Pine as Shatner Kirk (SNL)

ORLY?

The 'my father made a baby with another chick' thing didn't register with you as Sybok?

 

Gah, accursed region blocking.

 

If they work the line "Now that's a Star Trek!" into ST4 I will pop.

 

I thought it was a good, short skit. Chris Pine's energy on SNL was very good.

 

Ughh. I've seen all the Trek SNL's (The Final Voyage of the Starship Enterprise with Belushi is the best!) and this isn't funny at all.
The sexual harassment bit really should never have been written.

 

At the very least, it was historically tone-deaf. In the '60s, men making sexual advances at female coworkers was perfectly okay; what would've gotten the scene censored was a white man expressing interest in a black woman. Well, that and the relatively graphic nature of his advance.

And did the writers of the sketch have any idea how episodic television is shot? It said the producers knew that moment would never get on the air so they let the guy do whatever he wanted for the rest of the episode. Huh? They would've just stopped filming and left that bit as an outtake. If it had become clear mid-filming that an actor was ruining the episode, they would've fired him and brought in a replacement, much as they did with Lazarus in "The Alternative Factor" when John Drew Barrymore was a no-show (although that was, fortunately, before filming started). I mean, sure, there's room for poetic license in comedy, but the whole premise of this sketch was so nonsensical that it just fell apart.

It feels like they took some generic "lost episode of classic show" routine they had lying around and hastily slapped on some Trekkish elements once they knew Chris Pine would be hosting.

 

Yeah, not very funny. Is the Spocko guy a running character? That'd make some sense of the audience breaking down on the "That's a Star Trek!" line if it was a variation on a regular catchphrase.

If you've got Pine, why not do a skit on his version of Star Trek? Have him face off against Dr. Strange or something. Hell, with his dad being Thor and three of his villains having been Marvel heroes you could probably do some mad universe mesh up quite easily.

 

least he finally got the hair right lol

 

You should be on the writing staff. If done right, that could be golden.

 

I'm not looking for the aesthetic to be accurate. Indeed, even flimsier sets than the real McCoy ads to the humour.

The sketch is a bad one because it is as someone else said, it's all very unfocused. It half lampoons one thing whilst jumping to half lampoon the other. And noone outside of fandom remembers ST: V so even that reference would be lost to most.

 

it was just sloppy. Even the Voyager/Frasier skit was funnier, and I've never seen Frasier!

 

Christopher, this sketch is just one of a number of television productions that have poked fun at television shows in ways that defy the way actual day-to-day production works. And they do this even though (prepare to have your mind blown) they actually make TV shows and know how it really works.

I believe you alluded to this when you mentioned poetic license, but I'm just going to assume you have an insufficient grasp of the concept. So allow me to explain:

You may recall the classic multi-episode arc of Degrassi: The Next Generation featuring Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes as themselves. Actually, since they appeared on a number of occasions, let me specify the storyline to which I refer: this took place in the fourth season, in the episodes West End Girls, Goin' Down the Road, and Goin' Down the Road Part Two, also released on DVD as Jay and Silent Bob Do Degrassi independently of the rest of the season, presumably for fans of Kevin Smith's Jay and Silent Bob films (beginning with the 1994 film Clerks, which was an independent film shot in black and white on a limited budget, and which was one of a wave of films launching independent directors to stardom in that period, including Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino) who were unfamiliar with Degrassi: The Next Generation, itself a long running Canadian teen soap opera continuing on from Degrassi Junior High and Degrassi High. It does not occur in the same continuity as the original parent series that launched the franchise, Kids of Degrassi Street, though they share creators and some of the cast members. But as continuity is a nebulous concept and in no way a goal in and of itself (even if it were possible, which it isn't) and since (prepare yourself) none of this is real, it is, again, fictional, this actually isn't relevant to my point.

Anyway, it occurs to me that you may not have picked up on the fact that all three episode titles (well, two technically) are also song titles: West End Girls by the Pet Shop Boys and Goin' Down the Road, popularized by Woody Guthrie, but with roots that go farther back into folk music history. This is not a coincidence; but a longstanding tradition in the Degrassi series. That song also shares its title with a popular Canadian film, which is fitting as in the story Kevin Smith (again, playing a fictional version of himself that does not exist in reality) comes to Degrassi, a Canadian high school, to film his latest movie, Jay and Silent Bob Go Canadian, Eh? This is in reference to the titles of previous Jay and Silent Bob films, although it does not actually exist. If it did, and if continuity were not a meaningless fictional construct in this context, it would probably go between Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and Clerks II. The "Eh" in the title refers to an exclamation attributed to Canadians as part of an unfair sterotype. (In truth, "Eh" is used throughout the north and midwest of the United States, making its popular attribution to Canadians highly unfair.)

Anyway, there is a scene where the main characters (in the movie-within-the-show, not in the show) are confronted by a Canadian ninja (another lazy stereotype; the ninja appears wearing the inaccurate garb popularly associated with the ninja--a "stealthy" black suit with a face wrap. In actuality, ninja dressed as farmers and other civilians to better blend in and gather intelligence. This suit may come from the dress worn by Japanese stagehands, the kuroko--if you follow, and I doubt you do, this means that the wearer would only have been "invisible" in a theatrical context!), and there is a fight scene.

This fight is depicted in two methods simultaneously--as it is being filmed in the Degrassi school, and as it would appear in the final movie. (Again, if it actually existed--the editors were just creating a sequence that looked like it could have come from the movie.) So there is intercutting between "real time" with the actors (actors playing actors) and the final product, complete with special effects and music, and the actors are reacting to things that would only be apparent in the finished film.

Now the creators of Degrassi and, obviously, Kevin Smith himself have been in television long enough to realize that this is not how audio/visual production works. Nevertheless, it was used for comedic effect, as it was in the SNL skit. This is just one of many examples of this kind of thing in the long history of television.

I agree that the skit was pretty terrible, but now that you have all this information I believe you'll know better than to question the familiarity of writers, even sketch writers, with the television production process when actually they are doing this intentionally.

TC

 

Actually, from what I've been able to hear, the music heard in that sketch was mostly from the Varese Sarabande rerecordings. There are VERY brief snippets from the Label X suite of "The Enemy Within," but most of it came from the VS rerecordings of "Mirror, Mirror," "By Any Other Name" and "The Empath." I don't think anything used in "The Restaurant Enterprise" was unreleased at that time.

 

I had all the released albums at the time, and I distinctly remember the sketch using cues that weren't on the albums, which is exactly why they stood out to me when I heard them.

 

Give it a listen:

https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/star-trek-v-the-restaurant-enterprise/n9513?snl=1

I had the albums at the time, too. Still do. All of what I can hear came from them.

Side Note: Keven Nealon makes a terrible Spock, but would make a great Data. Phil Hartman was perfect. And then, there's Sulu.

 

Almost everyone makes a terrible Spock. Prior to Zachary Quinto's dead-on performance, the only good Spock impression I ever saw was Tim Russ playing Tuvok.

 

The skit wasn't that funny, but I like that Pine got to do more shatnerisms (and I mean that respectfully -- he does them sincerely in the movies). I'll still take this over that terrible The Love Boat: The Next Generation skit starring Patrick Stewart.