SNL50: The Ten Best Animation Sketches

Saturday Night Live JUST started bringing back animated shorts a couple of weeks ago but the sketch series that is slated to celebrate it’s 50th anniversary this coming Saturday has a long history with various animated art forms. From stop-motion to puppets and more, the show has helped shepherd hundreds of established voice actors and creators over the years that, to this day, still contribute quite a bit. Here’s a rundown of some of the best-known sketches that have lampooned classic brands in animation like Filmation, Hanna-Barbera, and more. Of note, I didn’t put any Rankin/Bass send-ups because that entire category of parodies belongs to MADtv.

10) Puppet Class

Mike O’Brien is going to appear a couple of times on this list because he’s one of the more underrated writers in the history of SNL. I know I may get some heat for counting this one as an animated sketch, but puppet animation has been a part of the Lorne Michaels-created series from the beginning and with the likes of Seth MacFarlane and Bill Hader having shown up on one of the sketches dueling voices for their stuffed counterparts how anybody watching this not green light anything with Hader opposite MacFarlane just goes to show Hollywood has no imagination.

---

9) The Anatominals Show

SNL writer Robert Smigel dominates this list largely due to his creation TV Funhouse which is all over the place and rightfully so. One could argue that Adult Swim pretty much built an entire network in the early 2000’s from ideas that Smigel was already doing with his own animated shorts that largely lampooned classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons like Yogi Bear. In this one, the guys imagined what it would be like if cartoon characters from Yogi Bear were anatomically accurate to their real-life counterparts. The answer? A lot of bulges.

---

8) The All-New Adventures of Mr. T

Featuring the likes of Tracy Morgan in the lead role along with Ana Gasteyer and a very young Andrew Daly whom would go on to be a very affluent voice actor for pretty much every animated series on television. The All-New Adventures of Mr. T would heavily lampoon the classic Ruby Spears-produced kids show with missions that were anything but serious. In a bit to keep his fledgling acting career moving, Mr. T. would audition for anything and everything…that is if he were to show up on time.

---

7) The X-Presidents

For a show that had a Dana Carvey that could probably have voiced a lot of these guys, instead Robert Smigel turned to Jim Morris to voice a number of former Presidents of the United States including the likes of Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, George Bush 1, and Jimmy Carter that teamed up to form a superteam and fight crime not unlike Filmation’s catalog of cheaply-produced series from the 1960’s. One could make the argument of that of all of the TV Funhouse shorts, X-Presidents is probably the most TV-ready.

---

6) Dragon Babies

Mike O’Brien returns with more of a behind-the-scenes look at what it’s like to work for a company such as Pixar. Amy Schumer did a similar bit on Inside Amy Schumer years later, but anyone thinking making shit for kids is a 24/7 love fest would be in for a rude surprise. SNL does a pretty accurate take on the real world of what a lot of voice jobs used to look like before the age of remote acting became more commonplace.

---

5)The Michael Jackson Show

The legendary Dino Stamatopoulos (Mary Shelley’s Frankenhole) voiced the lead in this Hanna Barbera-inspired cartoon all about keeping Michael Jackson away from under-aged children. Featuring not just Michael but depictions of Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor, and for whatever reason Elephant Man, everyone did their best to try and keep Mike away from the kiddos. Bubbles the monkey would later be shopped for an animated TV series pilot from Dino’s Starburns Industries but to no avail.

---

4) Middle-Aged Mutant Ninja Turtles

Maybe I’m a bit biased because the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is one of my favorite comics series and the original kids animated series was such a fandom when I was younger that this would be ranked this high, but Middle-Aged Mutant Ninja Turtles doesn’t go down the route of say Ronin in trying to understand where the Turtles are in present-day and instead focuses on the much more miserable day-to-day more accurate lives of what a once-great superhero team is at today.

---

3) The Land of Gorch

The writers of Saturday Night Live had no interest in Jim Henson’s vision of having puppet characters geared towards a more adult audience when the series launched in the mid-1970s. After only a season of Dregs and Vestiges, Henson grew weary of the SNL writers and opted to produce another television series entirely that would be more adult-skewing than his already established Sesame Street and featuring a character that he’d been working with for a number of years up until this point. That being Kermit the Frog and The Muppets. Years later, the Muppets characters would make occasional appearances on Saturday Night Live which seemed to confirm that Jim was right all along.

---

2) Mr. Bill

The Walter Williams-created clay character was an inspiration from kids shows of the seventies and only went for a couple of seasons before he would try his hand at Hollywood, but Mr. Bill’s lead characters had problems yo. When Bill wasn’t scrapping for cash he was usually on the lamb with his trusty sidekick Spot the dog. Years before Kenny from South Park would do the same, Mr. Bill would typically meet some sort of gruesome end in a number of hilarious ways.

---

1) The Ambiguously Gay Duo

Obviously the gold-standard of animated television on SNL’s TV Funhouse where the legend has surpassed even the show itself. Having made at stops at both the Dana Carvey Show and SNL, the two lead characters Ace (Stephen Colbert) and Gary (Steve Carrell) have reached a level of household fame that has stood the test of time. It should be noted that as Colbert was attempting to get to the pinnacle of his success, a lot of his early show-biz wins came in the form of being a part of a number of voice casts including those of Harvey Birdman and The Venture Bros., and will occasionally still take on a voice-acting part here and there.