Saturday Night Live Gets Roasted By Retail Chain It Lampooned in a Sketch: ‘Irrelevant 50-Year-Old TV Show’
Saturday Night Live returned for its 50th season on Saturday, just in time for the presidential election — but also Halloween! And one Halloween-themed retailer that you’ve probably seen in your town (before they left) was not happy to be the subject of a sketch.
One of SNL’s pre-taped commercial parodies was all about Spirit Halloween, the store that takes over an empty building for a few weeks to sell Halloween costumes, decorations, and party favors… until Halloween is finished. That was at the crux of the sketch, which included lines such as “Since 1983, Spirit Halloween has been helping our struggling communities — by setting up shop in every vacant building in the country for six weeks and then bouncing.” Another: “And thanks to us, what used to be a condemned AutoZone where a murder happened is once again a thriving business where a murder happened.”
SNL also took a shot at Spirit Halloween’s knockoff costume descriptions “tweaked just enough to avoid a lawsuit” (“Fat Yellow Worker,” “Candy Slave,” and the “Blonde Singing Woman” Taylor Swift costume).
Spirit Halloween, however, was not amused, as evidenced by a tweet they posted on Monday that declared, “We are great at raising things back from the dead @nbcsnl”:
The image is of an “Irrelevant 50-Year-Old TV Show” costume complete with “dated references, unknown cast members, and shrinking ratings” and the actual SNL logo.
Responses to Spirit Halloween’s tweet were a mix of people knocking the store for not being able to take a joke or praising the tweet for being funnier than SNL.
