Saturday Night Live is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary all season long, including this weekend’s presumably lavish Sunday-night special, and no discussion of the show’s legacy is complete without mentioning its influence on film comedy. Though the show is less of a TV-to-movie pipeline these days, the sheer number of movie stars (and, with them, classic comedies) that emerged from SNL is daunting: Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray, Will Ferrell, Kristen Wiig, Adam Sandler, Mike Myers, Chevy Chase, and Tina Fey, to name a few, which makes movies like Ghostbusters, Coming to America, Groundhog Day, The Wedding Singer, Anchorman, Bridesmaids, Austin Powers, Fletch, and Mean Girls at least spiritually related to NBC’s long-running comedy program. Of course, there are also instances – far fewer, despite the show’s reputation – of actual SNL characters being spun off into feature films. Only ten such movies based on live-action SNL sketches exist, and most comedy fans have probably checked out the four that are considered good: The Blues Brothers, MacGruber, and two Wayne’s World movies. The others are minor hits or outright bombs that have their fans – people who will, for example, excitedly explain that Dan Aykroyd’s feature-length film Coneheads is pretty good, actually. In fact, as it happens, you’re in the virtual presence of such a person right now.
Why Watch Coneheads Tonight?
The unexpected smash success of Wayne’s World in 1992 really did a number on producer Lorne Michaels and studio Paramount Pictures – in the sense that it seemed to convince them, probably falsely, that there was movie gold in them thar SNL hills. Wayne’s World 2 was hurried into production, naturally, but Michaels also reached further back into the archives, and found an extremely willing Dan Aykroyd. Aykroyd and Jane Curtin reprised their roles as Beldar and Prymaat, an alien couple from the planet Remulak, masquerading as humans “from France,” along with their daughter Connie (Laraine Newman on SNL; Michelle Burke in the film). The Coneheads sketches simply had them encounter various earthlings and behaving strangely, speaking in a rat-a-tat nasal jargon that’s pure, uncut Aykroyd.
That more or less describes the movie, too – both the barely-there plot, and the uncut Aykroydness of it all. Aykroyd had recently bombed with his singularly unpleasant and fascinating directorial debut Nothing But Trouble, which is probably why he wasn’t behind the camera for Coneheads. (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles director Steve Barron did the honors.) But Coneheads nonetheless serves as a sweeter, gentler complement to the aggressive, gross, and sour Nothing But Trouble. Though it was critically dismissed as a padded, one-joke 80-minute trifle back in 1993, these days it’s easy enough to read as a tribute to the hopefulness of the immigrant experience. Beldar and Prymaat still revere their home culture, but they do their best to adapt to life in New Jersey, finding that their drive to “consume mass quantities” of Earth substances both foodlike and not fits in reasonably well with a late-20th century capitalist lifestyle, even as they make little effort to hide their most obvious differences. Connie, meanwhile, grows up more assimilated, and falls in love with her lunkish high school boyfriend, played by the late Chris Farley.
Farley isn’t the only then-next-gen SNL cast member to appear. In fact, until Grown Ups 2 inched past it decades later, Coneheads held a record for the most SNL alumni to appear in a narrative feature film. Small roles are filled out by Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks, Adam Sandler, David Spade, Michael McKean, Garrett Morris, Laraine Newman (though too old to play teenage Connie, she does appear as another Conehead on Remulak), Julia Sweeney, Tim Meadows, Kevin Nealon, and Jon Lovitz. In other words, about half the cast of the show’s just-completed 18th season, plus several major alumni and, in the case of McKean, one future cast member. Today, there’s a particularly bittersweet twinge to seeing the departed Farley, Hooks, and Hartman all in a single film.
There’s also a certain poignancy when you realize that as a toddler, Connie is played by one of Aykroyd’s daughters; the movie, in its loopy way, becomes his tribute to the ways some parents try their best to normalize their deeply strange behavior in order to create a better life for their children. (Though he speaks with technical-manual precision, Beldar is also kind of a classic dad: tinkering with electronics, fixated on snacks.) This feels particularly resonant considering Aykroyd ranks among SNL’s foremost weirdos. Of course adult audiences were largely baffled or annoyed by Coneheads in 1993; a sketch-comedy series once known for its envelope-pushing had birthed a family-friendly comedy (with occasional beheadings on a far-off planet, of course), and an accompanying merchandising campaign. It may be the perfect emblem of how embedded SNL had become in the mainstream, something that probably rankles or surprises less in Season 50 than it did in Season 18.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
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