Watch Blondie’s Debbie Harry Perform “Rainbow Connection” with Kermit the Frog on The Muppet Show (1981)

in Comedy, K-12, Music, Television | April 19th, 2021

Do you dig songs about rain­bows?

The host of one of the very last episodes of The Mup­pet Show — Deb­bie Har­ry, lead singer of Blondie — does, and in 1981, she seized the oppor­tu­ni­ty to duet with Ker­mit the Frog on his sig­na­ture tune, “The Rain­bow Con­nec­tion” — its only per­for­mance in the series’ five sea­son run.

Many of us asso­ciate the folksy num­ber with The Mup­pet Movie’s pas­toral open­ing scene. This ren­di­tion trans­fers the action back­stage to the kimono-clad Harry’s dress­ing room.

Who knew her sweet sopra­no would pair so nice­ly with a ban­jo?

She also exhibits a game will­ing­ness to lean into Mup­pet-style ham­mi­ness, respond­ing to the lyric “Have you heard voic­es?” with an expres­sion that verges on psy­cho­log­i­cal hor­ror.

Mid­way through, the two are joined by a cho­rus of juve­nile frogs in scout­ing uni­forms.

A lit­tle con­text — these young­sters spend the episode try­ing to earn their punk mer­it badge.

No won­der. By 1981, when the episode aired, Blondie had achieved mas­sive main­stream suc­cess, with such hits as “One Way or Anoth­er” and “Call Me,” both of which were shoe­horned into the episode.

As cre­ator Jim Henson’s son, Bri­an, recalled in a brief intro­duc­tion to its video release:

…I was in high school and my father knew that Deb­bie Har­ry was, like, the biggest thing in the world to me. And he booked her to be on The Mup­pet Show dur­ing a vaca­tion week from school and he did­n’t tell me. We went out to din­ner the night before shoot­ing and they made me sit next to Deb­bie Har­ry at this fan­cy restau­rant. And I just remem­ber this whole din­ner I was just end­less­ly sweat­ing and all I knew was that I was aware of Deb­bie Har­ry sit­ting on the side of me. I don’t think I ever said a word to her, I don’t think I ever looked at her, but she did a great episode, she’s a great per­former and she’s a love­ly lady.

With punk per­me­at­ing the air­waves, the fan site Tough Pigs, Mup­pet Fans Who Grew Up laments oth­er guest hosts who might have been booked before the show end­ed its run:

It’s a shame Deb­bie Har­ry was the only mem­ber of her scene to make it to The Mup­pet Show. Can you imag­ine spe­cial guest stars, The Ramones, The B‑52’s or even Talk­ing Heads? … Harry’s guest stint reveals that the Mup­pets’ chaot­ic and tex­tured world has more in com­mon with the punk scene than one would ini­tial­ly expect.

The finale finds the Frog Scouts mosh­ing to “Call Me,” with a rea­son­ably “punk” look­ing, rain­bow-clad back­ing Mup­pets band (Dr. Teeth and the Elec­tric May­hem sat this one out due to their pre-exist­ing asso­ci­a­tions with Motown, jazz, and a more clas­sic rock sound.)

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Mup­pets Sing the First & Sec­ond Acts of Hamil­ton

Wit­ness the Birth of Ker­mit the Frog in Jim Henson’s Live TV Show, Sam and Friends (1955)

When Deb­bie Har­ry Com­bined Artis­tic Forces with H.R. Giger

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Trial of the Chicago 7 and the Oeuvre of Aaron Sorkin: An Assessment by Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast (#89)

in Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Television | April 15th, 2021

In lieu of an Oscars episode, the Pret­ty Much Pop pod­cast this week con­sid­ers one of the nom­i­nat­ed films, The Tri­al of the Chica­go 7, and the career of its writer/director, Aaron Sorkin, which start­ed with A Few Good Men through four TV series (most notably The West Wing), and films like The Social Net­work, Steve Jobs, and Mol­ly’s Game.

