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“Stuart? What are you doing here?”

The familiar phrase was heard again amid the SNL50 celebration as Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, and Fred Armisen reunited to reprise their roles from The Californians.

The trio was part of a commercial for Volkswagen, which sponsored the specials celebrating Saturday Night Live’s 50th anniversary.

Related: ‘SNL50’: Live From The Red Carpet For ‘Saturday Night Live’s Anniversary Weekend

During the commercial breaks for SNL50: The Homecoming Concert, commercials featuring some of the iconic characters of SNL’s history played.

The Californians was a recurring sketch on NBC’s late-night comedy show that mocked the California accent in a soap opera setting.

Wiig, Hader, and Armisen formed a love triangle in the series of sketches that featured the characters naming all the streets and freeways around the Los Angeles area.

Related: Tracy Morgan Playfully Calls Out Lorne Michaels For Not Letting Him...

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Where would we be without a motivation speech from a van-down-by-the-river-living speaker, or asking for more cowbell? Funko is celebrating Saturday Night Live‘s landmark 50th season with a special new Pop! collection honoring some of the most memorable reoccurring characters that have graced our screens (and made us laugh) throughout the decades.

The SNL 50 Funko Pop!s were available for preorder last year, but are available to buy on Amazon now.

Saturday Night Live has delivered a regular dose of New York City to millions of TV viewers for a half-century. Now, the city – or at least Midtown Manhattan – is getting a heavy dose of SNL.

Downstairs from the NBC staple’s home at 30 Rock’s Studio 8-h, NBCUniversal has been preparing the area in and around Rockefeller Plaza for the show’s 50th anniversary weekend. While the headline event will be Sunday night’s three-hour live special, the festivities got under way Friday morning with a stock market bell-ringing and final set-up for Sunday’s massive red carpet.

Banners affixed to neighboring buildings and light poles salute “SNL 50” and streets are blocked to vehicle traffic between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Starting earlier this week, pedestrians have been re-routed around Rockefeller Center, with the area around the center’s signature ice rink dominated by a large series of tall black tents.

Jonathan Haze, who originated the Seymour role in cult classic 1960 horror comedy The Little Shop of Horrors during a long collaboration with its director Roger Corman, has died. He was 95.

His daughter, Rebecca Haze, told Deadline that he died peacefully of natural causes on November 2 at his home in Los Angeles but did not provide a cause.

Jonathan Haze and Dorothy Malone in ‘Five Guns West,’ 1955

Born in Pittsburgh on April 1, 1929, Haze was discovered working in a gas station by Wyott Ordung, who gave him a role in Monster from the Ocean Floor, which Corman produced. That same year, he cast Haze in The Fast and the Furious and then as Billy Candy in the 1955 western Five Guns West, starring John Lund and Dorothy Malone.

They were the first of nearly 20 movies they made together, including 1955’s Apache Woman and Day the World Ended; 1956’s Gunslinger, The Oklahoma Woman, It...

When Ryan Gosling was first announced to host "Saturday Night Live" this weekend, most of us expected a giggle-heavy affair. His first two hosting gigs, from "Close Encounter" to "Terrezano's," had Gosling breaking in nearly every live sketch, so it was no surprise when Gosling broke constantly last night as well. What we didn't see coming was just how much the rest of the cast broke, especially in the sketch where a serious intellectual panel is interrupted by two guys in the audience who inexplicably look like Beavis and Butt-Head. 

First we're introduced to Beavis, played by Ryan Gosling, who insists that he's not pulling a prank, that he's never heard of Beavis before, and has never been told how much he looks like him. It's an unlikely story, but Heidi Gardener's Bobbi Moore and Kenan Thompson's Professor Hemming are willing to move past it, so long as "Beavis...

Iconic SNL skits like The Love-ahs, The Californians, and What Up With That deserve movies due to their hilarious antics and memorable characters. A Love-ahs film could explore the consequences of Roger and Virginia Klarvin's inappropriate behavior, while a Californians movie could hilariously showcase clashing personalities and parodies of California culture. Movies based on SNL sketches like Target Lady, Spartan Cheerleaders, and Stefon would offer comedic takes on retail jobs, competitive cheerleading, and NYC nightlife, respectively, with the potential for mass market success.

