Live From New York, It’s Saturday Night!

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MARVEL TEAM-UP — Issue no. 74, January 1978

Book: Marvel Team-Up

Issue No.: 74

Published: July 25, 1978

Title: “Live From New York, It’s Saturday Night!”

Cover Price: 35¢

Format: Digital scan

Sometimes the events involved in the creation of a piece of fiction are more interesting than the piece of fiction itself. I suspect that might be the case with this issue of Marvel Team-Up, where Spider-Man teams up with the cast of the TV show Saturday Night Live (AKA the Not-Ready-For-Prime-Time Players) to defeat super-villain Silver Samurai.

My guess is Marvel founder Stan Lee (or maybe EIC Jim Shooter, or maybe Chris Claremont, who wrote this story) was a fan of Saturday Night Live, which had been around for three years or so in 1978, and Lee or Shooter or Claremont or whoever managed to get permission from NBC to feature the SNL cast (which included Gilda Radner, John Belushi, and Bill Murray at the time) in a Marvel comic book.

But that’s just a guess. The only behind-the-scenes tidbit mentioned on the Fandom.com Marvel wiki page is that when Marvel reprints this era of Team-Up books these days, this issue is omitted because Marvel no longer has the rights to the actors’ likenesses or the Saturday Night Live brand. So that’s one thing that Dan Aykroyd and Godzilla have in common — both are former Marvel Comics characters who get excluded from modern reprint collections.

Stan Lee himself also appears in this story — the setup has Lee hosting Saturday Night Live, with Marvel character Rick Jones as the musical guest. Was Jones big enough a music star in the 1978 Marvel universe to host SNL? Or did he just get the gig because he was friends with Stan Lee? I forget exactly how the laws of Marvel creators appearing in Marvel comic books work, but I think the creators and characters are friends.

Two panels from this issue. In the first, Silver Samurai attacks John Belushi (who is dressed like a samurai). Silver Samurai’s sword glows with pink energy. Silver Samurai says, “Aye, stripling. And you’ll either surrender it willingly — or I’ll tear it from your fresh-slain corpse!” Belushi says, “Yikes!” In the second panel, three men are looking at a TV monitor screen. Caption reads, “At that moment, in the control room…” One man says, “Jacko, check the monitor! Something’s happening onstage that isn’t in the director’s script!”

Anyway, as you have probably figured out by now, the whole affair is pretty silly. The Silver Samurai and a bunch of his goons show up at the studio for a Saturday Night Live broadcast to find a ring (it looks like jewelry but actually powers some kind of teleportation device) that was mistakenly sent to John Belushi. And Spider-Man is in the SNL audience as his alter ego Peter Parker, on a date with Mary Jane Watson.

Silver Samurai and company are supposed to be keeping a low profile, but they do a terrible job of that, and chaos ensues. But! The audience at Saturday Night Live thinks the chaos is part of the show and rolls with it. At the story’s end, Stan Lee comments, “Y’know, kids, I had a great time, but the live show was nothing like the rehearsals.” Gilda Radner replies, “It never is, Stan. That’s why it’s so much fun.”

Next time — Stan Lee shows up as a character in another Marvel book!

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