Your hosts Bri­an Hirt, Eri­ca Spyres, and Mark Lin­sen­may­er con­sid­er Sork­in’s stock recur­ring char­ac­ters and their polit­i­cal dia­tribes, plots often based on true events, and how his writ­ing cre­ates dra­ma. Do we feel uplift­ed or vague­ly dirty after a Sorkin bath? It’s great to have char­ac­ters that aren’t stu­pid, but are they actu­al­ly smart or just designed to seem that way? Are the devi­a­tions from fact just good use of dra­mat­ic license or pos­i­tive­ly harm­ful? We touch on vir­tu­al­ly all of Sork­in’s pro­duc­tions (well, except for the plays; he actu­al­ly con­sid­ers him­self native­ly a play­wright) and still have ener­gy for a few Oscars mus­ings and reflec­tions about includ­ing real loca­tions or news events in fic­tion.

Here are some arti­cles we used to pre­pare our­selves:

Hear more of this pod­cast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can access by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

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Buckminster Fuller, Isaac Asimov & Other Futurists Make Predictions About the 21st Century in 1967: What They Got Right & Wrong

in Science, Television | April 13th, 2021

Why both­er with rea­son and evi­dence to make pre­dic­tions when you can put your faith in a chance roll of the dice? These two meth­ods could be said to rep­re­sent the vast­ly diver­gent ways of sci­ence and super­sti­tion, two realms that rarely inter­sect except, per­haps, when it comes to for­tune-telling — or, in the argot of the 20th century’s sooth­say­ers, “Futur­ism,” where pre­dic­tions seem to rely as much on wish­ful think­ing as they do on intu­ition and intel­lect.

In the 1967 short doc­u­men­tary film, The Futur­ists, above, sci­en­tists and vision­ar­ies quite lit­er­al­ly com­bine the sci­en­tif­ic method with ran­dom chance oper­a­tion to make pre­dic­tions about the 21st cen­tu­ry. Host Wal­ter Cronkite explains:

A pan­el of experts has stud­ied a list of pos­si­ble 21st cen­tu­ry devel­op­ments, from per­son­al­i­ty con­trolled drugs to house­hold robots. They have esti­mat­ed the numer­i­cal prob­a­bil­i­ty of each, from zero to 100 per­cent. The twen­ty sided dice are then rolled to sim­u­late these prob­a­bil­i­ties. A use of ran­dom num­bers known as the Monte Car­lo tech­nique, often used in think­tank games. All of this is high­ly spec­u­la­tive.

Indeed. The glimpse we get of the future — of our present, as it were — is very opti­mistic, “and so very, very wrong,” writes Bil­ly Ingram at TV Par­ty — at least in some respects. “Sad­ly, those past futur­ists for­got to fac­tor in human greed and the refash­ion­ing of Amer­i­cans’ way to be less com­mu­nal and more self-cen­tered.” The very medi­um on which the doc­u­men­tary appeared helped to cen­ter self­ish­ness as a car­di­nal Amer­i­can virtue.

Yet in 1967, the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment still required major net­works to run edu­ca­tion­al con­tent, even if “net­work exec­u­tives under­stood these pro­grams would end up at the bot­tom of the Nielsen rat­ings.” Hence, The Futur­ists, which aired on prime­time on CBS “when the 3 net­works would occa­sion­al­ly pre­empt pop­u­lar pro­grams with a news feature/documentary.” Despite low expec­ta­tions at the time, the short film now proves to be a fas­ci­nat­ing doc­u­ment.

The rolls of the dice with which it opens are not, it turns out, a “crap game,” but a “seri­ous game at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Pitts­burgh,” Cronkite tells us before intro­duc­ing the august pan­el of experts. We see a num­ber of sce­nar­ios pre­dict­ed for the com­ing cen­tu­ry. These include the vague “increased impor­tance of human con­cerns,” sci-fi “teach­ing by direct record­ing on the brain,” and omi­nous “tac­ti­cal behav­ior con­trol devices.”

Buck­min­ster Fuller even pre­dicts bod­i­ly tele­por­ta­tion by radio waves, some­thing like the tech­nol­o­gy then fea­tured in a brand-new TV show, Star Trek, but not sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly prob­a­ble in any sense, either then or now. Nonethe­less, there is sur­pris­ing pre­science in The Futur­ists, as its open­ing pan­el of futur­is­tic experts announces their con­clu­sions:

We wind up with a world which has the fol­low­ing fea­tures: fer­til­i­ty con­trol, 100-year lifes­pan, con­trolled ther­mal nuclear pow­er, con­tin­ued automa­tion, genet­ic con­trol, man-machine sym­bio­sis, house­hold robots, wide­band com­mu­ni­ca­tions, opin­ion con­trol, and con­tin­ued orga­ni­za­tion.

