Tag Archives: snl

Saturday Night Live "Moon" Short Film

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Update: It DOES exist! No sooner did I finish typing this than I managed to find a reference to it. It was directed by Adam McKay, it was called “Neil Armstrong: The Ohio Years,” and it aired on March 11, 2000. Now, I just need to hunt down the video.

Annie and I clearly remember an SNL sketch from maybe 10 years ago starring Neil Armstrong. It was a short film, very similar to the digital shorts they do today, with a little title card saying it was an SNL Short Film, and listing the director (who I don’t remember).

The film itself just showed a normal day in the life of Neil Armstrong: Getting dressed, eating breakfast, picking up groceries at the store, etc. But over the top of everything, we hear Neil’s inner monologue, which is all about him going to the moon. All day long, he’s thinking things like “I went to the moon! I was on the moon. The moon! The god damn moon!”

And all day long, his inner monologue gets louder and more insistent, until by the time he’s in the grocery store, you just hear him yelling “MOOOOOOOON!” over and over again. It was hilarious, because of the juxtaposition of this polite older man and his outragous inner voice.

And I can’t find any indication that it ever existed. Annie and I remember it clearly, but no one else does, and there’s no mention of it anywhere online. SNL doesn’t appear in Neil Armstrong’s IMDB page (or any of the other astronauts who landed on the moon). There’s no mention in wikipedia. Google is no help. I’m seriously starting to wonder if I just dreamed it.

Do any of you remember this sketch? Better yet, does anyone have a copy?

Mark Wahlberg vs Saturday Night Live

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A couple weeks ago, Andy Samberg did a parody of Mark Wahlberg in a throwaway sketch called “Mark Wahlberg Talks to Animals.” It was basically just Andy telling various animals “Say hi to your mother for me.”

It was pretty funny, but not amazing, and I doubt anyone would have paid any attention to it except that in an interview with the New York Post, Mark let it slip that he didn’t think it was very funny.

“Someone showed it to me on YouTube. It wasn’t like Tina Fey doing Sarah Palin, that’s for sure. And ‘Saturday Night Live’ hasn’t been funny for a long time. They’ve asked me to do the show a ton of times. I used to watch it when Eddie Murphy was there and Joe Piscopo and Bill Murray. I don’t even know who’s on the show now.”
– Mark Wahlberg interview in the New York Post

Now, here’s where it gets brilliant. In the most recent episode of SNL, Mark storms onto set during the opening scene and demands that Lorne tell him where Andy is. Later in the show, they aired this confrontation where Mark tells Andy his parody is way off, and then proceeds to confirm it.

To my mind, this means one of two things. Either Mark really was annoyed by the sketch, and they asked him on the show to make it up to him, or they planned this from the start, and asked him to complain in his next interview. Either way, totally genius.

In Which Scott Gets Sick and Watches Lots of Movies

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Ugh. I’ve been sick. Urn had a cold, which somehow Annie caught. So of course, now I get sick, too. Which wouldn’t have been so bad if Annie hadn’t used up all the Kleenex and taken all the cold medicine with her when she went home for the weekend. Oh well. On a weekend when I had no larger plans than to stay home and be anti-social, I guess this is a better time to be sick than a normal workweek, when I can’t afford to miss work. If I’m going to be miserable, it might as well be in the comfort of my own home.

One thing I’ve noticed about being sick is that my attention span gets even shorter than usual, and I get even more apathetic that usual. I don’t feel up to doing anything more than sitting on the couch and watching TV, and I don’t even really want to do that. As a result of this, when I get sick, I tend to watch a lot of movies. But due to my extremely short attention span, I can’t handle movies with a great deal of plot. So I end up watching a lot of BAD movies.

