January 29, 1977 – Fran Tarkenton / Leo Sayer, Donny Harper and The Voices Of Tomorrow (S2 E13)

Sketches are rated on a scale of 1-5 stars

COLD OPENING
JOB coaches host & cast on what to do during tonight’s show
   
— John as the coach: “We’re losing some strength; Belushi’s gonna be out this week.”
— This is a fun and interesting way to open the show, and I’m loving all the energy.
— SNL’s very first instance of a group LFNY.
STARS: ****

MONOLOGUE
(BIM) gives play-by-play as GAM takes over host’s rendition of “Feelings”
    
— I like the little touch of how the floor of the homebase stage’s main section has been painted to look like the 50-yard line of a football field.
— What was with the sound of a bass playing in the background briefly while Fran was in the middle of talking?
— Fran’s having some funny lines at the expense of the Vikings’ Super Bowl loss.
— Oh, he’s begun singing. I guess that explains the brief bass sound earlier.
— I like how this has suddenly turned into a continuation of the SNL football team cold opening, and Bill Murray as the play-by-play commentator is adding to the fun.
STARS: ***

SWISS ARMY GUN
(DAA) pitches Rovco’s multi-purpose Swiss Army Gun
  
— Another Rovco item, like the Puberty Helper from the Jodie Foster episode.
— It goes without saying that Dan’s doing yet another great job as a pitchman.
— The visual of all the features of the oversized swiss army gun is funny, especially how the actual gun part is just a small normal revolver.
STARS: ***½

AMY
Secret Service agents (BIM) & (DAA) help Amy Carter (LAN) cheat on a quiz
   
— This is the one sketch from this episode I remember when I saw this episode years ago.
— Dan and Bill are hilarious as the secret service men.
— Love the part with Dan and Bill stuffing Gilda inside her desk. That’s the portion of this sketch that stuck with me all the years since I last saw this episode.
— After the Gilda/desk gag, Bill seemed to accidentally hurt Gilda for real by unintentionally closing the desk top on her hand. Gilda’s making a comically-exaggerated pained facial expression, and Bill looks genuinely apologetic towards her.
— The ending could’ve been a little better.
STARS: ***½

SIDELINE
after losing an arm, football player (DAA) is sent back into the game
 
— Another continuation of the cold opening’s premise.
— Funny reveal with Dan’s missing arm after it reportedly got torn off during the game.
STARS: ***

MUSICAL PERFORMANCE (LEO SAYER)

BLACK PERSPECTIVE
host confirms stereotypes about blacks as quarterbacks
 
— Garrett sure flubbed his intro to Fran.
— This is the first actual sketch Fran has appeared in tonight.
— Hilarious with Fran explaining that all the negative stereotypes about black football players are true. I’m kinda surprised they’re getting away with racial humor of this extent.
— Garrett’s reactions are funny, too.
STARS: ****

ALSATIAN RESTAURANT
(BIM) & (JAC) get great food & domestic strife at an in-house restaurant
   
— The whole repeated thing with Dan and Gilda loudly arguing off-camera in the kitchen after putting on a kind facade for their guests is too predictable for my likes, and is too cliched of a premise.
— Okay, Dan returning from the kitchen with blood on his face is kinda funny.
— Funny detail of Gilda picking the spilled food up off the floor and serving it on a platter after she got pushed out of the kitchen.
— Gilda slowly sneaking up on Dan with a knife… okay, I’m liking where this sketch is going now.
— Overall, too much of this sketch suffered from feeling too cliched, but it slowly got better towards the end.
STARS: **½

SUGAR-FROSTED ANABOLIC STEROIDS
host gets strength he needs from sugar-frosted Anabolic Steroids cereal
 
— An okay premise for a commercial.
— I got a good laugh from the “turn your grapes into raisins” line.
— Fran’s delivery sure is awkward in some parts of this, and you can tell he’s amused by the lines he’s reading.
— Great reveal with his wife having a whole bunch of facial hair due to eating the cereal.
STARS: ***

WEEKEND UPDATE, PART 1
tired of being compared to CHC, JAC rips open her shirt & displays bra
silent film footage documents testing of the new cruise missile
   
— An odd start with Jane very coldly addressing criticisms of her Update performance from viewers who miss Chevy and feel that Jane can’t hold a candle to Chevy’s sex appeal.
— Jane: “[The network is] putting a lot of pressure on Lorne to try somebody new for Update, like that new kid Murray or whatever his name is.” Ha! Little did Jane know that she’d eventually be co-anchoring Update with “that Murray kid”.
— Oh, wait, I think this whole rant of Jane’s is leading to a certain famous moment…
— Yep, and there it is. “Try these on for size, Connie Chung!” Always a classic. Even though, as mentioned earlier, I previously saw this episode years ago, this is the first time I remember seeing this “Try these on for size, Connie Chung!” moment in its full context instead of just as a clip in SNL highlight reels.
— Funny how Jane seamlessly transitioned from her angry demeanor to a professional news anchor delivery immediately after her whole rant ended.
— I like the cruise missile launch being represented by a wacky black-and-white silent film clip of people frantically running away from a bomb that’s following them.

