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Reader: Banned from “SNL”: Robert Smigel’s “Conspiracy Theory Rock”
On March 14, 1998, NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” aired the Robert Smigel animated short film, “Conspiracy Theory Rock,” a parody of the beloved “Schoolhouse Rock” cartoons of the 70s, and then they never aired it again, snipping it out of subsequent airings of the episode in syndication.
Lorne Michaels has claimed that Smigel’s film was trimmed out of future airings because it “wasn’t funny,” but like just about everyone else who’s seen it — including Marc Maron, who tweeted a link to it last year, causing it to once again to become a topic of conversation — we gotta go ahead and disagree with Michaels.
The film features a crazy homeless-looking crackpot (voiced by Jack Sheldon, who has also lent his famous voice to “Family Guy”‘s parodies of “Schoolhouse Rock” ), critiquing powerful media companies that have become a “Media-opoly” — the example in the film being a kind of octopus-tentacled monster that includes NBC’s then-current ownership by General Electric/Westinghouse, CBS, Fox and Disney, all devouring up smaller news companies.