‘SNL’ to Become Your Child’s Least Favorite Little Golden Book
Saturday Night Live has churned out a lot of extraneous merchandise over the years — from T-shirts, to board games, to the Marvel comic book in which Spider-Man teams up with John Belushi to stop a magical Samurai from killing Lorne Michaels and destroying 30 Rock. (The less said about the video game in which Wayne Campbell uses the power of rock and roll to defeat donut mutant abominations, the better.)
With the show celebrating its 50th season, we’re getting even more SNL-branded crap this year, including socks, ornaments and, of course, life-sized cardboard cutouts of the A Night at the Roxbury guys — perfect for putting up in your home to ward off any potential romantic partners.
nbcstore.com
Now, it turns out that we’re also getting a Saturday Night Live-themed children’s book, which is good news for parents who are sick and tired of how Goodnight Moon doesn’t contain a single character played by Peter Davidson.
Specifically, it’s part of the Little Golden Book series, and will apparently feature familiar SNL characters like Gilda Radner’s Roseanne Roseannadanna, “What Up with That?” host Diondre Cole and the Spartan Cheerleaders played by Will Ferrell and Cheri Oteri. Oh, and they’re all rendered as Funko Pops, because synergy.
Penguin Random House
“Live from bedtime... it’s Saturday Night Live in its first ever Little Golden Book!” reads the publisher’s description. “From Coneheads to cowbells, Saturday Night Live has kept us laughing for 50 years. Now some of their funniest characters and skits come to life in this Little Golden Book.”
What’s the story going to be? Who the hell knows. The book is supposed for children from ages two to five, but do kids that age even know what SNL is? Over on the SNL subreddit, fan reactions ranged from “barf” to “this is a weird timeline” to “what the fuck is even happening?”
But this is hardly the first baffling Little Golden Book based on an adult property. As we’ve mentioned before, there was a Funko Pop Seinfeld book, which, weirdly, featured an illustration of the scene where Jerry is gassed by his sex criminal dentist. There have also been Little Golden Books featuring characters from The Office, The Golden Girls and Friends.
In addition to the SNL release, in the near future Little Golden Books will seemingly be rolling out stories based on Stranger Things, The X-Files and Gilmore Girls. It’s unclear whether or not children will be psyched that their parents can only be bothered to read to them if it involves pop-culture franchises for adults with which they have a pre-existing relationship.
But none of these books are quite as strange as the Little Golden Books biography series. After all, what child wouldn’t want to spend their bedtime learning about John McCain or King Charles III.
At least he’s not depicted as a buyable hunk of plastic, I guess.
