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I am – Hercules!!

“I’m not so SURE about that, Maxine!!” -- Cacuwa The Psychic

Saturday Night’s Third Season finds the NBC franchise firing on quite a few cylinders. Bill Murray’s first full year featured more episodes hosted by Steve Martin (three) than any other. The season also boasted the first five of the 13 Lisa Loopner/Todd DeLaBounta sketches, the first five of the 10 “Franken & Davis Show” installments, four of the 11 Conehead sketches, four (including “Samurai Night Fever”) of the 17 samurai sketches, four of the Leonard Pinth-Garnell sketches, the first three of the five Wild & Crazy Guys sketches, the final three of the four E. Buzz Miller sketches, the first three of the six Olympia Café (“No Coke!! Pepsi!!”) sketches, the second and third of the 12 Nick The Lounge Singer sketches, and the only two Judy Miller sketches ever to make it to air. 3.1 offers “Mike McMack, Defense Lawyer,” which mines comedy gold from an attorney with a judge in his pocket. America also gets its first glimpse of Yortuk & Georg Festruck, horny Slovakian immigrants. (Martin and Aykroyd would only play these guys five times on SNL, and three of these “Wild & Crazy Guys” sketches fell within the third season. Their fourth appearance came at the start of the fourth season; their fifth and final appearance came in 1998, during a Roxbury Boys sketch with Will Ferrell in a show hosted by Cameron Diaz.) 3.2, hosted by Madeline Kahn, features the premiere of the famous, Carly Simon-enhanced “Swill” mineral water commercial. 3.3 pits Hugh Hefner’s Planet of the Men against the Planet of the Women. Cpl. Fallopia fires the horn ray. Capt. Macho retaliates with the mouse ray. 3.4, the Charles Grodin Halloween show, brings back old favorites like toy monger Irwin Mainway, extraterrestrial driving instructor Beldar Conehead, Samurai Dry Cleaners, the Killer Bees, and even Paul Simon. 3.5 sees Mr. Mike mock the blindness of host Ray Charles. 3.6, hosted by Buck Henry, offers Mr. Mike’s surly Ricky Rat Club. It also debuts the cigarette-toking John Belushi’s plug for the little chocolate donuts on his training table (in a spot narrated by Marv Albert). 3.7 starts with Mary Kay Place in a cheerleader outfit, yelling at a cigarette-toking John Belushi for his “lack of pep.” 3.8, hosted by SNL contest winner Miskel Spillman, Christmas episode features Elvis Costello’s memorable show-closing second-song change-up, as well as the Meat Wagon Action Track Set, E. Buzz Miller’s Art Classics and Mr. Mike’s Coral Waters Café. 3.9 stars Martin as a lettuce spokesman who challenges the Conehead family via “Family Feud.” 3.10, the season’s Robert Klein episode, evolved into a horror actioner with a running joke about giant lobsters overtaking Manhattan. It was the first episode to feature the “No Coke! Pepsi!” Greeks, and the first to feature nerds Lisa Loopner and Todd DiLabounta (renamed Todd DiLamuca in later seasons after the real DiaLabounta objected). 3.11, the Feb. 18 show, was a ratings-grabber, the first SNL hosted by Chevy Chase since quitting the show more than a year earlier. Billy Joel ditched his 10-year high school reunion to appear on it. Chase puts on the land shark costume again. 3.12, hosted by O.J. Simpson (!), featured “Mandingo II,” “E. Buzz Miller’s Animal Kingdom” and “Celebrity Battle of the Sexes and Races” which pits Simpson and Leon Spinks against Sandy Duncan and Marie Osmond. The Juice gamely kisses Garret Morris on the lips and sticks pins in a Walter Payton doll. 3.13, hosted by Art Garfunkel, is famous for “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” in which an aged John Belushi danced on the graves of Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase. 3.14, hosted by Jill Clayburgh, features the breakfast solution Nutrifix; Belushi’s scream as he’s injected makes me laugh. 