The "Not - Ready - To - Spend - Any - Money - On - The - Chris - Kattan - Years"

Recent news from Digital Bits informs us that, after being bombarded with a slew of single disc DVD's that focus on individual performers and themes, NBC is going to finally give us all of it.

They're giving us the whole. damn. thing.



Now think about this for a moment. SNL is currently in it's thirty-second season. It's logical to assume that they aren't going to stop at season one or even season five (though, if I ever have the inclination to buy any of these gargantuan sets, my purchases won't likely go past this point). According to the episode guide, there was a total of 604 episodes in seasons one to thirty-one. At 70 minutes an episode (90 minutes minus commercials), that means a complete set of box sets of the past 31 seasons will come to just over 704 hours of material. Watching this at a rate of, say, 16 hours a day would mean you could complete it in a month and a half.

Damn.

I can't imagine anyone who would want to do this, myself very much included. All the number crunching I did is just to demonstrate what a friggin huge amount of material this is. And a great deal of it, sorry to say, sucks.

But as I said, I may be tempted to grab at least Season One. If nothing else, it would be a great time capsule. When George Carlin took the stage as host of the premier episode on October 11, 1975, I was one day shy of my second birthday. I obviously don't remember watching it during that first run, but I did catch the truncated episodes they showed on Nick at Nite When I was in High School.

Those are good memories. Perhaps even good enough to blow eighty dollars on Season One.