MovieChat Forums > Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) Discussion > Saturday Night Live spoof of 'Sky Captai...

Saturday Night Live spoof of 'Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow'


Back in 2004, there was an episode of "Saturday Night Live" featuring Jude Law. In a sketch entitled "Air Commander and the Day After Yesterday", he played an actor portraying Air Commander (a spoof of Sky Captain). The sketch mostly spoofed the all-bluescreen process used for "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow".

The sketch is very rare, but I managed to find it. Here it is:

http://indavideo.hu/video/SNL_-_Jude_Law_-_Air_Commander_and_the_Day_A fter_Yesterday

Courage, men! We've not sunk before, and we'll not sink now!

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Wondeful! Thanks for finding and sharing. You hear actors talking about reacting to concepts, and this really showed the difficulty of acting to something that doesn't really exist yet. But SD most actors I have known are mad as hatters, this must be like an old pork-pie.

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At the time that I created this thread, the only version of the SNL sketch in question that I could find was the one that I posted a link to in the original post above. However, since then, I have found the sketch on the official NBC website. Here it is:

https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/green-screen/2860888

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Wow, you really love this skit, huh?

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I'm a big fan of "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" and thus tend to have an interest in almost anything having to do with it.

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Maybe I should see this film then. I missed it in theaters and never got around to watching it.

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I highly recommend it, especially if you like 1920s-1950s era science fiction and fantasy movies, serials, pulp novels, comics, the 1939 World's Fair, etc. It's very much a passion project, inspired entirely by Kerry and Kevin Conran's love of classic movies, serials, novels, comics, etc. Don't expect a particularly deep story or the most original plot. That's not what it's about. It's a nostalgic, homage-filled cinematic love-letter to an exciting future that never existed except in the imaginations of people of the 1930s. If it could be summed up in one word, that word would be "whimsy".

And I equally recommend the bonus features on the DVD and Blu-ray, which are arguably just as interesting as the movie itself. In a nutshell, Kerry Conran originally made a short, black and white version of the movie in his apartment with the help of his brother Kevin (a very talented visual artist) a few friends and virtually no budget. He filmed his friends against a homemade green screen, then created all of the sets and backgrounds digitally on an old, outdated computer that he owned. (At the time, the idea of shooting a movie without any physical sets was groundbreaking.) He was planning on completing the entire project in his apartment, as a seven-chapter cliffhanger serial. But he eventually met producer Jon Avnet, who was so impressed by what Conran was able to achieve on a nonexistent budget that he managed to help get funding and A-list actors for a full-scale Hollywood version of the project. It's an inspiring story of imagination and hard work paying off.

Here's Kerry Conran's original short:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqRvdm8jHz4

It might look cheap compared to the version of the movie that was originally released in theaters, but if you keep in mind that he made it over the course of four years in his apartment with friends volunteering to play the characters and computer equipment that was already outdated at the time (ancient by today's standards), it's downright impressive that he was able to pull something on that scale off.

Also here's an article about how the movie came to be made (I can link to more articles and interviews if you'd be interested in seeing them):

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/14/magazine/mr-invisible.html

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