On March 14, 1998, Saturday Night Live ran that week’s TV Funhouse cartoon a bit later in the show than usual. According to Robert Smigel, who made it, that was deliberate: Saturday Night Live boss Lorne Michaels told Smigel that NBC president Robert Wright, who hadn’t seen the cartoon, usually turned the show off following the Weekend Update segment.
“On this night, however, Bob Wright got home late, and saw what he saw,” Smigel wrote in an Instagram post.
“What he saw” was “Conspiracy Theory Rock,” a Schoolhouse Rock parody about how a handful of companies owned a gigantic chunk of U.S. media. The cartoon depicted GE swallowing the NBC peacock, Westinghouse eating the CBS eye logo, Mickey Mouse dining on the ABC logo, and more. Peter Jennings anchors the news in mouse ears. There’s a banquet scene, and one of the logos served up as food is CNN’s. I remember watching it live (I was 12, so a lot of it went over my head), but I forgot about it until a few years ago when I saw a post about how it had been “censored” from future broadcasts by NBC.
For his part, Smigel was amazed that the cartoon was allowed to air in the first place, but wasn’t particularly surprised that it was cut from reruns. Smigel said that the segment went through a notes process “beyond the Standards dept & up the executive ladder.” In 2002’s Live From New York, an oral history of the show, NBC vice president for late night Rick Ludwin recalled that he “immediately passed it on up the line, to whoever was in charge, because I wanted everyone to know what was going on.”
But when the show aired as a rerun three months later, the cartoon was gone.
“I didn’t think it worked comedically,” Michaels told the New York Daily News at the time, explaining why it got dropped from future airings of that episode. Wright, in Live From New York, was more straightforward: “It was just kind of a GE shot without any point to it.”
“Smigel, I remember, was all upset about it being taken out of the repeats,” said Ludwin. “I said, ‘Robert, it got on the air. You were not censored. It got on the first time.’ It got on once — but never again.”
(And while it’s not quite accurate to call the cartoon “banned,” it was apparently included in the 2006 Best of TV Funhouse DVD, it’s hard to blame Smigel or writer Adam McKay for feeling like it was.)
Nearly three decades later, two of the networks in that cartoon have the same owner. On Tuesday, Skydance closed its $81 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, putting CBS and CNN under nepo baby billionaire David Ellison. His father, Larry Ellison, is the eighth richest person in the world, and is the largest shareholder in Oracle, which is one of the major managing investors in TikTok’s U.S. joint venture.
The cartoon was right in 1998, and it’s only gotten worse since.