On March 14, 1998, Saturday Night Live aired a cartoon as part of Robert Smigel's TV Funhouse series: "Conspiracy Theory Rock!" In a style parodying the "Schoolhouse Rock" cartoons of the 1970s, it was about how deregulation had consolidated TV networks under the power of multinational companies which used them to control the news.
The cartoon even criticized SNL's network NBC and its parent company GE for its PCB pollution, its defective bolts scandal, its association with weapons manufacturing, and even the firing of Norm MacDonald from SNL for his jokes about OJ Simpson.
The segment was dropped from reruns of the episode, leading many to believe that it was banned because of its controversial, anti-corporate, anti-GE message. The Snopes.com website labeled this claim "Mostly False," saying that it was simply excised from reruns in favor of a second performance by The Backstreet Boys because the cartoon "wasn't funny."
Smigel (under his alter ego, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog) posted the full cartoon on Xitter in March of this year.
At the same time, Smigel posted part of the video on Instagram along with a caption with his side of the banning story:
Yes, it was pulled after its initial airing & it's easy to see why. BUT what always amazed me was that NBC let it on in the first place.
It did go through an extensive note process, beyond the Standards dept & up the executive ladder. I remember adding the "voices in my head" line per their request to make the narrator seem crazier, not that it made a big difference. But, to their credit, there was a real willingness not to censor the piece.
It helped that Lorne Michaels supported it & that my cartoons were, at the time, one of the more popular things on the show (this was loooong ago). It went all the way to "NBC West Coast" honcho Don Ohlmeyer, who okay'd it even with the Norm/OJ reference. (Google it if you don't know)
I remember the cartoon aired much later than the usual TV Funhouse, because Lorne said Bob Wright, the President of NBC (who had NOT seen it) usually turned the show off after Weekend Update. On this night, however, Bob Wright got home late, and saw what he saw.
Months passed and all was calm until Adam McKay approached me. A pissed off crew member had let Adam know the sketch was being cut from the rerun, replaced by a second Backstreet Boys song, which had no mentions of GE polluting the environment. I wasn't especially surprised but Adam was fired up. He leaked the story to a few TV journalists who'd written about the cartoons, NBC claimed it wasn't funny (not that it was) and that's why people know and still talk about it today.
Footnote: It's on the Best of TVF DVD, so since 2006 it's only been Kinda Banned. – RS
So Smigel believes the "not funny" charge is a fig leaf to hide the fact that it was "Kinda Banned" for content.
I find it fascinating that the network required Smigel to have the song's narrator say, "Now maybe the voices inside my head will go away." That line originally made me wonder about the sincerity of the whole cartoon, but it turns out that was inserted in there by the network to with the purpose of undercutting the piece.
Correction: 1998, not 1988.