3.15, hosted by Christopher Lee, featured horror parodies – “The Island of Lost Luggage,” “The Thing That Wouldn’t Leave” and “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Rogers” – as well as “Dell Stator’s Rabbit Hut.” 3.16 was the first of four SNLs hosted by Michael Palin, who gives Lisa Loopner a piano lesson and participates in “Danger Probe.” (Sadly, Palin’s two Miles Copperthwaite sketches wouldn’t air until season four.) 3.17 stars Michael Sarrazin as “Josh Ramsey, V.D. Caseworker.” The same episode gives us “The Hate Jennifer Show,” “E. Buzz Miller’s Exercise World” and “La Dolce Gilda.” 3.18 remains one of the funniest SNLs ever. Steve Martin plays “Theodoric of York, Medieval Barber,” a “healer” with a great fondness for bloodlettings. Theodoric answers the objections of dying patients with, “Hey, who’s the barber here?” Other highlights of the episode include a look at the Festrunks’ bachelor pad, “Dancing In The Dark” with Gilda Radner, Todd DiLabounta casually trying to wreck Chaz The Spaz’s science-fair plutonium bomb, the psychic Cacuwa’s prediction of Pope Cloning on “Next Week In Review,” the definitive performance of “King Tut,” and the first official SNL appearances of The Blues Brothers. Big episode. 3.19, which marked the first and only SNL appearance of an Oscar-toting Richard Dreyfuss, goaded by John Belushi into reciting “Hamlet” during his monologue. Belushi later recreates clips from “The Goodbye Girl.” Dreyfus does not quite participate in a “Jaws” sketch, but does turn up as Roy Neary in the series’ antepenultimate Conehead sketch, “Cone Encounters of the Third Kind.” 3.20, the season finale hosted by Buck Henry, gave us the Sodom Chamber of Congress and loaded up on recurrings: nerds, samurai, cheeseburger, Franken & Davis, Leonard Pinth-Garnell with “Bad Conceptual Art” and the last live SNL appearance of Mr. Mike ever. EXTRAS: “Things We Did Last Summer.” (42:38) A 1977 mockumentary of sorts masterminded by two SNL vets: writer Don Novello and director Gary Weis. Gilda Radner charges fans a dollar to tour her apartment. Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, as The Blues Brothers, open for Steve Martin at the Universal Amphitheatre with “Hey Bartender” and “Rubber Biscuit.” Bill Murray rethinks a plan to give up comedy to play baseball full-time. Garrett Morris returns to his old trade of modeling for a lawn jockey manufacturer. Laraine Newman goes to Tahiti with actors Mackenzie Phillips, Paul Reubens and Michael McManus and music producer Peter Asher, where she encounters a giant centipede in her room and gets talked into taking a diving lesson. “John Belushi & Howard Shore: Wardrobe Test” (2:19) I’ve no explanation for this. It’s the future star of “Continental Divide” posing with the future composer of the “Lord of the Rings” scores. Shore is wearing what appear to be green dungarees and a hat. Belushi is wearing a long coat without button. “Trailers” (3:31) Commericals for “Charlie Wilson’s War,” “30 Rock,” “The Office,” and “Psyche.”

You say you like Marvel character crossovers? The Incredible Hulk TV-Movies are only $7.99 for both, and cooler than you’d think. “The Incredible Hulk Returns” (1988) teams the monstrosity with Marvel stablemate Thor, while “The Trial of the Incredible Hulk” (1989) thrusts David Banner into the world of blind attorney Matt Murdock (Rex Smith) and acrobatic altar ego Daredevil. John Rhys-Davies plays Kingpin! I assume these TV-movies represent the first live-action depictions of a lot of these comic-book icons.

“Star Trek” and “Mission: Impossible” were two Desilu shows that launched nine days from each other. Martin Landau turned down the role of Spock and went to work as stage actor and “M:I” master of disguise Rollin Hand. Three years later, Landau quit “Mission: Impossible” just as “Star Trek” was cancelled. “Mission: Impossible,” however, stays on the air. Leonard Nimoy wanders across the Paramount lot (because Paramount had purchased Desilu at that point) to start work as Hand’s replacement, a magician named Paris. (Was the one-name thing an homage to Spock?) J.J. Abrams, now directing Nimoy in the new “Star Trek” movie, maybe should have cast Nimoy as an IMF supervisor in “M:I 3.” That would have been supercool.
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