Beautiful Girls No Longer on SNL skit

**gabby gabbster** · 01.31.02, 07:52 PM

Maybe most of you guys already noticed this before....but, I'm sure we've all seen the SNL skit with Chris Farley and Adam Sandler who show up at a gay pool party...and none other than "Beautiful Girls" is blaring in the background. I caught the episode again this evening and they had some generic tune playing instead. Was BG pulled for some reason?

**HippieLettuce** · 01.31.02, 09:36 PM

It's been that way for a while. It was about a million times funnier with Beautiful Girls.

**Dan Halen** · 01.31.02, 10:43 PM

Huh, that's weird. But that was a funny skit.

**Raldo** · 02.01.02, 06:57 AM

That skit is one of favorites. It actually starts off with the beginning of D.O.A. then runs into BG. Had me on the floor laughing the first time I saw it.

**Wolfie3** · 02.01.02, 07:02 AM

Eddie probably called SNL and told them not to play the song anymore because he wants the band to be completely forgotten about.

**dog** · 02.04.02, 09:35 AM

I think it is just a licensing thing. SNL probably does not want to pay a fee everytime that show is rerun. I've seen this type of thing before. Paint It Black was the theme of the show Tour Of Duty when it was new show, but in reruns it has a different theme. Bosom Buddies had a Billy Joel tune has a theme when it was new. But it did not have it when it was rerun on USA a while back.

**ackerboy** · 02.06.02, 10:14 PM

This situation is probably not unlike what happened with the original music that was used on the old "WKRP in Cincinnati" sitcom and others.

Van Halen and Warner Brothers probably have little to do with it, as this is a publishing issue.

WKRP was, as SNL has always been, taped live onto videotape, not film. In the old days, ASCAP had a different licensing arrangement for taped shows than for filmed shows; licensing the music for SNL and WKRP cost something like half of what it would have cost had they been filmed instead.

Sometime in the latter half of the 1990s the rules had been changed so that by then ASCAP no longer had a "discount" for videotaped shows. Furthermore, in recent years the cost of licensing songs has skyrocketed across the board. So it would have been prohibitively expensive for the distributor to re-license all the songs used on WKRP and SNL. Now when stuff like old SNL episodes gets redistributed for syndication use and whatnot, what will happen is that a song like "Beautiful Girls" will get hacked in favour of something cheaper and generic sounding. In many cases, the distributors certainly could have done a better job of replacing the songs they couldn't pay for, but it was inevitable that some of the songs would be gone due to rising costs, and that's all there is to it.

That said, I can't imagine cracking open a bottle of Schmitt's Gay without "Beautiful Girls" pumping in the background! LOL.

[ February 06, 2002 at 09:19 PM: Message edited by: ackerboy ]</p>