Topical References: A Review of 1980 SNL

I always try to keep these things under 500 words, to make them more accessible to you ADHD kids with your glowsticks and your Kardashian sisters and your pogs to distract you. Out of the 135 posts I have on here, I’ve been successful exactly…zero times. But like I always say, one-hundred-and-thirty-sixth time’s the charm.

Saturday Night Live (or, to use the abbreviation I invented for it, SNL) is starting its 38th season, making it America’s longest-running television show (unless it’s not, I didn’t feel like fact-checking that). If you’re Amish and have never seen the show (yet somehow have a computer, an internet connection and are reading this blog), SNL is a sketch-comedy/musical show whose general premise is to put a celebrity in wacky situations for 90 minutes and hope the supporting cast of funny people around them can make a handful of the sketches bearable. And twice per episode they cut away to the musical guest du jour. Some casts are more successful at this than others, and I could probably crank out a pretty healthy 12,000-word article trying to rank each years’ casts in order from best to worst, but man does that sound like a lot of work. Maybe some other time.

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Unprofessional Driver on an Open Course

As most of you probably got tired of hearing from me, I recently got to shoot a commercial/internal branding video for a regional arm of Chevrolet. While most of the day was consumed with my usual on-set shenanigans/notes (“hit your mark,” “memorize your lines,” “stop overacting”), one aspect that was new to me was “acting” with a car — I still had to hit a mark and face a certain direction, etc. Except now I was doing it with a three ton vehicle and oh by the way there’s a camera guy’s head next to the pile of leaves you need to drive through, so make sure you don’t crush his head in the process. You know, the kind of thing you’d trust a semi-professional, mostly amateur actor to do.

Well anyway, after a long and fun day of shooting (a day totally free of head-smashing, I might add), we came out with some pretty good material. None of which I’m allowed to show you for copyright reasons. What I can show you, however, is a behind-the-scenes look at my debut as a stunt driver. And remember kids, always wear a seatbelt.

 

Cheers,
Dustin