In today's Friday Know-It-All, Editor-in-Chief Aaron looks back at some lost moments from “Saturday Night Live” history.

We’re nearly three weeks into the 50th season of “Saturday Night Live,” and Moo Deng appearance aside, it’s been a scandal-free season. Between the surprising cold open guest appearances, the Jason Reitman film that hits wide release today, and ubiquitous think pieces, retrospectives, and listicles, listicles, listicles everywhere, everyone seems on board with celebrating and examining the legacy of the show. And sure, that’s well and good — but I don’t think any of us realize how carefully cultivated that legacy has been.

Editor Ruby put together a round in September on various kinds of lost media (“Love’s Labour’s Won,” the “Batgirl” movie, Wilt Chamberlain’s record high-scoring game, etc. It was a great round! Hope you got to play it!). As we were then in the midst of our SNL theme night, that got me thinking about “Saturday Night Live” material that just… goes away. I’m not talking here about the sketches that are killed at dress rehearsal — that’s its own category, and “The Seth Meyers and Lonely Island Podcast” has some great examples of it — but the content that gets to air and then, for one reason or another, gets locked away in the vault, never to be seen again.

We remember the show for its highlights, the sizzle reels of Land Sharks and Roseanne Roseannadannas, Church Ladys and Debbies Downer. Less so for, oof, “Commie Hunting Season,” or the Loud Couple, or double oof, Elon Musk’s “Gen Z Hospital” for a good reason: a lot of it doesn’t stick around.

It makes sense that every moment from a 50-year-old program wouldn’t be available. That’s a lot of stuff to cover, after all (about 66,000 minutes without commercials, by my calculations!), that exists in a media landscape that has changed rapidly over those years, and legality hasn’t always kept pace. Music copyright protections alone, for instance, have prevented many a musical guest’s performance from making it to reruns, or Hulu, or NBC’s site, or Peacock, and incidental music in live sketches can also thwart availability. But I’m not interested in all that — I want to know why some sketches are immortalized into reruns and streaming, and why some just aren’t.

James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales get into this a bit in their 2002 oral history “Live From New York” — in particular, the swath of episodes that occurred during the Doumanian/Ebersol era. For those not in the know, producer Lorne Michaels left the show in 1980 after its wildly successful initial five-year run, and the entire cast and nearly the entire writing staff followed. The show was left in the care of associate producer and talent coordinator Jean Doumanian, and then NBC vice president and absolutely-not-a-comedy-guy Dick Ebersol, both of whom were… well, not great at running SNL. These were the Joe Piscopo/Charles Rocket dark ages of the show, an era that produced material like, ugh, “The Whiners,” with only one real redeeming bit of casting: a 20-year-old kid named Eddie Murphy. When Michaels returned to the show in 1985, he largely purged reruns of the previous five years. In “Live From New York,” former head writer Andrew Smith said:

“Lorne rules the reruns now. Any clips or anything like that, it’s as if the Ebersol years didn’t exist. Once in a while he’ll throw in an Eddie Murphy, but whenever there’s a clip show, it’s like those years of Ebersol’s just disappear.”

Like many of my fellow olds, my contact with SNL’s back catalog in the days before streaming was through Comedy Central reruns — episodes trimmed to 42-or-so minutes to fit into an hour-long slot by, say, cutting out one of the musical performances and losing a handful of sketches — and even as a religious viewer, I was served up very little from the 1980–85 years. The existence of platforms like YouTube and Peacock have changed that a bit, of course, but still: Peacock’s complete catalog of all 50 SNL seasons is hardly complete.

Internecine producer politics aside, let’s talk about some content that went away, never to return. The first of these is also arguably the most famous: In October 1992, Sinead O’Connor tore up a picture of the pope after an a cappella cover of Bob Marley’s “War,” in protest of sex abuse cover-ups within the Catholic church. The incident caused an obvious furor, and reruns either elided the performance or replaced it with the dress rehearsal footage. Peacock’s version of the episode has neither of O’Connor’s performances for that night. (You can find the entire performance, with a very large and annoying watermark, over on YouTube.)

More recently, in 2017 SNL aired a parody commercial for auto glass company Safelite in which Beck Bennett’s Safelite tech creeps on a teenage Melissa Villaseñor. The real Safelite was understandably upset about the portrayal, and NBC pulled the clip from reruns and scrubbed it from streaming. Even in an age where nothing ever truly disappears from the internet, this is the best version I could turn up.

