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I suppose it’s an unfair, exceptionally unseemly critical impropriety, but I have to admit that while watching these early seasons of Saturday Night Live, I don’t understand how anyone could resist this stuff.

This writer – like so many other 20- and 30-somethings – grew up in a house of SNL. My dad may have been a stand-up family man 6.994 days each week, but on Saturday night, he let it loose with Saturday Night Live. The show, from what I’ve gathered from him over the years, was exactly what he wanted from TV comedy and wasn’t getting at the time. It was off-the-cuff, wild (even outrageous at points), and immediately warm and inviting.

While the show’s third season showcased a growing confidence and overall finesse, the fourth season proves that the show was willing to take risks. Watching the debut season was hilarious because you were literally watching these folks come up with a new rhetoric of comedy right before your very eyes. Watching seasons two and three was enjoyable due to the exceptional skits and concepts that the show’s cast members and writers were able to devise. This fourth season is a hilarious wildcard of a beast, a compilation of SNL moments that proves that it never rested on its laurels, even in the early days, and even as it became a kind of TV institution.

Just look at this season’s opener featuring The Rolling Stones as both hosts and musical guests. There’s an off-kilter intro from former NYC mayor Ed Koch in which he gives newfound-celeb John Belushi (Animal House had just been released) a certificate of achievement. There’s a set of beguilingly long faux interview parodies (including one particularly zany one with Dan Aykroyd playing Tom Snyder and Mick Jagger as himself). And there’s an uncharacteristically extended concert segment; The Stones play quite a few tracks from their newly-released Some Girls record.

Is the episode comically air-tight? Of course not. Anyone who has an encyclopedic knowledge of SNL knows that consistency is not the show’s main asset. It’s all about sitting through a handful of stinker skits in order to get that one diamond in the rough. And those diamonds are scattered throughout the fourth season. The Beach Blanket Bingo send-up featuring Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia is outstanding. Weekend Update is a wonderfully fertile place for Jane Curtain and Bill Murray to verbally joust (Dan Aykroyd even pops in every once in a while to rustle Jane’s feathers). And Buck Henry’s appearances in the multiple samurai sketches are second-to-none.

There are clunkers, to be sure, but my appetite for all things SNL consumes them with almost as much comic fervency as the good stuff. Judy Collins is typically a solid performer, but both her song choice and on-stage presence on SNL this season seem coked-out and hazy. And while two Monty Python members (Michael Palin and Eric Idle) have chances to make magic with their episodes, for every one great gag they come up with, there are five or ten dead-on-arrival stinkers.

I suppose you shouldn’t turn to me for a level-headed, pristinely critical analysis of Saturday Night Live. I’m of the mind that terrible episodes of SNL are better than pretty much everything else on TV past, present, and future. And that being said, these season-long SNL box sets are seriously excellent things. In addition to offering the show’s oft-syndicated classic moments, it gives those of us who were in diapers during their initial run a chance to soak in all the nooks and crannies of the SNL universe that our parents dug so much. Keep ‘em comin’.

The Video: How Does The Disc Look?

As with seasons past, these episodes look as they’re supposed to, which is the good news. The bad news is that there’s a ton of inconsistencies in the original masters that don’t necessarily make the show look fantastic. But DVD is about preserving the original incarnation of source material, and these 1.33:1 transfers do that just fine. Black levels are all over the place, color quality is sometimes way off, and finely grained detail is hit- and-miss, but again, that’s how the in-studio video of the time looked. Does this set look great? No. Does it look like it should? Hell, yeah.

The Audio: How Does The Disc Sound?

Ditto with these stereo sound tracks. The musical segments sound perfectly fine, but a bit constrained by the recording format. The dialogue comes through just as it was intended. There are a couple hiccups here and there, but again, that’s how the show was originally put in the can. Leave your THX expectations behind, kick up your feet, and just laugh.

English subtitles are included.

Supplements: What Goodies Are There?

The only bonuses are a trio of interviews: Two Today Show interviews with John Belushi and Gilda Radner, respectively, and a Tomorrow Show interview with Mr. Bill creator Walter Williams. They run about twelve minutes total, so they’re not exactly revelatory, but they make for a quick, funny appendix to this season nonetheless.

Exclusive DVD-ROM Features: What happens when you pop the disc into your PC?

There are no DVD-ROM features on this DVD.