Writing about Charles Rocket on Friday made me think about Saturday Night Live a bit more than usual, not that I've regularly watched the show for, oh, well over a decade at this point. (I only catch the show these days if there's a musical guest on whom I like.) I don't have any memories of catching Rocket on SNL, but I do have the vaguest memories of catching the later days of Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo's tenure on the show. (I can remember catching Murphy's "Mister Robinson's Neighbourhood" skits at an age where I was far, far too young to understand the social commentary at work.) I regularly caught the show in the late 80s, though, and I guess to me that's "my" SNL: Dana Carvey, Jan Hooks, Victoria Jackson, and Dennis Miller back when he was still funny. (I think Miller's departure from the show pretty much ended me catching it on a regular basis, particularly since I never thought Kevin Nealon was funny in the slightest when doing "Weekend Update.")
In a similar way, I guess "my" MTV was back in the 1990s. Although I think MTV reached its peak in the late 1990s with the peak of Lilith Fair and Daria, I watched regularly through most of the 1990s. I liked a lot of the alternative music in the early part of the decades, and the cartoons that came out under the Oddities name were quite good as well. More than the music and the shows, though, I think what ties me most to that era of MTV are the personalities that were on the network back then; Kennedy, Matt Pinfield, Kurt Loder, Tabitha Soren, and Alison Stewart are the five that come to mind most readily. Although I stopped watching MTV that much once the sugar-pop wave hit near the end of the decade and they started doing all that self-important stuff at Times Square, I still get a kind of happy feeling inside when I think of watching MTV back then.
Perhaps I'm thinking of that era of MTV since Alison Stewart's been guest hosting Countdown so much these past couple of months. Last week, though, I had this strange nightmare involving Tabitha Soren, although in retrospect I was probably thinking of someone I used to know who bore a passing resemblance to Soren. Still, I kind of really liked Soren, and I liked her as more than just a journalist to be honest. Although I've always enjoyed Kurt Loder's dry wit (although not enough to try enduring modern-day MTV to catch him), I kind of wish that Soren would find her back to television here, whether on MTV or elsewhere. Daily Show correspondent, perhaps?