These iconic Saturday Night Live skits are so hilarious that they're begging to be fleshed out and adapted to the silver screen. Their hilarious antics, memorable characters, and unique Povs helped them achieve mass market success, and garner the critical acclaim that helped rouse audiences on Saturday nights. Due to their popularity, the best SNL skits not only rake in views, but they've since become recurring segments,...

Bill Hader is ready to come back as Stefon.

The “Saturday Night Live” alum reflected on the legacy of his breakout character Stefon, a gay nightlife guru in New York City who appeared during the “Weekend Update” segments. Hader parted ways with “SNL” in 2013 after eight years on the live sketch series; he returned in 2018 and reprised the role of Stefon as well as “The Californians” skit. In 2022, Hader was approached to bring back Stefon, but the “Barry” co-creator and star voiced his concern over being a straight man playing a queer parody. Hader is now addressing the debate and clarifying his past comments.

“I’ve never had any gay man come up to me and be offended that I [played Stefon],” Hader told The Independent, citing he also played a queer character in Craig Johnson’s “The Skeleton Twins.” “I’ve always had people come up and say how much they love those roles.

Jenna Ortega kicked off her Saturday Night Live hosting debut with a nod to her days as a child actor in a Colgate toothpaste commercial, but added a horror twist to the ad in light of her starring role in Wednesday, the Addams Family-inspired Netflix series.

“A lot of people assume that I am dark and twisted in real life because of these roles that I play,” Ortega said after also pointing out her role in Scream VI. “But I am not like that at all. I think there...

Jenna Ortega took center stage at Saturday Night Live to remind folks that she’s only 20 and not the “dark and twisted” girl in real life that she plays in movies and in TV.

“It’s been a crazy couple of years,” the star of Netflix’s Wednesday began. “I think there is something about my face that people see and say, ‘Hey, let’s throw blood on that.”

She reminded the audience that she’s actually been acting since she was little. Her mom got her into the business by putting a video of Ortega on Facebook, “which someone explained to me is like TikTok but for racism instead of dancing.”

Ortega then shared a toothbrush commercial that she shot when she was a kid, and how the “invisible nasties” she talked about in the ad can be made into a horror film today, thanks to scary music and editing.

‘Gone with the Wind’ actress Mary Anderson dead at 96; also featured in Alfred Hitchcock thriller ‘Lifeboat’ Mary Anderson, an actress featured in both Gone with the Wind and Alfred Hitchcock’s adventure thriller Lifeboat, died following a series of small strokes on Sunday, April 6, 2014, while under hospice care in Toluca Lake/Burbank, northwest of downtown Los Angeles. Anderson, the widow of multiple Oscar-winning cinematographer Leon Shamroy, had turned 96 on April 3. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1918, Mary Anderson was reportedly discovered by director George Cukor, at the time looking for an actress to play Scarlett O’Hara in David O. Selznick’s film version of Margaret Mitchell’s bestseller Gone with the Wind. Instead of Scarlett, eventually played by Vivien Leigh, Anderson was cast in the small role of Maybelle Merriwether — most of which reportedly ended up on the cutting-room floor. Cukor was later fired from the project; his replacement, Victor Fleming,...

The first man to play Captain Video — the Guardian of the Safety of the World! — in the early days of television died today in Los Angeles. Richard Coogan was 99. He starred on the first two seasons of Captain Video And His Video Rangers, the popular low-budget space opera that premiered in 1949 on the DuMont Network. The future-set series aired for a half-hour Monday through Friday, also on Saturdays in 1950, with a reported prop budget of 25 bucks a week. The jut-jawed Coogan played a scientific genius who invented radical weapons and led a vast network of defenders of good. The program was a favorite of The Honeymooners‘ Ralph Cramden and Ed Norton, who were card-carrying members of the Captain Video Space Rangers fan club. After leaving Captain Video, the New Jersey native starred on the CBS soap Love Of Life and toplined late-’50s Gold Rush drama The Californians. He also...