Here's an announcement about the complete first season of Saturday Night Live coming out on DVD. The release date is December 5 and the set allegedly contains every single sketch and musical performance for a whopping running time of more than 26 hours. I'll post an Amazon link for ordering as soon as they add it to their catalog.
I suspect this will sell very well but I wonder how subsequent volumes will do. How many people will be in a hurry to order Season 4 and Season 5 when they've never found the time to watch all of the first three seasons they already purchased? That's a helluva lot of catch phrases, repeated gags, Conehead bits, Tom Snyder impressions, etc.
I also wonder if some folks won't be disappointed in the show as viewed in that format. The reruns have played well for years in syndication and elsewhere…but those reruns are usually chopped down to eliminate the weakest third of each show. Some episodes, that third was pretty weak. I spoke once to one of the folks involved in the chopping-down of 90 minute shows to 60 and asked if Lorne Michaels had personally decided what to keep and what to lop. She said yes, he had…but that the decisions were usually pretty obvious. Someone else would make the preliminary choices and it was rare that Michaels — or whoever supervised the non-Michaels episodes — had to overrule that. It was especially simple in some cases because Michaels (or other guys in charge when the shows first aired) would routine the shows by sticking the pieces they liked least near the end. She said, "We rarely kept a sketch that aired in the last half hour."
Well now, if you buy these DVDs, you're paying for the sketches that aired in the last half hour. And while it might be a treat to see some of them again after so long, some of them were there for a reason.
I also wonder, if they're going to go ahead and do other seasons, if they won't run into problems trying to be "complete." There are a couple of segments that had to be yanked from reruns for legal reasons…like the one in which Jay Mohr plagiarized another comedian's routine and made it into a sketch. I believe that when the lawsuit was settled, it was agreed the sketch would never run again, and it was omitted when the otherwise-unedited full episode reran. There are also a number of cases where music was changed for reruns or when a version of a song or sketch from Dress Rehearsal was substituted in all reruns for the live performance…the time Sinead O'Connor tore up a photo of the Pope, for example. I guess they'd still advertise the shows as complete but they wouldn't be complete as they originally aired.
Here's something I've been thinking about for around twenty seconds now. The folks selling the SNL material on DVD have found numerous ways to repackage it for sale…theme compilations, "Best of Certain Performer" collections, etc. I wonder how long it's going to be before they begin compiling DVDs of the "lost" Saturday Night Live material, meaning performances taped at Dress Rehearsals. There are a couple of performers who had so many of their sketches cut after those preliminary tapings that they used to joke that their "Best of…" specials would be The Best of Dress Rehearsal. Well, maybe that'll happen. Some of that footage has been used for bonus material on DVD releases but I think it's all been sketches that were later performed on the air shows, and they include both versions on the DVD as a kind of comparison. I'll bet one of these days, they'll try issuing sets of not only that stuff but also the sketches that were taped at Dress and then dropped…kind of a "Worst of Saturday Night Live" compilation. There might be legal or union complications that will prevent it but I can't believe someone won't at least try to make it happen.
And if they really want to sell something "lost," they oughta dig out the disastrous live episode that was done in prime time for the New Orleans Mardi Gras in 1977. If you never heard about that one, here's what happened.