Make An Argument
Why this is a fine time to be a twentysomething
By Eric Hughes
June 1, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Jump ahead about a dozen years - to an SNL Digital Short from early May - and the Michael Bolton hilarity train is at it again. Only this time it’s Michael, in the flesh, crooning about Jack Sparrow being a “pauper of the surf” and “jester of Tortuga.”
I was positively tickled by the thing. I’ll kindly explain why.
I’m not alone here in admitting that the soundtrack to my late ‘80s, early ‘90s upbringing would include songs by Celine Dion, Toni Braxton, Whitney Houston, Boyz II Men and, of course, Michael Bolton. In fact, either “How Am I Suppose to Live Without You” or “When a Man Loves a Woman” would probably kick the album off if such a disc existed. My mother wore down her Michael Bolton CDs like they were LPs.
As I watched the short, I couldn’t help but think SNL’s writers grew up in similar households. I mean, who else but their moms enabled his 1991 album, Time, Love & Tenderness, to go Platinum eight times over?
Whereas Mike Judge, in his mid thirties at the time he was writing Office Space, did little more than nod at the lameness of the Michael Bolton brand, the guys behind the SNL short operated without meanspirited ‘tude. Instead, I like to think they just wanted to tap into personal nostalgia on this one. They, like I, have committed Michael Bolton to memory because his iconic bellows were there at the dinner table, and in the mini-van, and at the family reunion grill off out back.
The whole thing makes me wonder what viewers 10 years or so my junior would get from the short. Would they think it funny? Probably. On a basic level, it’s an older dude interrupting a hip-hop video to whimper about the seven seas and Keira Knightley. But would they have a similar appreciation for the short as us men and women who grew up with Bolton? I say no, which feels empowering. I think Andy Samberg and The Lonely Island designed the sketch with us twentysomethings in mind, and that’s nice.
The ties that bind us twentysomethings together run deeper than Michael Bolton, though. I started realizing those ties, I think, in middle to high school when my friends and I would engage in regular debates over which Nickelodeon cartoon was best: Rocko’s Modern Life or Doug?
The same was true of its game shows. In homeroom my senior year, we somehow got our teacher’s approval to allow us to watch daily reruns of Legends of the Hidden Temple in lieu of announcements and other important stuff. And just as we remembered, the Silver Snakes made it through to the Temple Run nine times out of ten, but would falter when it came time to assemble the statue in the Shrine of the Silver Monkey.
We eventually tired of Legends some and moved on to Global Guts with Mike O’Malley and the most important referee ever to come out of England: Mo. Again, the most agile 10-year-old athletes circa 1995 called Brazil home.
Next to these - and All That, and Kenan & Kel and… - I don’t know that there’s a twentysomething who matters alive today who wasn’t there for the theatrical releases of The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King and Pocahontas. I hold no grudges to those who skipped over The Rescuers Down Under (sandwiched between Mermaid and Beauty). I didn’t see it either.
With that said, it seems fitting that SNL would incorporate those fabled animated movies into recent sketches, too. A couple years ago, Jason Sudeikis and guest Rosario Dawson were Aladdin and Jasmine, respectively, in a spoof on their unhappy lives together 10 years after their wedding. Instead of “A whole new world/A new fantastic point of view,” it’s “The spark is gone/How did we let it get so bad?”
It may be true that Aladdin is so deeply rooted into pop culture that the sketch appealed to a mass audience anyway, but what do you make of what SNL did this season with The Little Mermaid? The sketch, which mysteriously cannot be freely streamed on Hulu, aired a few days after bin Laden’s death and had Ariel, Sebastian and other characters grappling with bin Laden’s body, which had sunk down next to them at the bottom of the ocean.
The idea might be simple, but what I find most interesting about the sketch is that the writers went with Mermaid - not Spongebob, or Finding Nemo nor any other underwater show or movie that came out later on. Instead, the writers stuck with The Little Mermaid, which I guess was a more comfortable platform for the writers to build their sketch from - even though the movie was theatrically released some 22 years ago?
Don’t you see, young twentysomethings? We’ve aged some from our innocent days of Michael Bolton on loud en route to the grocery store or Saturday morning reruns of Rugrats and The Adventures of Pete and Pete. If nostalgia is your thing, then know that it might be in your favor to pay closer attention to media.
Offhandedly, Community’s Troy could hardly compose himself during a chance encounter with LeVar Burton. Younger people may have felt in the dark for that gag, but viewers around Troy’s age probably understand what was at work there.
Now, if only SNL would get crackin’ on a Salute Your Shorts spoof…