This weekend, I rented The Sixth Day, which was about what I was expecting (Arnold blows things up and makes bad puns!), and the first Highlander, which was a lot worse than I remember. I also saw most of Muppet Treasure Island, which has some really funny pirate songs. Then there was some horrible made-for-TV Mission To Mars knockoff on the sci-fi channel, a police chase documentary, about 15 minutes of Wyatt Earp, in which Kevin Costner makes a lousy Wyatt Earp, but the guy they got to play Doc Holliday is pretty cool. Add to all of those a couple hours of just channel-flipping, watching 10 minutes of Star Trek here, and 20 minutes of VH1 there. Sadly, I couldn’t find any Bob Ross episodes anywhere. Bob Ross is the best thing to watch when you’re sick. He was an amazing guy. And, of course, I watched Iron Chef. It’s just about the best show ever.

Addendum, 10 minutes later:

I forgot to mention about 3 episodes of Saturday Night Live and The Replacement Killers, which was much much worse than The Killer. Being sick, I wasn’t even able to enjoy the fact that Mira Sorvino or however you spell her name left her shirt unbuttoned for the entire movie.

37 Hours

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I was awake for 37 hours on Friday. It was pretty cool. Pulling an all-nighter on a night when you’re just goofing around is a very different experience than pulling an all-nighter desperately trying to finish a term paper in an hour that should have taken a week to write. Normally, all-nighters are such a stressful experience that the next day always feels a little off. The lighting everywhere seems strange, too bright or too dim. People all seem to be moving in slow-motion one second, and the next everyone’s in fast-forward. Everyone’s speech is very difficult to understand for some reason. And it’s always VERY hard to stay awake.

This was completely different. Friday, at work, Steve called and asked if we wanted to go to Gustav’s. Gustav’s is a German pub/restaurant in NE Portland that’s far enough away from downtown (where I live), that I’ve only been there once with Steve. But now Steve has a car! So quickly, Miles and Ang and I all agreed to meet in the tech room at 9pm (happy hour starts at 10). At 9, we all got together, plus Mark, and headed to Gustav’s. We had so much food. The bill was 50-some dollars between five guys at happy hour. Everyone ate some chicken strips and fries. We all had a large plate of sausage. We all partook of two large orders of fondue. We all had some sort of really rich chocolate dessert. The rest of the guys all had a large mug of dark beer, and I had two Cider Jacks. We all stumbled out at about 11:30, fat and happy.

On the way back downtown, Miles asked if I wanted to hang out in the tek room with him and work on Mutton Kombat (remember Mutton Kombat? from months and months ago?). I said sure, since Annie was in Tacoma for the weekend and wouldn’t care if I spent all night in the tek room geeking out.

So at about midnight, Miles and I sat down and started work. We worked really hard for awhile, then we looked up at the clock and realized it was 6AM. We paused to get breakfast from McDonald’s. Alex was supposed to show up at about Noon to talk to Miles about our other game project, Cube Fighter. Miles and I were supposed to go on shift at about 10AM. We kept working on the game through until 10, when we came on shift and did some work stuff for awhile. Alex finally showed up around 1:30, and at 2pm, I was off shift. Miles and Alex were babbling about code, so I sat down and looked for japanese fonts online. Finally, at about 4:30, we all headed for home (we all live in the same Student Housing building). At 5PM, I was sitting in my living room trying to decide if I was hungry or tired or wide awake (I wasn’t really any of them), when my Mom called and offered me dinner. She picked me up and we had a huge meal of pork chops and steak and baked potatos and salad and ice cream. it was great.

After dinner, I lay down on the couch and started reading one of my brother’s comics. 20 minutes later I woke up and realized I’d been asleep, so I got Mom to take me home to go to bed. Of course, by the time I got home, I was wide awake again, so I stayed up and watched Saturday Night Live, which was horrible. Really bad episode. Finally, at 3AM, I forced myself to go to bed, even though I still wasn’t really tired.

I had been up for 37 hours straight, going strong the whole time (except the 20min nap). It was really odd. I didn’t feel drained or out of it, or anything. A very interesting experience. Mutton Kombat is coming along well, and I hope to get some information on it posted on play.fojar.com later today.