Don Pardo Award SNL Hall of Fame

This week on the podcast we reveal the Don Pardo Award winner for Season 5. This high prestigious honor is bestowed onto a person or group of people who contribute to the show's success despite not being eligible for traditional election into the Hall.
Transcript:
Track 2:
[0:42] Thank you so much, Doug Donatz. It is great to be here in the SNL Hall of Fame.
The SNL Hall of Fame podcast is a weekly affair where each episode we take a deep dive into the career of a former cast member, host, musical guest, or writer and add them to the ballot for your consideration.
Once the nominees have been announced, we turn to you, the listener, to vote for the most deserving and help determine who will be enshrined for perpetuity in the hall.
Except for this week. Because this is our very special Don Pardo Award show where the three of us, Thomas, Matt, and myself put our heads together and award the Don Pardo Award to a deserving individual, or in the case of this year's award, deserving individuals.
I won't bury the lead any longer, but before I go anywhere, please. please wipe your feet.

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[1:43] This week, we are going to be talking about a major component of Saturday Night Live, and that is the SNL band.
So the way we're going to tackle this is we're going to go in chronological order to the best of our ability.
We might miss a couple of years, but we can fill Fill in the blanks as necessary for you to get your little history lesson.
But this has been enough of me talking right now.
How are you doing, Thomas? Hey, JD.
Doing really well. It's nice to be on a little like an actual episode with you and Matt, like the three of us kind of uniting here. Yeah. One united front.
This is really fun. We were talking as we're recording this, we're coming off a really fantastic Kristen Wiig episode. So I think all of us are kind of energized by SNL right now.
So we're taking that energy from the recent Kristen Wiig episode and putting it forth here for this. Oh, that's fantastic.
Matt, you're not in your usual corner this week. No, no. Yeah, I've moved things, moved my desk around.
I need to make room to watch that, you know, 1970s French disco funk and dance around.

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[3:00] I wonder if they were even i know when they counted the numbers they were speaking french but i wonder how much of the rest of it was was actual french my wife was asleep on the couch i would have asked her she's a french teacher i wanted to wake her up and say you got to watch this sketch but she was gone i'll ask i'll show it to her today and ask it sounded right from my grade nine general French.
So it may be like Google Translate. Who knows?
But it had the right shapes. Yeah. And I think Bowen's a French speaker.
So I think at least Bowen was probably speaking good real. Oh, OK. I think he is. Yeah. Didn't realize that.
Well, Matt and I have failed our Canadian tests here.
For those listening from other places in the world, Canadians are not truly bilingual, even though our country is.

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[3:52] But I digress. Let's start at the start.

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[3:57] And speaking of Canadians, we're going to talk about the original SNL band.
And it's not band leader, but it's musical director. And that is Howard Shore, who is immensely talented.
He played the alto sax in the band, and he, like I said, was the band leader.
But he was, before he came to SNL, he worked with Lorne Michaels and Hart Pomerantz on the Lorne and Hart Terrific Hour. hour.
And when Lauren got SNL, it seemed like a slam dunk for him to come South and work with Saturday Night Live.
To me, his most defining moment in the role is that he wrote the closing.
He wrote Waltz in D, is it D minor?
Waltz in A, written by a founding member, Howard Shore.
And And that is something, maybe the only thing other than update that is like lasted the duration of the show.
I'm not as versed in the 80s. I don't know if they ended in Waltz and A, but definitely all the Lorne Michaels era, it ends with that.