Today in 1977, the show that famously broadcast “live from New York” put on a special show live from New Orleans.
And while you can’t exactly call what happened a trainwreck, it has definitely stayed a one and done.
This was, of course, Saturday Night Live, a huge late night hit for NBC in the late 70s.
Showrunner Lorne Michaels pitched the network to do an SNL prime time special on a Sunday night, ahead of Mardi Gras in New Orleans.
NBC said yes, so Michaels and his team started building a show that would take place in and around all of the celebrating.
The cast was excited about trying something new, especially in a city where they had a lot of loud and enthusiastic fans.
But live TV is tricky enough when you’re working in your usual TV studio.
All of this is much harder when you’re in an unfamiliar setting, especially when that setting is New Orleans at Mardi Gras time.
Musical guest Randy Newman warned Michaels that while live TV runs on a tight schedule, New Orleans just doesn’t work that way.
Some things didn’t work at all, like some of the cameras the show was planning to use for the show.
Special guest star Cindy Williams of “Laverne and Shirley” had trouble getting to her location, so her co-star, Penny Marshall, had to play two roles in a sketch instead of one.
And drunken revelers kept trying to insert themselves into the proceedings, climbing on stuff and on at least one cast member.
Michaels did have a fallback built into the show: he had Buck Henry and Jane Curtin ready throughout the broadcast to do comedic commentary on a passing Mardi Gras parade.
Except that, as Randy Newman had warned, the parade that was supposed to be running at the same time as the show didn’t really get going until it was over.
Which prompted Curtin to tell the audience that Mardi Gras was “a French word that means ‘no parade.’”
The special not only went off the rails, it also went over budget and the ratings weren’t that great.
So SNL decided to go back to what it did well: broadcasting live from New York on Saturday nights.
Today in 1989, TIME magazine noted that a TV ad for Nike sneakers wasn’t quite what it appeared to be.
At one point the ad featured a guy from the Samburu people in Kenya speaking in the Maa language.
According to the subtitle, he said Nike’s slogan, “Just do it.”
What he actually said was, “I don’t want these, give me big shoes.”
What’s Maa for “Bo, you don’t know Diddley?”
The Big Uneasy: When SNL Went to Mardi Gras (Vulture)
Advertising: If the Inamuk Fits . . . (TIME)
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