Last week I saw the E! special listing the 101 most memorable moments. Aside from the fact that the entire world has gone top ten, fabulous fifty, and most memorable list-crazy, it was pretty entertaining.
But, I gotta disagree with the list. Wayne World with Aerosmith at 1??? Chris Farley’s Chippendale audition against Patrick Swayze should be significantly higher than 9. I can’t watch that one and not laugh.
I also thought the most recent skits were rated a little high, and the classics a little low. What was your take on the list?
I did not see that, but one of the best skits I ever saw was the one, not so long ago, where theater customers are locked in, and they never show the movie; only previews.
I don’t agree with their choice, but I respect it. I thought the first Wayne’s World sketch was better, but I liked most of them (the one in question was a Tom Hanks episode as I recall).
Some choices I liked more:
Jackie Rogers Jr. $100,000 Jackpot Wad
Most of the motivational speaker ones (the Christina Applegate episode was one of the better ones)
the Sam Waterston commercial for robot insurance (robots feed on old people medicine)
men’s synchronized swimming
I didn’t watch the E shows though as I heard they didn’t really show the sketches as much as show brief moments interspearsed by C-level celebs talking about them, which is really a shame.
I was disapointed that the classics weren’t rated higher, but other than that I had no problem with the list (although I’ve never been a huge fan of Wayne’s World).
Where’s the Bass-O-Matic? Or the one where Dan Akroyd (sp?) plays the guy who sells defective Halloween costumes (like the Invisible Pedestrian)?
Oh, and Celebrity Jeopardy should have been much higher on the list.
It was disconcerting how they conflated individual moments (or sketches) with whole recurring series of sketches. It was pretty unclear what they were actually counting down. And I think that was the main problem with the #1 pick. Were they crediting all of Wayne’s World or just the Aerosmith thing? Because even though I don’t think Wayne’s World in general deserves #1, I could at least see it being up there. The Aerosmith thing? BFD. They were making like getting Aerosmith on the show was the biggest thing that ever happened to them. Which is absurd.
And how were they defining “memorable?” They seem to be as confused about that as they are about what constitutes a moment. I’d say that that which is memorable falls into 4 main categories.
–Bits that turn into catchphrases in the general public. (Isn’t that special? Jane, you ignorant slut!)
–The very unexpected guest appearance. (Barbra Streisand on Coffee Talk. Janet Reno at Janet Reno’s Dance Party. Did they even include George Bush’s “na ga da” bit?)
–Those few sketches that perfectly capture some bit of the zeitgeist. (Pat. Will Ferrell in a a patriotic thong.)
–When something goes wrong. (John Belushi bloodying Buck Henry.)
There was so much stuff on there that just didn’t seem to be that memorable.
Curiously absent were the parody commercials, which have provided some of the most truly memorable moments in SNL history. (On preview, I see a couple of others talking about the omission of particular commercials. I don’t recall any commercials at all.)
I agree with the OP that it was weighted towards the recent stuff way too heavily. Yeah, the Boston Teens and the Sensitive Naked Man were funny, but top 20? Come on! I’m definitely not one to glorify the original cast of SNL–I think a lot of that stuff just hasn’t aged very well, and I am a big fan of some of the more recent line-ups, but if you are going to do a show on the most memorable moments, you have to focus on the stuff that’s actually had some time to become memorable.
And I just really can’t understand why the post-9/11 thing wasn’t made #1. Putting it at #2 just seems…disrespectful. If they had put it much farther down the list, that would have been better, because that would have classified it as being relatively unimportant as far as SNL history. Putting it into the #2 spot is like saying “September 11 was an important event, but compared to Wayne’s World? Small potatoes!”
Re: the fake commercials. At one point, they lumped all the commercials into one category, giving them all a collective ranking. I disagree with that choice. I didn’t see all of it, so I can’t really comment further.
Like Munch said, all the commercial parodies were under one catagory. They seem to think that the best commercial parody of all time on SNL was the Sam Watterson Robot Insurance one. Eh.
I would have thought that the Sinead O’Conner tearing up the Pope picture was the most memorable (at least that’s what I kept guessing for number one), but they seem to keep it under humor.
And no “Buckwheat’s Greatest Hits”? Instead they showed “Buckwheat Gets Shot”? The “Greatest Hits” was better.
I caught a few minutes this weekend: three seconds of the “Best Sketch” clip, and three minutes of some morons repeating the catch phrases and going, Oooooh, that was sooooo funny, we all loved it!"
My own favorites (Lord and Lady Douchebag, Velvet Jones, John Belushi Dances on His Castmates’ Graves) didn’t do very well—Roseanne Roseannadanna only no. 25?! And La Dolce Gilda didn’t even make the list?
people people! How many of these VH1/E! top 100 lists have you watched? There’s something you really need to understand. These lists aren’t ranked by best to 101st best. They’re put in an order of having the most memorable ones right after a commercial break, and then putting something that would be on the bottom of the list in the middle, and then another hot one before the commercial break, or whatever it takes to keep every episode more even. The more obvious of this scrambling comes when you watch the 101 most shocking moments, where the sudden death of a popular musician is shown at 85, only to be followed by some other musician saying the f word at an awards show at 84.
Putting Rudy introducing the show at #2 just seemed odd. I was totally expecting that to be either #1 or #21. These shows LOVE to cheeze out and put something sentimental at the very end of each episode. As far as their list was concerned, Wayne’s World could have been anywhere.
Personally, I’d pick Celebrity Jeopardy as a whole at #1, simply because I can’t go anywhere without hearing someone quoting it.
I didn’t see the whole thing, so how did the benefit song for free-range chickens one do? I still almost pee myself thinking of them panning over to Chris Farley as Carnie Wilson
It did bug me how they would take a whole character and call it a moment?!
