that year. There was a godawful variety show in prime time in ABC trying to recapture the old "Ed Sullivan Show."

Back in 1975, we thought the idea of "Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell" was the goofiest, kitchiest thing you could imagine, but if you want to get a laugh with Cosell these days you had better be talking to people who are at least in their late 40s.

It took more than the first season for SNL to hit its stride, but everybody was enjoying "I'm Chevy Chase and You're Not," Bass-O-Matic ("Mmm, that's good bass!") and just the idea of live comedy from 11:30 till 1 a.m.

 Newman, Belushi, Morris, Curtin, Chase, Radner and Akyroyd

The second season was the one that really made us fall in love with the show, when Chase made a really bad decision and left SNL to be a movie star.

Bill Murray replaced him, and after he did three really good seasons on SNL, he left and really did become a movie star.

He did a few movies during those three years, but the one that was his breakthrough to comedy movie star was "Caddyshack," in which he appeared with Chase.

His next three movies hit the trifecta -- "Stripes," "Tootsie" and "Ghostbusters." He wasn't the first big breakout from the show. Chase did a few movies, but John Belushi hit with "Animal House" and "The Blues Brothers" before dying of a drug overdose in 1982.

Murray did some great bits, but the one everyone seemed to love the most was his lounge singer, and hisd performance of the "Star Wars" theme was his most memorable.



I think the only time I was a regular viewer after the original cast left was in the late '80s and early '90s. A pretty good cast, good writing and hey, I was living alone.

But I didn't come home early to see it. I had a VCR by then, and it usually wasn't worth taping anyway.

By then it was really just another show anyway. Not like 1975, when we were just coming of age and when it was our show. It was the first show we could remember that was aimed at us as adults, and that was what made it special.

There's nothing like that now -- unless they bring back "Matlock" or "The Golden Girls."

Lot of water under the bridge.