ruminations

Recently through the wonder of Netflix we started watching the original 1975-1976 Saturday Night Live episodes -- episodes that I watched live while in graduate school. They are as entertaining as I remember them, and the humor still works after all these years. One staple of those early shows was fake commercials. Don't know if Saturday Night Live still does that, because my days of staying up past 11:00 PM are long gone.

In the very first show ever aired, there was one fake commercial that absolutely fascinated me. It was a parody of a razor commercial seen frequently at the time. The first double bladed safety razor, the TracII made by Gillette first went on the market in 1971, and was followed by many imitations in the next few years. One of the real commercials -- probably for the TracII itself showed an animated image of how the first blade in the razor lifted the hair and allowed the second blade to cut the hair closer to the skin. The fake Saturday Night Live commercial made fun of the whole idea of the need for two blades by carrying the image to ridiculous extremes (or at least they thought at the time was ridiculous extremes) -- the fake commercial featured a three bladed razor!

Imagine what the Saturday Night Live comedy writers of 1975 would make of today's five bladed razors!!