Things We Did Last Summer

As a huge Bill Murray fan you can imagine my excitement when I saw this film/documentary for sale at £3 ($5). The video is 60 minutes of 70's Saturday Night Live types talking about how they spent the summer.

The Murray piece was a funny 15 minute skit on him planning on giving up comedy to train with a smalltown baseball team near Seattle. There's some great scenes especially when he pictures himself as the game winning hero! WOW - the two loves of my life wrapped up in one package I didn't even KNOW existed..all for the price of Big Mac meal (well in England anyway!)

The rest of it is quite entertaining too. Nice footage of Belushi and Aykroyd as the Blues Brothers, and a funny take by Gilda Radner selling tickets to members of the public to look around her apartment! Neat

A TV spescial that replaced SNL one night in 1978. Directed by the co- director of the Rutles movie and written by Don Novello, it's a series of filmed sketches depicting what SNL cast members did during the summer. It's not funny. It does, however, contain some concert footage of the Blues Brothers, so points for that.

The comments and summaries entered so far have left out one of the more offbeat entries: Jane Curtin's supposedly "serious" news entry about what was going on in Memphis, Tennessee, during the summer of 1977. The city was under martial law that summer after the police went on strike. And - at the risk of stating the obvious - you can bet it hit that city hard when Elvis went to that big gig in the sky that August.

It made my local (Knoxville, TN) paper that SNL had contacted the mayor of the city to ask for permission to do an impression of him as part of the sketch; as I remember, that plan was scrapped and the mayor appeared as himself. (Sorry, forget the guy's name.) And as I recall, the gag of the episode was, in the midst of all that was going on in Memphis, the only thing Jane had to report can be summed up in four words: "IT WAS VERY HOT".