Appar­ent­ly, in 1967, all the Futur­ists worth talk­ing to — or so it seemed to the film’s pro­duc­er McGraw Hill — were men. Theirs was the only per­spec­tive offered to home view­ers and to the stu­dents who saw this film in schools across the coun­try. Those men include not only Fuller, who gives his full inter­view at 14:30, but also fre­quent mak­er of accu­rate futur­is­tic pre­dic­tions Isaac Asi­mov, who appears at the 20:50 mark. Aside from the exclu­sion of 50% of the pop­u­la­tion’s per­spec­tive, and an over­ly rosy view of human nature, how­ev­er, The Futur­ists is often an uncan­ni­ly accu­rate vision of life as we now know it — or at least one far more accu­rate than most 21st cen­tu­ry futurisms of the past.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

In 1964, Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts What the World Will Look Like Today: Self-Dri­ving Cars, Video Calls, Fake Meats & More

9 Sci­ence-Fic­tion Authors Pre­dict the Future: How Jules Verne, Isaac Asi­mov, William Gib­son, Philip K. Dick & More Imag­ined the World Ahead

Octavia Butler’s Four Rules for Pre­dict­ing the Future

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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A Long-Lost Soviet Adaptation of The Lord of the Rings Resurfaces on YouTube–and Tolkien Fans Rejoice (1991)

in Literature, Television | April 7th, 2021

When Peter Jack­son’s The Fel­low­ship of the Ring came out in 2001, it her­ald­ed a cin­e­mat­ic adap­ta­tion of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings tril­o­gy that would, at long last, pos­sess scale, pro­duc­tion val­ue, and sheer ambi­tion enough to do jus­tice to the orig­i­nal nov­els. This set it some­what apart from the ver­sion of The Fel­low­ship of the Ring that had aired just ten years before on Leningrad Tele­vi­sion — and has­n’t been seen since, at least until its recent upload (in two parts) to Youtube. An unof­fi­cial adap­ta­tion, Khran­iteli tells a sto­ry every sin­gle Tolkien read­er around the world will rec­og­nize, even if they don’t under­stand unsub­ti­tled Russ­ian. The pro­duc­tion’s appeal lies in any case not in its dia­logue, but what we’ll call its look and feel.

“Fea­tur­ing a score by Andrei Romanov of the rock band Akvar­i­um and some incred­i­bly cheap pro­duc­tion design, no one is going to con­fuse this Lord of the Rings with Jackson’s films,” writes /Film’s Chris Evan­ge­lista. “The sets look like, well, sets, and the spe­cial effects — if you can call them that — are delight­ful­ly hokey. This appears to have had almost no bud­get, and that only lends to the charm.”

Despite its cheap­ness, Khran­iteli dis­plays exu­ber­ance on mul­ti­ple lev­els, includ­ing its often-the­atri­cal per­for­mances as well as visu­al effects, exe­cut­ed with the still-new video tech­nol­o­gy of the time, that oscil­late between the hok­i­ly tra­di­tion­al and the near­ly avant-garde. Some scenes, in fact, look not entire­ly dis­sim­i­lar to those of Pros­per­o’s Books, Peter Green­away’s high-tech vision of Shake­speare that also pre­miered in 1991.

That year was the Sovi­et Union’s last, and the pro­longed polit­i­cal shake­up that ensued could par­tial­ly explain why Khran­iteli went unseen for so long. Until now, obscu­ri­ty-hunters have had to make do with The Fairy­tale Jour­ney of Mr. Bil­bo Bag­gins, The Hob­bit (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture), Leningrad Tele­vi­sion’s ear­li­er adap­ta­tion of Tolkien’s pre-Lord of the Rings chil­dren’s nov­el. It was the now long-gone Leningrad Tele­vi­sion’s suc­ces­sor enti­ty 5TV that just put the Sovi­et Fel­low­ship of the Ring online — and in seem­ing­ly pris­tine con­di­tion at that — to the delight of glob­al Tolkien enthu­si­asts who’d known only rumors of its exis­tence. And as many of them have already found, for all the short­com­ings, Khran­iteli still has Tom Bom­badil, for whose omis­sion from his sprawl­ing block­busters Jack­son will sure­ly nev­er hear the end.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 1985 Sovi­et TV Adap­ta­tion of The Hob­bit: Cheap and Yet Strange­ly Charm­ing

