Saturday Night Live: 14 Characters That Deserve Their Own Movies (And Those That Didn’t)
The SNL sketch to feature film pipeline seems to have been shut down as we haven’t seen one since MacGruber’s 2010 release. But why is that? Coneheads, Wayne’s World, and Superstar are all comedy classics, but there are a few more characters that should have made the cut as well. Here are 11 characters that deserved their own SNL films, and three that just couldn’t seem to get it right.
Stefon - Deserving
Stefon out on the town going to New York’s hottest clubs would be a cinematic masterpiece that film students would study for hundreds of years. Don’t you want to see the human traffic cones and mesh bladder implants come to life? We could visit such hot clubs as Wesh, Crease, Twice, Trash, Gush, Your Mother And I Are Separating, Jelly Bones or the club that just sounds like a cat hissing.
Matt Foley - Deserving
Matt Foley feels like a strong enough character to carry the weight of an entire feature film. Foley perhaps starts a summer camp for misbehaving teens and inevitable hijinks ensue. Maybe he could have traveled the country in his van to reprimand the most at-risk teens in the nation. There are a million directions they could have gone with this one, but it’s safe to say we won’t be seeing it.
Marty and Bobbie Culp - Deserving
Broadway Video
Between 1996 and 2002, Will Ferrell and Ana Gasteyer performed this sketch as Marty and Bobbie Culp a total of 19 times. This duo of middle school music teachers could show their rise to national fame. Or perhaps the trials and tribulations the two go through in an effort to raise enough money to save their school. I don’t really care what the plot is, I just want Will Ferrell and Ana Gasteyer to star in a movie together.
The Ladies Man - Undeserving
This Tim Meadows movie based around his character Leon Phelps or, The Ladies Man, was absolutely destroyed by critics upon its release. The film was used as an example of taking a shallow character and attempting to push it to feature length proportions. The New York Post called it, “Arguably the limpest film yet spun out from a Saturday Night Live sketch.”
Mindy Grayson - Deserving
I have to know more about Mindy Grayson’s life from the Secret Word sketches on SNL. I must see how she does on Broadway. If I had the power, I'd produce this movie into a Walk Hard: The Dewy Cox Story style biopic about Mindy Grayson's life.
Brian Fellows - DeservingImagine it, a Between Two Ferns: The Movie-style tale showing us the behind-the-scenes shenanigans going on at whatever public access station Brian Fellows operates from. I can see it now, Tracy Morgan interacting with different animals and inevitably being attacked by something like a snake or feral coyote. The movie writes itself, baby! He’s Brian Fellows!
The Falconer - Deserving
I mean, this sketch is essentially the story of the most interesting man to ever live. In a movie, we'd finally get the chance to learn why he left his job as an advertising executive to move into the woods and become The Falconer. The sketch, much like MacGruber, always focuses on an emergency that he and the falcon are aiming to fix, meaning we are used to seeing how he handles conflict, which is usually in some over-the-top fashion. The only question is, would they CGI the hawk or keep the puppet?
Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer - Deserving
In a perfect world, this Phil Hartman sketch would have gone on to become a gritty crime drama, which rarely ever references the fact that he is a caveman. This 1991 sketch debuted long before Geico and NBC ruined our enjoyment of cavemen in comedies.
White Like Me - Deserving
This sketch, following Eddie Murphy as he goes undercover as a white man in America, deserves to be a movie, even today. The story of a black man learning that white people basically live in a utopia whenever black people leave the room is rife with satire, and a brilliant central idea that could withstand an hour and a half plot in the mockumentary format. Like if White Chicks met Nathan For You and This is Spinal Tap.
A Night At The Roxbury - Undeserving
Regardless of whether you have any fond memories of watching this movie on Comedy Central at 1PM on a Tuesday, this was just a very, very weak premise to hang an entire film on. The original sketch's comedy derives from funny dances and its representation of nightclub douches, something that takes four minutes to handle, not 82.
The Chippendales - Deserving
A buddy movie focused around the relationship of aspiring male dancers and best friends Patrick Swayze and Chris Farley? It’s almost too good to be true… which is probably why we never got it. Bob Odenkirk has famously bashed the sketch and Chris Rock said that he thinks Chippendale’s fed into Farley's negative opinion of himself. Still, if the movie had time to flesh out these characters it could have become a message of body positivity rather than just exploiting Farley's body type.
Colleen Rafferty - Deserving
An epic tale following the alien abduction and extensive probing of Kate McKinnon’s Colleen Rafferty could have been (or still could be) a fantastic vehicle for impressive visuals and storytelling. Have you ever seen a movie focused around a single person being completely unphased by alien technology and experimentation? Also, the aliens she describes act so differently from the aliens we generally associate with abductions, giving McKinnon a lot of freedom to create alien characters unlike any we have ever seen in movies. Please give us this Kate McKinnon/ Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy combo.
It’s Pat - Undeserving
An entire film dedicated to a character whose whole schtick is you can’t tell their gender? How on earth did that premise get made into a feature film? Julia Sweeny’s annoying, shrill, and overly-obnoxious character is hard to stand for five minutes let alone 70 minutes. The film literally has a zero percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Laser Cats - Deserving
I want a Laser Cats feature-length movie but made in the same style as the original sketches. I want this movie to have a budget of $300. I want this movie to have cameos from the biggest stars in the world wearing aluminum foil robot costumes. Just make the call Lorne, I’ll pay handsomely.
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Top Image: Broadway Video