COMMUNITY APPEAL
host says “thanks to Community Appeal, drug-addled JOB is working”
 
— Uh, is John supposed to be acting like a special-needs kid? If so, this seems kinda in bad taste, but I’d be lying if I said John’s performance wasn’t giving me some laughs.
— At certain points in this, John’s voice actually sounds like future cast member Chris Farley’s.
STARS: ***

WEEKEND UPDATE, PART 2
 
— Jane seems to be playing to the camera a lot more than usual in tonight’s Update, like making lots of charming little random ad-libs to the camera (“Hi, there”) or just giving the camera a funny sly look. I wonder if this is her attempt to spice up her Update performance in response to the aforementioned criticisms she’s supposedly been getting.
— Another ad-lib from Jane, with her jokingly starting to open her shirt up a little again after the Shirley Temple Black joke bombed.
— That polar bear story was too similar to the zoo stories that Chevy used to sometimes do on Update.
— Yay, no Emily Litella.
STARS (FOR BOTH WEEKEND UPDATE HALVES): ****

ALICE
with JOB’s coaching, host does a hotel room sketch with LAN
   
— This has turned into yet another continuation of the “SNL football team” premise, with Fran calling a time-out in the middle of a sketch and running off-stage to receive advice from “Coach John Belushi”.
— Why does “Coach John Belushi” now have gray hair? He didn’t have it earlier tonight.
— The “time-out” interludes are cool and everything, but the actual bedroom sketch with Fran and Laraine is not interesting me.
STARS: **

GRAND STAND, PART 1
Lee Whitehead (BIM) & Bryant Gumbo (GAM)

— The preceding sketch has segued into this sports-related one.
— Boy, if Garrett’s supposed to be doing a Bryant Gumbel imitation, then he’s doing a TERRIBLE job.
— Huh? Why did Bill and Garrett throw to a “commercial” as soon as this started? It’s bad enough that Weekend Update in this era always has to have a fake ad break in the middle; now they’re doing that in the middle of sketches, too?

SPEARMINT GUM
at a funeral, Spearmint Gum-holding priest (TOS) says “carry it with you”
  
— This is actually a rerun from season 1, but it wasn’t in my copy of any episodes from that season, so this is my first time seeing it.
— The twist at the end was really random, but cracked me up. I probably would find this even funnier, though, if I was familiar with the real ad this seems to be parodying.
STARS: ***

GRAND STAND, PART 2
Lee Whitehead (BIM) & Bryant Gumbo (GAM) interview host
     
— The “Saturday Night” blimp was pretty funny.
— Funny gag with the halftime show of a marching band performing a salute to “blind non-white American composers”.
— A bizarre brief technical error just now, where the entire screen turned yellow except for the little monitor showing Fran.

— Fran’s gay quarterbacks remark about someone who reportedly insulted him (I didn’t catch the name) got some shocked “ooh!”s from the audience.
— Bill flubbed the hell out of his “terrific steroid bit” line (“terrific styroid bead”).
— I like the idea behind them doing slow-mo replays of clips of Fran from earlier in the show, but nothing funny is coming out of that.
— During the fake ending credits playing now, I just caught a listing of “Engineered by Coneheads”. Haha! And keep in mind, the Coneheads haven’t even become recurring characters yet at this point; they’ve only been done once.
— Some other parts of these fake ending credits seem to be reusing the same jokes from the fake ending credits of the all the Ford/Carter debate sketches (including the same typo where Dr. Seuss is misspelled “Dr. Suess”).
STARS: ***

MUSICAL PERFORMANCE (LEO SAYER)

SMALL WORLDS
by Gary Weis- amphibians & reptiles displayed at pet store
   
— Very random outro with Fran, on the homebase stage, holding a tarantula and getting “bitten” by it. It was a cheap, predictable gag, but I got an unintentional laugh from how they abruptly cut to a black screen after Fran yelled from getting “bit”.
— Regarding the film itself, well, the frog was funny, at least. The rest of this was the usual Gary Weis snoozefest.
STARS: **

FRENCH LIQUID
the new perfume gives different scents to different women
 
— This was a weird short piece, but I liked the narrator’s increasingly-odd fragrance descriptions given to each woman’s perfume.
— I think that was the voice of O’Donoghue as the narrator, by the way.
STARS: ***

MUSICAL PERFORMANCE (DONNY HARPER AND THE VOICES OF TOMORROW)
— Fran bizarrely introduces them by the wrong name: “Donny Harper and The Voices Of America”.

CREDIT CARD
Rhonda Weiss (GIR) & credit card employee Barbara (JAC) one-up each other

— The return of Gilda’s Jewish character that was introduced in the Ralph Nader episode.
— I’m liking Gilda and Jane constantly one-upping each other in a stereotypical Jewish New Yorker way.
— Jane’s doing a good job playing a similar character to Gilda’s.
STARS: ***

GOODNIGHTS
 
— We don’t get the usual goodnights speech from the host. These goodnights just begin with the credits rolling and the music kicking in. I guess they were running really low on time.
— Also, no Don Pardo goodnights announcement tonight either.
— Some of the male cast members are wearing festive conga-type outfits for some reason. Was a sketch cut at the last minute? Or were they dressed like that because the (infamous) Mardi Gras special was approaching?

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IMMEDIATE POST-SHOW THOUGHTS:
— A very average episode. Kinda reminds me of how I felt about the Dyan Cannon episode from season 1: consistently decent but overall very forgettable. Tonight’s “SNL football team/Belushi as coach” running premise added a fun vibe, at least, and gives this episode the slight edge over Dyan Cannon’s.
— As SNL’s very first athlete host, Fran Tarkenton wasn’t anything special, and he played himself in everything he appeared in, but his expected wooden acting style wasn’t bad enough to drag down the show or anything. I’ve seen worse from some athletes who would host later.

HOW THIS EPISODE STACKS UP AGAINST THE PRECEDING ONE (Ruth Gordon):
— a moderate step up

My full set of screencaps for this episode is here

TOMORROW:
Steve Martin