Saturday Night Live's 35th Anniversary - an educated guess

Though nothing has been said about it yet, something will inevitably happen in October or November of this year: Saturday Night Live's 35th Anniversary Special, following the 15th in 1989 and the 25th in 1999. Much has changed since the last special - Will Ferrell and Cheri Oteri are no longer representatives of "current SNL", Jimmy Fallon went from featured player to cast member to alumni to talk show host, another former cast member passed away, the show began airing in HD, and the TV Funhouse segments disappeared in favor of the SNL Digital Shorts.

Since we still have a few months, I thought I would take this opportunity to make educated predictions about what exactly we'll be seeing in a 35th Anniversary Special...

* The show will be at LEAST three hours long, with a number of excessive commercial breaks
* Monologue by Tom Hanks again (he's done the previous two)
* Monologue and/or performance by Justin Timberlake, who either references "Dick In A Box" or sings a variation of "bring it on in to Omeletteville"
* SNL Digital Shorts montage, including (edited for prime time) "BLEEP In A Box", "Lazy Sunday", "MacGruber", and "BLEEP In My Pants"
* A handful of past hosts and musical guests introducing montages and kissing Lorne's ass for cheap applause, including Steve Martin, whose contributions to SNL are no longer considered relevant, having turned himself into nothing more than "that 'hamburger' guy"
* 70's montage including Mighty Mouse, The Wolverines, Mr. Bill, Cheeseburger, Land Shark, Judy Miller throwing herself into a door, Samurai Deli, and the same clip of Chevy calling Richard Pryor the n-word that's been in both previous specials and every single 'Best of the Classic Years' video
* Rehashed tributes to Gilda Radner and John Belushi
* Early 80's montage that skips the struggling seasons and focuses entirely on 1982-1985, with most clips featuring either Eddie Murphy or the 1984-85 cast (expect to see Synchronized Swimming, Christopher Guest saying "chocolate babies", Mr. Robinson saying "WHO IS IT?!", Buckwheat singing "Fee Tines A Mady", Fernando saying "you look marvelous", Ed Grimley excited over meeting Pat Sajak, possibly a brief clip of "I'm Gumby, dammit", and Tim Kazurinsky being hugged by a chimp)
* A shot of the audience in which Denny Dillon, Gail Matthius and Gilbert Gottfried are visible, just happy to be there and not at all surprised that none of their material has been shown
* Late 80's montage including the Master Thespian saying "acting", Lovitz telling Hartman he stinks, Dana singing about chopping broccoli, and no footage whatsoever of 1985-86
* Early 90's montage including Canteen Boy being groped by Alec Baldwin, Wayne and Garth meeting Madonna, some Operaman clips, Farley eating French fries and shouting at Spade
* Rehashed tributes to Phil Hartman and Chris Farley
* Late 90's montage including Mango, Mary Katherine Gallagher, the Cheerleaders, the Ambiguously Gay Duo, and, you guessed it, Schwetty Balls
* 2000's montage centering entirely around Kristen Wiig, except for a clip of The Barry Gibb Talk Show
* A title card that briefly mentions Charles Rocket's death, and no mention at all of the deaths of Danitra Vance and Michael O'Donoghue
* Sappy slow-motion tribute to the now-retired Don Pardo

That just about covers it. See you in October, suckers! :-P

Dedicated to the Butterfly

If you own at least one Insane Clown Posse CD, you will have probably noticed the strange liner note mentioning how the CD is "dedicated to the Butterfly." If you're a *true* ICP fan (and not, like, one of those people who bought "The Great Milenko" just because all the other kids at school had it), you most likely know what the meaning of this ever-present dedication is; but for those that don't...

It stems from a traumatic event in Violent J's childhood. One day, J and his brother spotted the most beautiful butterfly they had ever seen. They placed it in a jar, intending to set it free the next day after spending the night admiring its beauty. However, when they awoke the next morning, the butterfly was dead - an image that has haunted J ever since. So, it became a tradition to dedicate each of ICP's releases to 'the Butterfly' - J's way of apologizing to the creature he feels he unfairly robbed of life.

