Search - Saturday Night Live - 25th Anniversary on DVD

Too much to cover in too short a time

DEM | Germany | 03/20/2007

(1 out of 5 stars)

"This DVD functions more or less as an advertisement for the other SNL DVDs that have been and continue to be marketed by NBC. The 25th anniversary special on this DVD lasts 2.5 hours, which sounds like a long time, but it's not long enough to do justice to the talent that appeared on the shows over such a long period of time. As uneven as the show was from week to week and year to year, there was still a lot of great material--far too much to cover in this format in any satisfying way. As a result, the clips that are shown are soundbites of soundbites--often, just enough to cover a famous quote ("wild an crazy guys," etc.) with a touch of lead-in. This may be enough to evoke a smile of nostalgia from someone who's seen the skits, but that's about it. When the skits were originally aired, they usually went on too long, but here the DVD's producers err by going way too far in the opposite direction. I'm not sure how you could do a worthwhile retrospective of 25 years worth of programming that would fit on one DVD, but if it can't be done... maybe one shouldn't do it.

The DVD comes with three "extras": an interview of Lorne Michaels by Tim Russert, which is mildly interesting; the "day-after" coverage of the 25th anniversary show by a heinous TV show I never heard of, "Access Hollywood"; and promotional TV coverage by some other NBC news show, which featured clips that mostly overlapped with the special included on the DVD. Again I ask: Why put this material on a DVD? The so-called extras bring nothing to an already lackluster party.

All in all, disappointing.

By the way, for those who care, the Beastie Boys don't actually perform a number on the DVD. They play a couple of measures of one of their own songs before getting interrupted by Elvis Costello, and then they end up playing back-up for him."