Illus­tra­tions of The Lord of the Rings in Russ­ian Iconog­ra­phy Style (1993)

Sovi­et-Era Illus­tra­tions Of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hob­bit (1976)

The Lord of the Rings Mythol­o­gy Explained in 10 Min­utes, in Two Illus­trat­ed Videos

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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How Sounds Are Faked For Nature Documentaries: Meet the Artists Who Create the Sounds of Fish, Spiders, Orangutans, Mushrooms & More

in Film, Nature, Television | March 25th, 2021

We think of nature doc­u­men­taries as pri­mar­i­ly visu­al works. As well we prob­a­bly should, giv­en the count­less, most­ly dull and uncom­fort­able hours spent in the field they demand of their pho­tog­ra­phy crews. But what comes to mind when we imag­ine the sound of nature doc­u­men­taries — apart, of course, from the voice of David Atten­bor­ough? Lis­ten close­ly dur­ing the breaks in his nar­ra­tion of such hit nature series as Plan­et Earth or Our Plan­et, and you’ll hear all man­ner of sounds: the sound of sharks swim­ming, of orang­utans chew­ing, of spi­ders shoot­ing their webs, of mush­rooms sprout­ing. Hang on — mush­rooms sprout­ing?

Nature doc­u­men­taries, as nar­ra­tor Abby Tang says in the Insid­er video above, are full of “sounds that would either be impos­si­ble to cap­ture, or ones that are straight-up made up.” In this they dif­fer lit­tle from script­ed films, whose actu­al shoots usu­al­ly man­age to record only the actors’ dia­logue, if that.

Work­ing in the wild, far indeed from any stu­dio, nature doc­u­men­tar­i­ans “might actu­al­ly be shoot­ing a sub­ject mat­ter that’s across a val­ley, or they’ll cap­ture objects nor­mal­ly too small to have a reg­is­tered noise to it.” Hence the need for a cat­e­go­ry of pro­fes­sion­als pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture: foley artists, those inven­tive cre­ators of foot­steps, door-knocks, punch­es, sword-unsheath­ings, and all the oth­er sounds view­ers expect to hear.

Here foley artist Richard Hin­ton demon­strates his meth­ods for breath­ing son­ic life into a range of nature scenes. A shoal of mack­er­el? Old mag­net­ic audio tape sloshed around in a tub of water. The vibra­tions of a spi­der­web? A slinky, held per­ilous­ly close to the micro­phone. The north­ern lights? A pair of cym­bals and a set of wind chimes. Often, just the right sound emerges from those of two dis­tinct objects lay­ered togeth­er, a prin­ci­ple known to foley artists since the ear­ly days of radio dra­ma. In fact, though foley sounds today go through a fair bit of dig­i­tal edit­ing and pro­cess­ing to make them more con­vinc­ing, the tools and tech­niques used to pro­duce them have changed lit­tle since those days. The next time you watch a bear onscreen open its eyes after months-long hiber­na­tion, con­sid­er the pos­si­bil­i­ty that you’re hear­ing an Eng­lish­man mak­ing nois­es with scraps of fur and his mouth.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch 50 Hours of Nature Sound­scapes from the BBC: Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly Proven to Ease Stress and Pro­mote Hap­pi­ness & Awe

Chill Out to 70 Hours of Ocean­scape Nature Videos Filmed by BBC Earth

Watch­ing Nature Doc­u­men­taries Can Pro­duce “Real Hap­pi­ness,” Finds a Study from the BBC and UC-Berke­ley

How the Sounds You Hear in Movies Are Real­ly Made: Dis­cov­er the Mag­ic of “Foley Artists”

How the Sound Effects on 1930s Radio Shows Were Made: An Inside Look

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Aesthetic of Anime: A New Video Essay Explores a Rich Tradition of Japanese Animation

in Animation, Television | March 22nd, 2021

Giant robots, super­pow­ered school­girls, berz­erk­er mar­tial artists: we all know the sort of fig­ures that rep­re­sent ani­me. Though clichéd, the wide­spread nature of these per­cep­tions actu­al­ly shows how far Japan­ese ani­ma­tion has come over the past few decades. Not so long ago, the aver­age West­ern­er did­n’t know the mean­ing of the world ani­me, let alone its ori­gin. Today, thanks not least to the films of Hayao Miyaza­ki’s Stu­dio Ghi­b­li, the aver­age West­ern­er has like­ly already been exposed to one or two mas­ter­works of the form. This view­ing expe­ri­ence pro­vides a sense of why Japan­ese ani­ma­tion, far from sim­ply ani­ma­tion that hap­pens to be Japan­ese, mer­its a term of its own: any of us, no mat­ter how inex­pe­ri­enced, can sense “The Aes­thet­ic of Ani­me.”