I've come to believe that everyone has their own Butterfly... in other words, I believe that inside every single person lies the scarring memory of a small, otherwise insignificant event that managed to leave a lasting negative impression.

I definitely know mine; several years ago, we had a number of contractors replace the siding on our house. One of them discovered a nest of baby bunnies in our front yard that we hadn't noticed. For whatever reason, the bunnies started dying while the contractors were there; before it was too late, my mother decided to try and rescue the last remaining baby. It was very small, enough to fit in the palm of your hand. We made a little makeshift home for it (I think it was a basket, but I can't remember for sure), and named it Momo. The basket was sitting on top of our stereo, which was a horrible idea on someone's part, because Momo jumped out at one point, falling about four feet.

Over the next day, we realized that he must've been gravely injured from the fall; he was no longer very active, and was becoming increasingly cold to the touch. My mother and I rushed to the pet store to buy a sort of small baby bottle so that she could feed him in an effort to nurse him back to health. After she tried for quite some time, she and my dad decided to let him rest while they went grocery shopping. I went with them, because I couldn't bear to be home alone with the bunny if it died. It did, of course, during the time we were at the store.

For whatever reason, this struck a horrendous chord inside me... for someone who usually took the deaths of our pets fairly well, I was extremely upset. The night it happened, I couldn't get to sleep, because I cried for ages, to the point where my mom asked me what the big deal was. To this day, I have no answer for that question. I suppose I just took a lot of pity on this small, defenseless animal, especially after knowing that the rest of his family had died over the last couple days.

So, I guess that Momo was my Butterfly. What most people would look at as a small, insignificant event had a large emotional impact on me that I still can't explain. Just as Violent J hopes that he'll someday be able to face the Butterfly once more in the afterlife, perhaps deep inside of me is the hope that someday in the afterlife, I will see Momo, grown and healthy; and I will be able to apologize for not preventing the abrupt, avoidable end to his short life.

Is anyone else willing to share the story of their own Butterfly?

"Nightflight To Venus" - a musical butchery?

I've come to realize over the course of time that mentioning Boney M. in America doesn't mean a whole lot to people. I was originally introduced to them after receiving a CD of megamixes, one of which blended a dozen or so Boney M. tunes, all of which I'd just assumed were hits here at some point... not true, apparently. (They're mainly known here as "whatever band that was that did a disco version of 'Mary's Boy Child'.")

A handful of their biggest hits ("Rasputin", "Painter Man", "Rivers of Babylon") stemmed from the same LP - 1978's "Nightflight To Venus". For years, all I had of this album was a very poor MP3 copy that I found on Usenet at some point, apparently ripped from the CD. It wasn't until I read a review recently, however, that I found my copy to be incomplete - previous editions were quite different.

Browsing through Wikipedia's pages about Boney M.'s albums, I came to realize that they were apparently *very* anal retentive about their material, issuing several different versions of each album. "Nightflight To Venus" was no exception - the original pressing hailed from Germany, where the group had the most popularity; and this now extremely rare version offered the most material. Over the course of the following three pressings, several songs became shorter and shorter, for reasons I'm unaware of. The worst casualty was the album's opening 13-minute medley of "Nightflight To Venus" and "Rasputin", which was eventually chopped down to nearly half its original length by the time of the 4th pressing - unfortunately, the pressing that formed the basis of the CD.

While the hit "Rasputin" mainly lost a handful of small musical passages with no lyrical changes, the title track was shuffled and hacked several times into a mere collection of edits and brief chunks. Based heavily around Cozy Powell's hit "Dance with the Devil", "Nightflight To Venus" was a drum-heavy intro, with a robotic-voiced tour guide describing the listener's flight to Venus aboard the Starship Boney M. Throughout the course of the seven minute track, he pointed out Moon City ("a boomtown if ever there was"), and detailed the process of making Venus inhabitable to humans. Great concept... though unfortunately, Boney M. seemed to disagree, as much of his dialogue was removed by the final pressing.

Thankfully, there exists a torrent (link below) that compiles variations from the four pressings of the album into a handy 2-CD set. I took the time recently to compare the four different edits of the title track, detailed below... so if you have one of the later pressings or the commercial CD, you may be surprised at how much you're missing... (Note that the changes are not merely lyrical, as the musical mix varied from pressing to pressing as well.)