The reasons for “Safelite” and O’Connor’s extirpation are pretty clear. Less so for our next example, a 1998 “Saturday TV Funhouse” segment called “Conspiracy Theory Rock,” a genuinely catchy animated musical segment, a la “Schoolhouse Rock,” that sends up the industrial giants that control American media. Like Sinead, it aired as scheduled and then was cut from reruns. But here’s where it gets interesting: conspiracy theories about “Conspiracy Theory Rock” claim that the network pressured Michaels to remove it, perhaps due to some particularly pointed digs at NBC’s parent company GE and their involvement in cancer-causing pollution, military hardware, and, uh, NBC firing Norm McDonald because he made too many jokes about O.J. Simpson.

Social media dredged up the “Conspiracy Theory Rock” scandal again in the 2010s, and caused such a storm that Snopes had to hop in to debunk with the official line, which is that Lorne Michaels cut it from reruns not because his corporate overlords demanded it, but because he didn’t find it funny. (But hey, this is the same guy who greenlit like 300 “Mango” sketches, so maybe there’s no accounting for taste.) For his part, the segment’s writer Robert Smigel weighed in on Instagram and doesn’t seem especially upset about its banishment. He also notes that it’s on the “Best of TV Funhouse” DVD, but according to my research, it didn’t make the cut on Peacock. You can draw your own conclusions about why that one’s gone.

Then there are the nearly full episodes, like a 1982 Robert Blake-hosted episode that is mostly erased from history. Of its original runtime, only 21 minutes made it to Peacock: the opening credits, one sketch, parts of “Weekend Update,” a very short Eddie Murphy monologue, and the goodnights. Incidentally, a writer quoted in “Live from New York” nominates Blake as the worst-ever host. (Don’t know who Robert Blake is? Don’t worry, I had to IMDb him too — turns out he [checks notes] played Mickey in “Our Gang,” starred in “In Cold Blood,” played Detective Tony Baretta in the TV show “Baretta,” and, uh… probably murdered his wife. Great!)

Season 31’s streaming presence is full of episodes like Blake’s (minus the murder). Lindsay Lohan’s episode is 18 minutes total and consists of only a handful of sketches, including the first “Laser Cats.” Jon Heder’s is just 16 minutes! Scarlett Johansson’s is only 15! I can’t speak to the reasons behind these episodes’ brutal culling, but their content, 90 minutes of comedy on which hundreds of people worked very hard, is just gone.

But maybe that’s not always a bad thing. Fair warning: our last example gets sad.

On October 25, 1997, Chris Farley returned to the show to host. Fresh off a string of Hollywood successes but after years of alcohol and drug abuse, his health was visibly failing, to the point where SNL brought in Chris Rock as a replacement host in the event that Farley couldn’t perform. Farley did do the show, with sweaty, out-of-breath aplomb, turning in a performance that teetered toward trainwreck. It’s heartbreaking in retrospect, and when Chris Farley died less than two months later, Michaels reportedly vowed he never wanted anyone to see the episode again. It was pulled from the rerun rotation, and except for a few sketches that made it onto best-of compilations, largely disappeared into the ether… until Peacock revived it.

The version there includes about half the sketches, including the final appearance of Matt Foley, Motivational Speaker… but it also includes the saddest part, a segment that had all but disappeared for 25 years: the cold open and monologue. A rare example of a cold open whose gag bleeds into the monologue, the premise there is that Lorne Michaels doesn’t want Farley to host the show, because he’s such a mess. With the intervention of Tim Meadows and Farley’s “sponsor,” the just-out-of-Betty-Ford-Clinic Chevy Chase, Lorne is finally convinced, but Farley — who in real life had been literally released from rehab to host the show — screws up and lets him down. There’s a last-minute rally, of course, and everything works out fine, but the takeaway joke is that Farley is an irredeemable screwup on a collision course with tragedy — who then made that collision in real life just weeks later. It’s awful that it’s all there on video, a segment that only serves to make the SNL powers-that-be look cheap and mean-spirited, does Farley’s legacy a disservice, and perhaps worst of all, just isn’t very funny. Michaels was utterly justified in having the episode memory-holed for so many years. And no, I won’t link to it here, because it bummed me out. More importantly, it made me reconsider whether our cultural completism, our demand that everything ever be available all the time, isn’t occasionally misplaced. Sometimes it’s maybe better to let things disappear.

But hey, let’s not end on such a sour note. Instead, let’s wrap things up with our own Trivia Mafia SNL Retrospective Think Piece Listicle™. Back in the summer, when Ruby was putting the SNL theme together, she asked our staff what their favorite SNL pieces were, off the top of their heads. Here’s what they said: