Hans and Franz Would Have Been the Face of Nike If Not for Lorne Michaels
These days, it’s fairly common for Saturday Night Live cast members to appear in commercials, like how Colin Jost decided to shill for Amazon while rubbing his awesome life in all of our faces.
And it’s not all that weird to see Kenan Thompson taking an animatronic bear for a spin in a Thrifty rental car. Okay, it’s a little weird.
But there was a time when SNL-ers were actually forbidden from appearing in any ads while they were working on the show. Real ads, that is; spots for Colon Blow and Oops! I Crapped My Pants were obviously still cool.
As Dana Carvey recently revealed in an episode of the Fly on the Wall podcast, Lorne Michaels’ commercial ban meant that the Master of Disguise star missed out on launching one of the biggest campaigns in the history of advertising.
While discussing finances with fellow rich guys David Spade and Judd Apatow, Carvey admitted that he was envious of those folks who have been “leveraging whatever their career is” and “becoming a gazillionaire” as a result. When Apatow questioned why Carvey never, say, bought his own “cell service,” the comedian recalled that when he was on SNL, “you couldn’t even do a commercial.” Carvey said that he reluctantly “turned down a lot of commercials,” and the most regrettable of the bunch involved Hans and Franz.
According to Carvey, his and Kevin Nealon’s Austrian bodybuilder characters, who debuted in 1987, were asked to appear in “the first Nike campaign: ‘Just Do It,’” but they “couldn’t do it. Weren’t allowed to do it.”
When Apatow questioned, “Why? Who said no?” Both Carvey and Spade busted out their Michaels impressions. “Forces at play. It’s not what we do,” Carvey as Michaels responded.
As a result of this no-ad policy, the soon-to-be-massive slogan debuted in a 1988 commercial that instead featured an 80-year-old shirtless dude named Walter Stack who was in no way employed by Lorne Michaels or NBC.
So Carvey must have been miffed that he missed out on all that Nike money, but in retrospect, the two guys who are always talking about pumping things up really would have been a better fit for Reebok.
Michaels has obviously relaxed his “no commercials” policy these days, possibly because SNL itself has itself become a commercial to some extent. Exhibit A: the time that MacGruber randomly became obsessed with Pepsi products.
In recent years, the show has shortened the length of its commercial breaks, but then attempted to make up for the lost revenue with more sponsored content. This year, that includes a deal with Allstate insurance that will find their current mascot being incorporated into an upcoming episode.
If this trend continues, we can all look forward to an SNL episode hosted by the GEICO Gecko, with musical guest Mac Tonight.
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