=================================================

White text denotes lyrics standard to all pressings.
Pink lyrics were exclusive to the 1st pressing (7:11).
Green lyrics appeared in both the 1st and 2nd (5:53) pressings, but were later removed.
Blue lyrics appeared in the 1st, 2nd and 3rd (4:58) pressings, but were removed for the 4th/CD (4:47) pressing.
Gold lyrics appeared in the 1st, 3rd and 4th/CD pressings, but not the 2nd.
Purple lyrics appeared in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th/CD pressings, but not the 1st.

"Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard the starship Boney M. for our first passenger flight to Venus.
Ready for countdown.
Ten. (Nightflight to Venus...)
Nine.
Eight.
Seven.
Six. (Nightflight to Venus...)
Five.
Four.
Three.
Two. (Nightflight to Venus...)
One.
Ignition.
Lift-off."

Nightflight to Venus
Way out there in space
Nightflight to Venus
Our new favorite place
Nightflight to Venus
We got the all-clear [OR] All systems are go
Nightflight to Venus
The moment is here [OR] The sky is a-glow
[The verse appears twice in the first pressing only - all other pressings replace the
original latter half with the second half of the otherwise unused second verse.]

(Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!
Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!
Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!
Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!
Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!
Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!)
[This chant stands alone on pressings 1 and 2, but is mixed under the following
tour guide speech on 3 and 4. Oddly, pressing 2 is missing eight "hey"s.]

Nightflight to Venus!
Nightflight to Venus!
[As the placement of the chant differed, these sung lines appeared before the tour
guide's speech on pressings 1 and 2, but after the speech on 3 and 4.]

"Ladies and gentlemen, we have had a successful take-off on this first nightflight to Venus. Our flying time will be eight hours. You'll be travelling at a speed of 2,183 miles per second - that is, seven and one half million miles per hour. The distance from mother Earth to Venus is 60 million miles at this time."

"To your left, you can see the mountains of the Moon; and right in the center, under a huge plastic bubble, Moon City - a boomtown if ever there was one, because of the huge gold and diamond veins. As for Venus, it took almost ninety years to cool down the planet from its 500 degrees to the current pleasant 75 degrees, and to transform the atmosphere to make it inhabitable for Earth people."

Nightflight to Venus
Way out there in space
Nightflight to Venus
Our new favorite place
Nightflight to Venus
All systems are go
Nightflight to Venus
The sky is a-glow
[This verse went through a few changes - originally, it appeared in full, before losing
its last four lines for pressing 2; pressings 3 and 4 remove this verse completely. As
previously mentioned, the last four lines replaced those of the first verse in pressings 2-4.]

"Captain - unidentified object at eight o'clock. Two million miles away."
"Stand by for emergency maneuver."
"Object coming closer with the speed of light. We have eight more seconds. Object coming closer. We have five more seconds."
"Changing course by 4.6 degrees."
"Order executed."
"That was a close one, ladies and gentlemen. A meteor just passed us on its way to infinity. Well, you can see, even in space, traffic is getting heavier all the time."

"Ladies and gentlemen, in a few minutes, we are going to be landing on Venus. Push the button on your left side. The safety mechanism will do the rest for you. We hope you enjoyed the world's first nightflight to Venus. Have a good time there."

[At this point on all versions, the looped drum beat serves as a transition into "Rasputin,"
eventually accelerating to that song's slightly faster tempo.]

=================================================

Well, that should cover it; incidentally, an extremely truncated 1:30 edit of "Nightflight" (missing ALL vocal sections) was used as an intro for the 12" single of "Rasputin".

As for the torrent mentioned above, it can be downloaded from the Pirate Bay:
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/3868953/Boney_M._-_Nightflight_To_Venus_Collection_(1978__2CD)

For fans of the album, especially those disappointed by the recent remastered edition (which STILL used the butchered 4th pressing versions), this is essential, first presenting the ultimate cut of the album compiled from several different sources, followed by numerous other variations. Dig that 'marching band trumpets' version of "Rasputin"! :-P