The Night ‘Saturday Night Live’ Went to the Apes
On December 4, 1993, Charlton Heston hosted Saturday Night Live. While the show was solid overall, the start of the episode — including the cold open, opening montage and monologue — was something truly unique among SNL’s 900-plus episodes. Rather than try to describe it myself, however, I’ll leave it to the man who wrote and conceived of it: veteran TV writer David Mandel.
Mandel later worked on Seinfeld and Veep, but before that, he was a writer on Saturday Night Live where the opening of the Heston episode was his crowning achievement.
The Night ‘SNL’ Went to the Apes
I love format-breaking. I did the documentary episode of Veep, and I did the backwards episode of Seinfeld. Over the years, Saturday Night Live had done some very cool format-breaking that a lot of people had forgotten about. In the Charles Grodin episode, the concept is that Charles Grodin did all this tourist stuff while in New York, but he forgot to show up for rehearsal, so he didn’t know his lines and he was wandering in and out of sketches.
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There’s another one where Francis Ford Coppola is making a movie about the show while the show is going on, and he’s being a crazy megalomaniac. There’s another one where Billy Martin is hosting, and he gets fired and he sets fire to the show.
So, the idea of wanting to break the format was something I was obsessed with, and when Charlton Heston hosted, I finally got my chance.
Now, I’m a nerd. Let’s start with that. I’m a sci-fi fan and a movie prop collector. Which is why, when Charlton Heston was the host, I pitched this very extravagant opening. The cold open of the show had Charlton Heston falling asleep in his dressing room. He sleeps for a hundred years and wakes up on The Planet of the Apes, or a Saturday Night Live: Planet of the Apes.
He wakes up with a beard, he doesn’t see anyone and Planet of the Apes music is playing. He sees one stage manager, Joe Dicso, from behind. But when Joe turns around, it’s a monkey wearing stage-manager clothes. Then he’s chased by various ape soldiers and is captured. Finally, he says, “Take your stinkin’ paws off me you damn dirty apes! Live from New York, it’s Saturday night!”
However, it doesn’t end there. We re-shot the entire opening credits and replaced all the humans with gorillas and orangutans and Don Pardo re-recorded all of the opening. So it’s Saturday Night Live starring Cornelius, General Urko and all these other ape names until it gets to “speaking human Charlton Heston and singing human, Paul Westerberg.”
During the monologue, two ape soldiers brought out Charlton Heston all chained up and the audience was all apes. Next, we did a Planet of the Apes Q and A monologue where all the questions are about how he can speak. When the monologue ends, we even had G.E. Smith playing guitar in a gorilla costume.
Beneath the Faces of the Apes
To get the costumes for all the apes, we tracked down this collector by the name of Fuller French, who owned all the costumes — and I mean all of the costumes — from the Planet of the Apes movies. We flew him and the costumes in, so everyone in the cast was wearing real hero Planet of the Apes costumes while people in the back were wearing more basic masks.
Working with Charlton Heston
Heston was so cool. It was my second year on the show and I’d gotten kind of used to celebrities coming and going, but he was on a different level of fame. I remember him telling us Orson Welles stories from Touch of Evil. I even had him autograph a Touch of Evil poster. I never did a lot of autographs, but I got him to sign that.
In addition to the Planet of the Apes sketch, we did a Ten Commandments sketch that was really funny. And because we were hitting those things as sketches, he was telling stories from all those movies. He was really funny, and he knew how to play with his own reputation.
How the episode was received, I have no idea. There was no social media back then so it was hard to say. I’ll say that it went over really well with all my friends who were Planet of the Apes fans, which was good enough for me.