Tak­ing that con­cept as the title of their lat­est video essay, Lewis and Luiza Liz Bond of The Cin­e­ma Car­tog­ra­phy show us a range of cin­e­mat­ic pos­si­bil­i­ties that ani­me has opened up since the 1980s. I recall, long ago, stay­ing up late to tune in to the Sci-Fi Chan­nel’s “Sat­ur­day Night Ani­me” block to catch such clas­sics from that decade as Venus Wars and Project A‑Ko.

While Japan­ese ani­ma­tion in all its forms has gone much more main­stream around the world since then, it has­n’t result­ed in a loss of artis­tic, nar­ra­tive, and the­mat­ic inven­tive­ness. On the con­trary, Bond argues: over the past quar­ter-cen­tu­ry, series like Neon Gen­e­sis Evan­ge­lion, Ser­i­al Exper­i­ments Lain, and Death Note have not only pushed the bound­aries of ani­me, but demon­strat­ed a pow­er to “re-sig­ni­fy sto­ry­telling con­ven­tions that go beyond the ani­me form itself.”

In the effort to reveal the true nature of “the mis­un­der­stood and often dis­re­gard­ed world of ani­me,” this video essay ref­er­ences and visu­al­ly quotes dozens of dif­fer­ent shows. (It stops short of the also-vast realm of fea­ture films, such as Ghost in the Shell or the work of Satoshi Kon.) Its range includes the “exis­ten­tial med­i­ta­tion on lone­li­ness” that is Cow­boy Bebop, sub­ject of anoth­er Bond exe­ge­sis pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, and “city pop-fueled Superdi­men­sion­al Fortress Macross,” which did so much back in the 80s to define not just giant-robot ani­me but ani­me itself. Trope-heavy, over-the-top, and “unapolo­get­i­cal­ly weird” though it may seem (but usu­al­ly not, as Bond implies, with­out self-aware­ness), ani­me con­tin­ues to real­ize visions not avail­able — nor even con­ceiv­able — to any oth­er art form.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Exis­ten­tial Phi­los­o­phy of Cow­boy Bebop, the Cult Japan­ese Ani­me Series, Explored in a Thought­ful Video Essay

The Ani­ma­tions That Changed Cin­e­ma: The Ground­break­ing Lega­cies of Prince Achmed, Aki­ra, The Iron Giant & More

The Phi­los­o­phy, Sto­ry­telling & Visu­al Cre­ativ­i­ty of Ghost in the Shell, the Acclaimed Ani­me Film, Explained in Video Essays

How Mas­ter Japan­ese Ani­ma­tor Satoshi Kon Pushed the Bound­aries of Mak­ing Ani­me: A Video Essay

The Phi­los­o­phy of Hayao Miyaza­ki: A Video Essay on How the Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Reli­gion Shin­to Suf­fus­es Miyazaki’s Films

The Ori­gins of Ani­me: Watch Free Online 64 Ani­ma­tions That Launched the Japan­ese Ani­me Tra­di­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Saturday Night Live’s Very First Sketch: Watch John Belushi Launch SNL in October, 1975

in Comedy, Television | March 10th, 2021

How do you kick off the longest run­ning live sketch com­e­dy show in tele­vi­sion his­to­ry? If you’re in the cast and crew for the first episode of Sat­ur­day Night Live, you have no idea you’re doing any­thing of the kind. Still the pressure’s on, and the new­ly hired “Not Ready for Prime­time Play­ers” had a lot of com­pe­ti­tion on their own show that night. When Sat­ur­day Night, the orig­i­nal title for SNL, made its debut on Octo­ber 11, 1975, doing live com­e­dy on tele­vi­sion was an extreme­ly risky propo­si­tion.

