Cutting back to the studio, Koppel is finally interrupted once more, sadly announcing, “We have just … we have just received some tragic news. “No comment!” Piscopo’s eager Koppel then subjects Buckwheat’s harried surgeon to the footage just before the doctor goes into the operating room. “Oh, I’m hurt and confused,” gasps Alfalfa after being subjected to the film. And Texxon is there.”īuckwheat doesn’t make it, with horrified former costar Alfalfa (a cowlicked Mary Gross) ambushed in the hospital corridor by Koppel’s camera, the anchor asking him if he’s seen the actual footage of his friend being shot. (The footage itself is bloodless, as Sheffield notes that their initial, squib-heavy take on the bit looked far too real for the comedy to have worked.)Īs Buckwheat is rushed to a nearby hospital, Koppel, eager to keep viewers riveted to the broadcast, repeats the footage in between frequent updates and the quickly cobbled-together graphics from the show’s fictional sponsor, a stentorian announcer labeling the tragedy, “The Shooting of Buckwheat: America Stunned. It was a parody of how similarly the news media had covered the filmed assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan a few years before, complete with Buckwheat’s entourage snapping into action and the footage being rewound and slowed down to capture the carnage in every horrifying detail. Luckily for Koppel and fans of sensationalized murder footage everywhere, footage of Buckwheat’s attack as he was leaving the SNL studios to enter his limousine was being filmed by the paparazzi, allowing Piscopo’s Koppel to repeat the footage many, many times. Then a sketch with Gary Kroeger and Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Donnie and Marie Osmond was interrupted by Joe Piscopo as newsman Ted Koppel, who solemnly announced, “We have just received word that Buckwheat has been shot.” Murphy’s grinning, word-garbling version of the former child star showed up in a commercial for Buckwheat Jeans, parodying the then ubiquitous Calvin Klein jeans ads. The saga began innocently enough on the Bruce Dern-hosted March 12, 1983, episode. What the trio created was an elaborate, multi-episode demise for Murphy’s Buckwheat, an extended satire of American gun culture and media sensationalism Ebersol later called “the best piece of satire in the four or five years I was there.” Ebersol, to his credit (and taking into account the immensely popular Murphy’s importance to SNL), didn’t try to talk Murphy out of the idea, instead suggesting his star sit down with his two favored SNL writers, Barry Blaustein and David Sheffield, and come up with an appropriate send-off.
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