The forty ninth season of Saturday Evening Reside wrapped up this previous weekend with host Jake Gyllenhaal, musical visitor Sabrina Carpenter and the palpable sense that Lorne Michaels can be in a dashing limo sure for the Hamptons by 1:01 a.m.
One memorable sketch featured Gyllenhaal and Carpenter as Fred and Daphne from Scooby-Doo, investigating a thriller in a spooky mansion. Additionally, Sarah Sherman and Mikey Day have been completely forged as Velma and Shaggy, respectively. The “Shadow Phantom” is predictably revealed to be a bitter previous man (James Austin Johnson) who would have gotten away together with his crimes if not for these “meddling youngsters.” However issues go south when Fred tries to tear off a second masks, ripping the poor man’s face clear off, Nicolas Cage-style. Issues get much more ugly from there.
Not everybody was thrilled with the sketch. Some took situation with the truth that it was arguably just like a 2016 “Nerdist Comedy Brief” known as Scooby, Don’t, which additionally discovered the Scooby-Doo gang lowering a villain’s face to a bloody mess. This time, the monster-turned-regular dude was performed by legendary creature performer Doug Jones.
There are clearly some key variations between the 2 sketches, beginning with the truth that the Nerdist quick doesn’t descend into gory chaos as in SNL’s model. And the joke in Scooby, Don’t is that Daphne is so distracted by her smartphone, she doesn’t understand that the masks has already been pulled off when she begins tugging on the villain’s face, whereas Gyllenhaal’s Fred is simply confused and incompetent.
Nonetheless the director of Scooby, Don’t, Andrew Bowser, couldn’t assist however level out the similarities on social media, suggesting that he’d “directed this sketch 7 years in the past!”
The author, Ben Mekler, additionally famous that the sketch had been completed earlier than.
This isn’t the primary time that SNL has been accused of lifting materials from web comedy movies both. In 2022, the present was criticized for producing a Charmin Bears-themed sketch that was not not like one made by YouTuber Joel Haver. Though Haver later acknowledged that he didn’t imagine that the similarities between the 2 sketches have been “malicious,” chalking up the controversy to “unconscious borrowing” or a “wild coincidence.”
However whereas comedy sketches starring Charmin Bears who’ve profession aspirations past wiping their butts are seemingly uncommon, jokes in regards to the Scooby-Doo characters ripping folks’s faces off have been made with some regularity, like on this animated quick made by the AOK YouTube channel, which additionally got here out in 2016:
There was even an analogous gag in a 2020 episode of Household Man:
And earlier than all of those parodies, there was this 2011 webcomic from Maneggs:
Maneggs
So it appears much less doubtless that Saturday Evening Reside copied one sketch particularly, and extra that they’re milking a comedic premise that’s been round for over a decade. Which actually, sounds about proper.
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