So, what do you do if you’re pro­duc­ers Dick Eber­sol and Lorne Michaels? Put your riski­est foot for­ward — John Belushi, the “first rock & roll star of com­e­dy” writes Rolling Stone, and “the ‘live’ in Sat­ur­day Night Live.” The man who would be comedy’s king, for a time, before he left the stage too soon. His first sketch, and the first on-air for SNL, reveals “a ten­den­cy toward the time­less­ly pecu­liar,” Time mag­a­zine writes, that made the show an instant cult hit.

Rather than skew­er­ing top­i­cal issues or imper­son­at­ing celebri­ties, the first sketch, “The Wolver­ines” goes after the ripe tar­gets of an immi­grant (Belushi) learn­ing Eng­lish and his teacher, played by head writer Michael O’Donoghue, who insists on mak­ing Belushi repeat the tit­u­lar word in non­sen­si­cal phras­es like “I would like to feed your fin­ger­tips to the wolver­ines.”

Belushi’s accent has shades of Andy Kaufman’s “for­eign man” from Caspi­ar, and he gets a brief moment to dis­play his phys­i­cal com­e­dy skills when he keels over in imi­ta­tion of his teacher hav­ing a heart attack. “The Wolver­ines” is short, non­sen­si­cal, and weird­ly sweet. “No one would know what kind of show this was from see­ing that,” Michaels remem­bered. We can still look back at that wild­ly uneven first sea­son and won­der what kind of show SNL would be now if it had held on to the anar­chic spir­it of the ear­ly years. But that’s a lot to ask of a 45-year-old live com­e­dy show.

The night’s guest was George Car­lin, who did not appear in any sketch­es, but who did get three sep­a­rate mono­logues. The show also fea­tured two musi­cal guests, Bil­ly Pre­ston and Janis Ian. Andy Kauf­man made an appear­ance doing his famous Mighty Mouse bit, and the Mup­pets were there (not the fun Mup­pets, but a “dark and grumpy ver­sion” Jim Hen­son dis­owned after the first sea­son.)

The first episode was also the first to fea­ture the icon­ic intro, “Live from New York, it’s Sat­ur­day Night!” — deliv­ered by Chevy Chase. Though it has become a cel­e­bra­to­ry announce­ment, at the time “it’s Sat­ur­day Night!” was a dark reminder of the live com­e­dy vari­ety show, Sat­ur­day Night Live with Howard Cosell, then fail­ing through its first and only sea­son before its 18-episode run came to an end the fol­low­ing year.

See more from that weird first night above, includ­ing Carlin’s Foot­ball and Base­ball mono­logue and the for­got­ten SNL Mup­pets, just above.

via Ulti­mate Clas­sic Rock

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Cre­at­ing Sat­ur­day Night Live: Behind-the Scenes Videos Reveal How the Icon­ic Com­e­dy Show Gets Made

Lorne Michaels Intro­duces Sat­ur­day Night Live and Its Bril­liant First Cast for the Very First Time (1975)

Clas­sic Punk Rock Sketch­es from Sat­ur­day Night Live, Cour­tesy of Fred Armisen

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Why Is the Debut Disney+ Marvel TV Show a Tribute to Classic Sitcoms? Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #85 on WandaVision

in Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Television | March 10th, 2021

The newest, now con­clud­ed super­hero series fea­tures char­ac­ters no one asked to hear more about, one of whom was accord­ing to the Mar­vel fran­chise films def­i­nite­ly dead, and drops them in media res into a lov­ing styl­is­tic recre­ation of The Dick Van Dyke Show, then I Dream of Jeanie, etc. Why is this hap­pen­ing, and is it good?

Your Pret­ty Much Pop hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt are joined by guest Rolan­do Nieves from the Remakes, Reboots, and Revivals pod­cast try to fig­ure out what kind of sto­ry­telling this real­ly is, whether this exper­i­ment was suc­cess­ful, whether you have to be a Mar­vel die-hard (or old enough to have watched those sit-coms) to get it, and the poten­tial for future odd­ball super­hero out­ings that don’t fea­ture a big boss fight.

This episode is hot off the press­es, and more arti­cles are com­ing out about Wan­daVi­sion now, but here are a few that might help:

Fol­low Rolan­do @Rolando_Nieves.

Hear more of this pod­cast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion (with more Rolan­do!) that you can access by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

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