DVD Watch: Potential-Gift Edition

SNL: The Complete First Season

Universal Studios, $69.98

"You can only be new once," reflects Saturday Night Live producer and creator Lorne Michaels. "In that first season, all that really mattered was the work." SNL has been with us so long now it's hard to recall a time when it didn't exist. Reissues and "Best ofs" from the series' salad days have been released in so many permutations they've become like Comedy CliffsNotes, and the visceral impact of the early shows as they were originally aired has been lost like Rubber Soul in a sea of K-Tel compilations.

In 1975, Michaels – a former writer for Laugh-In – assembled a stoner repertory company of guerilla writers, improv artists, and Second City alumni – including comic force of nature John Belushi, chameleonlike sketch genius Danny Aykroyd, waifish odd-girl-out Gilda Radner, prim but sexy Jane Curtin, and – the breakout star by far – writer/performer Chevy Chase, who was and you weren't, if only for one season before departing for the greener pastures of Fletch-dom. No one quite knew what to expect at 11:32 EST on Oct. 11, 1975, when a frightened Belushi and then-head writer Michael O'Donohue took the stage at Rockefeller Center's Studio 8-H for the opening sketch. Live national television hadn't been attempted since the days of Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, let alone put into the hands of a ragtag bunch of (mostly) stoned, counterculture sketch comics and writers. With its tacit endorsement of the drug culture, commercial parodies, and assault on the status quo, SNL left pungent vapor trails that linger to this day.

But the show didn't change the medium overnight; It took a couple of months before America began to catch the distinctively subversive whiff of Michaels' incendiary experiment, which has become the longest-running comedy series in history. Here, after 32 years, is the revolutionary first season exactly as it aired, warts and all, with musical performances intact, breakout guest stars (Albert Brooks, Andy Kaufman, Billy Crystal), memorable hosts (Richard Pryor, Buck Henry, Desi Arnaz, Lily Tomlin), classic sketches ("Word Association," "Samurai Deli," "Star Trek," and Chase's signature "Weekend Update"), plus bonus features, including each cast member's screen test. "It was never the same again," lamented Michaels recently. "It was the end of innocence."